Book 4 The Object Relations

The Object Relation

Jacques Lacan
The Object Relation

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan

Book IV
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
Translated by A. R. Price
polity
First published in French as fc .g6mz.#cz!te dc Jacqwcs L¢ccI", L!.vrc Jy. lil rc/afi.o#
d'oZ}y.c/ © Editions du Seuil, 1994
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Names: Lacan, Jacques,1901-1981, author. I Miller, Jacques-Alain, editor.
I Lacan, Jacques,1901-1981. S6minaire de Jacques Lacan. English ; bk.
4.
Title: The object relation / Jacques Lacan ; edited by Jacques-Alain Miller
; translated by A.R. Price.
Other titles: Relation d'objet. English
Description: English edition. I Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press,
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Contents
THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT
Introduction
The Three Forms of the Lack of Object
The Signifier and the Holy Spirit
The Dialectic of Frustration
On Analysis as Bundling and the Consequences
Thereof
THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE
The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young

Homosexual Woman
A Child is Being Beaten a,nd the Young
Homosexual Woman
Dora and the Young Homosexual woman 123
THE FETISH OBJECT
The Function of the Veil

Identification with the Phallus
The Phallus and the Un fulfilled Mother
MYTHICAL STRUCTURE IN THE OBSERVATION ON

LITTLE HANS'S PHOBIA
XII On the Oedipus Complex

XIII On the Castration Complex
XIV The Signifier in the Real
XV What Myth is For
VI Contents
XVI How Myth is Analysed

XVII The Signifier and Dcr Wz./z
XVIII Circuits
XIX Permutations
XX Transformations
XXI The Mother's Drawers and the Father's
Shortcoming
XXII An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic
` Me donnera sans femme une prog6niture'
XXIII
FAREWELL
XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror 403
Note 427
Translator's Notes 432
Index 447
Book IV
The Object Relation
1956-1957
THEORISING THE LACK
OF OBJECT
I
INTRODUCTION
The Z-shaped diagram

The object, lost and re-found
Gems
The object, anxiety and the hole
Fetishes and phobic objects
This year we shall be speaking on a topic to which the historical

evolution of psychoanalysis, or what is so termed, could offer a
central place in both theory and practice, whether in a way that
hangs together or otherwise.
This topis is The Object Relation.
Why did I not choose this topic before, back when we began these
seminars, given that it was already a crucial, prominent and contem-
porary topic? Well, precisely for the reason behind the second part
Of ray I;the -... and The Freudian Structures.
Indeed, this topic could be treated only after a certain step back
had been taken in relation to this question. We first had to examine
what constitutes those structures in which, according to what Freud
has shown us, analysis moves and operates, and most especially the
complex structure of the relation between the two subjects present
in analysis, namely the subject being analysed and the analyst. This
is what our past three years of commentary and critical reading of
Freud's texts have been devoted to, which I shall rapidly recall for
you now.
The first year dealt with the main technical features in the steer-
ing of the treatment, that is, with the notions of transference and
resistance. The second year bore on the grounding of the Freudian
discovery and experience, namely the notion of the unconscious. I
think I showed well enough how this notion is what necessitated
Freud's introduction, in Bc}7o#d /fee P/e¢swre Prj.#c;.p/c, of principles
that are utterly paradoxical on the purely dialectical plane. Lastly,
4 Theorising the Lack of Object
over the third year, I gave you a patent example of the absolute
necessity of isolating the essential articulation of symbolism that
is known as the sz.g#J#cr, so as to understand, analytically speak-
ing, something of that field of psychoses that is strictly limited to
paranoia.
After these years of critical reading we are now armed with a
number of terns that have culminated in certain schemas. On no
account is the spatiality of these schemas to be taken in the intui-
tive sense of the term schemcz, but rather in another sense that is
altogether legitimate, the topological sense. It's not a matter of local-
isations, but rather of relationships between loci, interposition, for
example, or succession, sequence. What we developed culminated in
the following diagram -
®' other
This diagram lays out, first and foremost, the subject's relation
to the Other. In the way that it is naturally constituted at the start
of analysis, this relation is one of virtual speech wherein the subject
receives, from the Other, his own message in the form of unconscious
speech. This message, which for him is interdicted, is profoundly
misrecognised. It is mangled, stayed and intercepted by the inter-
position of the imaginary relationship between cz and ¢', between
the ego and the other, which is the ego's f};pc-object. The imaginary
relationship, which is an essentially alienated relation, barges in,
hampers, and more often than not reverses and profoundly mis-
recognises the relationship of speech between the subject and the
Other. This happens insomuch as the big Other is another subject
and insomuch as he is capable, par excellence, of deceiving.
There was a point to introducing this schematisation in analytic
experience, given how nowadays this experience is being refor-
mulated by an ever larger number of analysts who give priority
in analytic theory to the object relation as something primary,
without for all that offering any further commentary. They have
been realigning the entire dialectic of the pleasure principle and
reality principle on the object relation, and basing all analytic fur-
therance around what might be called a rectifying of the subject's
Introduction
relation to the object, regarded as a dual relationship, as a relation-

ship that would be - so we are told when they speak about the
analytic situation -exceedingly straightforward.t Well, this rela-
tionship between subject and object that is increasingly tending to
occupy the centre stage of analytic theory is the very thing that we
are going to put to the test.
Given that the object relation, insomuch as it is dual, corresponds
to the line cz-ci' in our diagram, can we on this basis construct in a
satisfactory way the entirety of phenomena open to our observation
in our analytic experience? Can this implement possibly answer for
the facts all by itself? Can the more complex diagram that we have
set in opposition to this be disregarded, indeed must it be cast aside?
I shall give you some sustained evidence of how the object relation
has become, at least apparently, the foremost theoretical feature in
the explication of analysis. Not that I can recommend that you
delve into what can be called a sort of collective work that has
just come out, and to which the term co//ccfz.vc is particularly well
suited. You will see that from beginning to end this object relation
is foregrounded in a way that is not always particularly satisfactory,
in the sense of hanging together, but the monotony of which, the
:xn;:::;;typ,ri.smq:i::sit:i:inneg..?:huewai::i:::s:hei:t?,E:ictjrve.'f"tj,9.n„Odeein,g
ps};cfe¢#o/);sc, and, as the final stage of this evolution, you will see
in the article Lcz c/j.7!j.awe ps)/cfecz#cz/};/z.gwc a way of presenting clinical
practice itself that is fully aligned with it. Perhaps I will give you
some idea of what a presentation such as this can lead to.
The collection as a whole is certainly quite striking. In it, you can
see practitioners of analysis trying to put their minds in order. The
understanding they manage to have of their own experience does
not seem to give them full and complete satisfaction. On the other
hand, however, this only orients or penetrates their practice with
any depth when they conceive of how their own experience in this
realm is not something that would truly have consequences for the
actual patterns of their intervention, for the direction they give to
analysis, nor, by the same token, for its outcomes. In merely reading
them, one can misrecognise this, even though it has always been said
that analytic theory and practice cannot be separated, dissociated,
one from the other. Once people start conceiving of analysis in a
certain direction it is inevitable that it will also be led in a certain
direction, if the theoretical direction and the practical outcomes can
likewise be but glimpsed.
To introduce the question of the object relation, and precisely
the question of its legitimacy, or of the groundlessness of its being
placed at the centre of analytic theory, I shall have to recall for
you at least briefly what this notion owes, or doesn't owe, to Freud
himself. I shall do so first of all because this is indeed a sort of
guide rope for us, and almost a technical delimitation that we have
imposed on ourselves, based on this Freudian commentary.
Likewise, this last year I have sensed some questioning arising
from you, worries even, as to whether I would be taking Freud's
texts as my point of departure. When it comes to the object relation,
it is undoubtedly very hard to begin with Freud's texts themselves,
because it's not to be found in them. I'm speaking, of course, about
something that is hereby categorically asserted to be a deviation
from analytic theory. So, I'm going to have to begin with recent
texts and with a criticism of their positions. However, that we shall
ultimately have to refer to Freud's positions is not in doubt, and
by the same stroke we cannot avoid bringing up, even very rapidly,
what revolves around the very notion of object in those fundamen-
tal themes that are strictly Freudian.
We cannot do so, here at the point of departure, in a developed
way. It is precisely at the end that we will be joining up with this,
when we will have to spell it out.
So, I simply want to provide a brief reminder, which wouldn't
even be conceivable were it not for the three years of collaboration
we have under our belt, and had you not already met this theme of
the object in various different guises here with me.
Freud does, of course, speak about the object. The final section of the
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is ca,yhed Die Objektf indung,
77!e Fz.#dz.#g o/c7# Ofy.ccf. The object is being implicitly spoken of
whenever the notion of reality comes into play. It is spoken of in yet
a third way whenever the ambivalence of certain fundamental rela-
tionships is implied, namely the fact that the subject turns himself
into an object for the other party, the fact that there is a specific type
of relationship in which an object's reciprocity with a subject is a
plain and even constituting factor.
I would like to accentuate more firmly the three ways in which
notions relating to the object become apparent to us. This is why
I'm alluding to one of the points in Freud's writings to which we
can refer in order to demonstrate, to articulate, the notion of object.
If you go to this chapter in the 7lfercc Esscz)/s you will see something
that was already there at the time he was drafting the E#Jwr/, a
text that I remind you has only been published by a sort of histori-
cal accident, for not only was Freud not minded to publish it but,
Introduction 7
furthermore, it was published against his will. None the less, we find
the same wording in connection with the object back in this first
projection of his psychology. Freud insists that any way by which
man may find the object is only ever subsequent to a drive tendency2
in which what is at issue is a lost object, an object that would have
to be found again.
Here, the object is not regarded in the same terms as in the new-
fangled theory, where it is said to be a fully satisfying object, a
/}jpc-object, the object par excellence, a harmonious object, the
object that grounds man in a corresponding reality3, in the reality
that is proof of maturity - the infamous genital object. It is quite
striking to see how, when he is laying out the theory of instinctual
development, such as it can be isolated in the first analytic experi-
ences, Freud indicates that it is grasped along the path of a search
for the lost object. This object that corresponds to an advanced
stage in the maturation of instincts is the object of the first weaning,
found again. It is the object that was initially the point of attach-
ment to the infant's earliest satisfactions. It is a re-/ow#d object.
It is quite clear that discordance is established by the bare fact of
repetition. Nostalgia binds the subject to the lost object, through
which every searching effort is exerted. It brands this re-finding with
the stamp of a repetition that is impossible, precisely because it is
not the same object and never can be. The primacy of this dialec-
tic places a fundamental tension at the heart of the subject-object
relationship, which ensures that what is sought out is never sought
out in the same way as what will be found. It is through a search for
a satisfaction that is both passGc and dt;p¢ss6c, past and outgrown,
that the new object is sought out and found, and seized elsewhere
than the very spot at which it is being sought out. A fundamental
distance is introduced by the essential conflictive element that any
search for the object entails. This is the first form in which this
notion of the object relation appears in Freud's work.
It is here that we ought to resolve to lay the stress squarely on what
I've been underscoring. I would say that to articulate this in terms
that would be philosophically developed would be at cross-purposes.
I'm not doing this, and intentionally so, because I'm setting it aside
for our return to this theme. For some of you these terms already
carry a meaning by way of certain items familiar to you from phil-
osophy. I'm underscoring the distance that lies between, on the one
hand, the subject's relationship to the object in Freud's work and,
on the other, what preceded it in a certain conception of the object
as a corresponding object, the object expected in advance, coapted
to the subject's maturation. This full distance is already implicit in
what contrasts a Platonic perspective - the perspective that grounds
each apprehending, each recognition, upon the reminiscence of a

f)/pc that is in some sort preformed - with a profoundly different
notion. It is the same distance that lies between modern experience
and experience in Antiquity, and it is set out by Kierkegaard in the
register of repetition, the repetition that is forever sought out but
essentially never satisfied insomuch that, of its very nature, it is not
reminiscence by any stretch of the imagination. It is always repeti-
tion as such, and thus impossible to assuage. It is in this register that
Freud's notion of rc-¢#dj.ng !fec /os! oky.ec/ is located.
We shall take this textual reference on board. It is crucial that
it should have survived in Freud's first report on the notion of the
object. It is essentially with a notion of the subject's profoundly
conflictive relation with his world that things are set out and clari-
fied. How could it be otherwise since, already at that time, it was
essentially a matter of the opposition between the reality principle
and the pleasure principle?
If pleasure principle and reality principle were not extricable, one
from the another - I would further say, each implying the other and
each including the other in a dialectical relation, as Freud consist-
ently established - then the reality principle would be constituted
only by what is imposed, for its satisfaction, on the pleasure princi-
ple. It would merely be its extension.
Correlatively, while the reality principle does imply, in its dynamic
and in its fundamental search, the fundamental tension of the pleas-
ure principle, it is no less the case that between the two - and this
is the essential factor in what Freudian theory brings us - there is
a wide gap that there would be no cause to single out were the one
merely the continuation of the other. Indeed, the pleasure princi-
ple tends to become a reality in profoundly unrealistic formations,
while the reality principle implies the existence of an organisation,
a structuration, that is different and autonomous, and which entails
that what it grasps may well be something fundamentally different
from what is desired. In itself this relation introduces another term
into the very dialectic of subject and object, a term that is here
posited as irreducible.
Just as the subject we saw earlier was something that was founded
in its primordial requirements as something that is fated forever to
make a return, and even an impossible return, so too in the opposi-
tion between reality principle and pleasure principle do we have
the notion of a fundamental opposition between reality and what
is sought by the drive tendency. In other words, the notion of the
satisfaction of the pleasure principle, insomuch as it is always latent,
subjacent to any world-building exercise, is something that always
tends to become more or less of a reality in a loosely hallucinatory
Introduction 9
form. The fundamental possibility of this organisation that is sub-

jacent to the ego, that of the subject's drive tendency as such, is to
be satisfied in an unreal realisation, in an hallucinatory realisation.
Here, with fe¢//wcj.#cz/or};, we have the other term on which Freud
squarely lays the accent in the rr¢cfmc7cwfw#g, in 71f!c /#fcrpre/¢fz.o#
o/Drcczms, where there is the first full and articulated formulation
of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle.
These two positions are not, as such, articulated one to the other.
The fact that Freud presents them as distinct marks out well enough
how the development is not centred around the relationship between
subject and object. Each of these two terms finds its place at a differ-
ent point in the Freudian dialectic, for the simple reason that in no
case whatsoever is the subject-object relationship central.
This relationship becomes apparent only in a way that may seem
to be sustained directly, without any gap. It is within this ambivalent
relationship, or in a kind of relationship that has since been labeued
prege#!.f¢/ - referring to relations of seeing/being seen, attacking/
being attacked, passive/active - that the subject experiences these
relationships that always imply, in a way that is more or less mani-
fest, his identification with the partner of this relationship. That is
to say, these relations are lived through in a recjprocj/}J - the term
is acceptable in this instance - of ambivalence between the subject's
position and the partner's position.
Indeed, at this level a relationship is introduced between subject
and object that is not only direct and seamless but which literally
equates them. It was this relationship that provided the pretext for
the foregrounding of the object as such. This relationship of reci-
procity between subject and object, which warrants being termed
a mirror-relation, already in and of itself raises so many questions
that, in an attempt to resolve them, I introduced the notion of the
mirror stage into analytic theory.4
What is the mirror stage? It is the moment at which the infant
recognises his own inage, but it is far from being purely and simply
the connoting of this one phenomenon in child development. It
encompasses everything that the child learns from being captivated
by his own image, and precisely everything of the distance that lies
between his inner tensions and those that are brought out in this
relation to his identification with the image. This is still something
that has served as a theme, as a central point, in the foregrounding
of this subject-object relation as, so to speak, the phenomenal scale
to which may be referred, in a valid and satisfactory manner, what
had hitherto been presented in terms that were not only pluralist but
strictly speaking conflictive.
It introduces an essentially dialectical relation between the
different terms, except that some thought - and one of the first to
accentuate this, though not as early on as might be believed, was
Karl Abraham - that they ought to be trying to refocus every-
thing that had thus far been introduced concerning the subject's
development.
Until then, the subject's development had always been introduced
in a way that was seen retroactively, as a reconstruction, based on a
central experience, that of the conflictive tension between conscious
and unconscious. This conflictive tension is created by the funda-
mental fact that what is sought by the drive tendency is obscure, that
what is consciously acknowledged therein is first and foremost a mis-
recognition, and that it is not along the path of consciousness that
the subject recognises himself. There is something else, and there is
a beyond-zone. By the same stroke, this beyond-zone thereby poses
the question of its structure, its origin and its meaning, in being
fundamentally misrecognised by the subject, beyond the reach of his
cognisance.
This is the perspective that was abandoned on the initiative of
a number of figureheads, and then in trends of significance within
analysis. They refocused everything in accordance with an object the
terminal point of which is not the same as our point of departure.
Our point of departure leads backwards in time, so as to understand
how this terminal point is arrived at. Moreover, this terminal point
can never be observed. This ideal object is literally unthinkable.
They, on the contrary, conceived of it as a sort of focal point, a cul-
minating point, onto which a whole series of experiences, elements
and partial notions of the object would converge. This conception
became prevalent from a particular time onwards, and especially
from the moment that Abraham formulated it, in 1924, in his theory
of libidinal development. For many, this theory grounds the very
law of analysis and everything that occurs within it. It grounds the
system of coordinates within which they situate the entire analytic
experience, along with the experience of this infamous correspond-
ing object that is ideal, terminal and perfect. They propose this
object in analysis as the one that in and of itself marks out the
achieved goal, namely the normalisation of the subject.
In itself alone, the term #ormcr/j.sczf!.o# ushers in a slew of catego-
ries that are utterly foreign to the point of departure of analysis.
By the admission of those who have gone down this path - I think
I can offer no better illustration of what is at issue than what they
Introduction 11
have certainly worded in very precise terms - what they regard to be

furtherance in analytic experience is the fact of having pushed to the
fore the subject's relations with his surroundings.
The accentuation they give to the surroundings amounts to a
reduction of everything that analytic experience yields. There is a
kind of reverting to the altogether objectifying position that posits,
at the forefront, the existence of a particular individual and a rela-
tion that more or less corresponds, that is more or less adapted, to
his surroundings. This is something that is spelt out in the collective
work we were speaking about, on pages 761 to 773 [of the original
French edition], in the following terms,
After having underscored that what is at issue in the furtherance
of analysis is the accentuation of the subject's relations with his sur-
roundings, we read in passing that this is especially relevant in the
little Hans case study. We are told that Hans's parents seem to be
/¢ckj.77g cz pcrso#¢/z./)7 o/ ffecz.r ow#. Nothing compels us to subscribe
to this opinion. The important matter is what follows. // wczs bc/ore
the outbreak of the 1914 war, at a time when Western society was
more self assured and didn' t think to second-guess its longevity; since
1926, the emphasis has been, on the contrary, on anxiety and the
organism's interaction with its surroundings; so it was that society's
foundations were shaken, the anxiety of a changing world was lived
through on a daily basis, and individuals saw themselves differently.
This was also the time when physics was trying to find itself, with
relativism, uncertainty, and probability seeming to undermine the self
confidence of objective thought.
It seems to me that this reference to modern physics as the foun-
dation of a new rationalism speaks for itself. What is important
is that it is being oddly confessed, in a roundabout way, that psy-
choanalysis is envisaged as a kind of social remedy. This is what is
pushed to the fore as the driving feature behind its furtherance. It
is of no matter whether this is well founded or otherwise, because
these are items that don't appear to us to carry much weight. What
is instructive is the great casualness of the context in which these
items are accepted.
This example does not stand alone, because what is specific to
this collective work is how it communicates internally in a way that
seems to be much rather composed of a kind of odd homogenisation
than any articulation in the strict sense.
The first article to which I alluded earlier also marks out in a
deliberate way the fully fomulated notion that, all things consid-
ered, what will a.Hord us the general conception Of a scheme that
enables us to understand, here and now, the structure of a personality
is the poz.#/ o/w.cw that we are told is /fee mosJ prcrc/z.c¢/ and Jfec mos/
prosaic, that o[ the patient's social relationships. This \alst expresstron

is emphasised by the author.
I shan't linger over other terms, which are confessional in nature
- there arises a painful impression of something in motion, ungrasp-
able, even artificial, but doesn't this depend on the very object of this
discipline, which is an activity of which the variations over time no
o#c drcczms o/ co#/es/I.#g? Indeed, this is one explanation for the
somewhat cloudy character of the different approaches that this
point of view offers, but it's perhaps not an explanation that ought
to be entirely satisfactory for us. I fail to see which objects of any
discipline are not equally subject to variations over time.
Concerti+r\g the relationship between the subject and his world, it is
aLsserted that there is a, parallelism between the more or less advanced
state in the maturation of instinctunl life and the structure of the ego in
cz gz.vc# swdy.ccf cz/ a gj.vcJ7 momeH/. To spell it right out, from a certain
point on, this structure of the ego is considered to be the inner lining
and, ultimately, the representative of the sfcz/c o/ /Ac m¢/#r¢/j.o# o/
j.#s/!.#c/#a/ czcjz.w.fz.cs. There is no more difference, whether on the
dynamic plane or the genetic plane, between the different stages of
the ego's progress and the different stages of instinctual progression.
For some of you, these are terms that you might not find particu-
larly questionable in and of themselves. No matter. This is not the
issue. We will be seeing to what extent we may or may not take them
on board. But their consequence is that setting this up at the heart
of analysis presents as a typology in which there are those who are
pregenital and those who are genital.
This is written - Pregenitals are people with egos that are [ . . . ]
wcczk. For them, the ego's coherence depends strictly ctpo# ffec a/czbz./-
ity of object relationships with a significant object. This is where we
can start to ask questions. Later, in passing, we might see where this
unexplained notion of a sz.g7tj#ca#f ody.ec/ leads in the other texts,
namely the absolute lack of differentiation and discernment about
what is sz'gr!z#ccz#/. The technical notion that this implies is the bring-
ing into play, and by the same stroke the emphasising, within the
analytic relationship, of pregenital relations, those that typify this
pregenital individual's relation with his world. We are told - 7lfoc
loss of these relationships, or of their object (which amounts to the
same thing since the object exists only by virtue of its relationship to
the subject ) , may bring about functional disturbances of the ego, such
as depersonalisation or psychotic disorders. Here we uncover the s,pot
where a test is being sought that would vouch for this deep fragility
in the ego's relationships with its object. 77!c swzy.cc/ mczkcs ever);
effort to maintain at all costs his object relationships, making all sorts
of adjustments to this end, changing the object by using displacement
Introduction 13
or symbolism in such a way that the choice of a symbol, quite arbitrar-

ily charged with the same affective values as the original object, makes
it possible for hin not to be deprived of an object relationship. For
this object, onto which the affective value of the original object is
displaced, the term cz2tx!./z.or); ego is fully justified.
This explains the following - 7lfec gc#z.f¢/ /}/pc, o# ffee offeer fea#cJ,
possesses an ego whose strength and healthy functioning do not depend
upon the possession of a significant object. While, for the first group,
the loss of a person of great subjective importance -to take the most
straighiforward exc[mple -may endanger the whole personality, for
the second group, however painful the loss may be, it does not consti-
lute a threat to the solidity of their personality. The latter individ:uals
are not dependent upon an object relationship. This is not to say that
they can easily do without all object relationships -which, after all, is
unrealisable in practice, so many and so varied are such relationships
-but simply that the integrity of their being is not at the mercy of the
loss of one significant object. This is where, from the standpoint of
the cormection between the ego and its object relationships, we find the
difference between this and the former types of personality.
Much further on, we Tea,d -It may well be that, as in all neuroses,
normal development seems to be halted by the subject's finding it
impossible to achieve a resolution of the last structural conflict of the
irfantile phase. Such a resolution normally results in that happy adap-
tation to the world which we call the genital object relationship and
which gives the observer the impression of a harmonious personality
and, in analysis, what seems a sort of crystalline clarity of mind that is
more an ideal than a reality. But this difficulty in resolving the oedipal
confoict is very often the result not only of the problems involved in that
conflict [ . . . ] .
Cr);s/cz//z.#c c/czrz./}7. We can see where this author is able to lead us
with the perfection of the objectal relation.
Whereas the drives in their pregenital form present ¢ #ccd/or
a possession that cannot be controlled or limited by conditions and
foos j.# I.f cz des/rwcfz'vc c/cmc"f, in their genital form they are rccz//)/
fc#cJer ¢#d /ow.#g, and while such subjects may #o/ sfeow /feemsc/vcs
to be oblative, that is, disinterested, alnd the object selected may be
fundamentally just as narcissistic a choice as in the earlier cases; nev-
ertheless, they are capable Of understanding and adapting themselves
to the object situation. Moreover, the imer structure of their object
relationships shows that the happiness of the object is essential to the
happiness of the subject. The convenience, the desires, and the needs of
the object are taken into consideration to the highest degree.
This is enough to open up a very serious problem. Is it important
to draw distinctions within maturation, which is neither a path, nor
a perspective, nor a plane? Indeed, we cannot help but ask what is

meant by a #ormcz/ end to childhood, to adolescence and to maturity.
However, an essential distinction does need to be drawn between
the establishing of a reality - with all the problems it poses in terms
of adapting to something that resists, to something that refuses, to
something that is complex, to something that in any case implies
the notion of oC7y.ecf!.vz./};, as the most elementary experience shows
us - and what is being aimed at in these same texts as a notion that
is loosely implicit, and which is opened up by the contrasting term
oky.cc/cz/J./);, the plenitude of the object. Besides, this confusion is
spelt out because the term oty.ccf!.w.f); can be found in the text as
what typifies this form of achieved relation. There is certainly a
distance between, on the one hand, what is implied by a certain
construction of the world regarded as more or less satisfying at
such-and-such an era that is effectively determined outside of any
historical relativity, and, on the other, this relationship with the
other party in its affective register, indeed its sentimental register,
including the fact of taking his needs, happiness and pleasure into
consideration. This certainly carries us much further, because what
is at issue is the constitution of the other as such, insomuch as he
speaks, insomuch as he is a subject.
We shall have to come back to these texts, whose authors plop
out one gem after another. It's something that requires more than
just quoting, even when coming out with the comic remarks that
they themselves suggest quite readily enough, without, for all that,
making the necessary progress.
This extraordinarily simphistic conception of the notion of instinc-

tual development in analysis is far from universally accepted.
Texts like those by Glover, for instance, will refer you to a very
different notion of the exploration of object relations, and which are
even named and carefully defined as such. When you read Glover's
texts, you will see that what essentially characterises the stages of the
object throughout the different phases of individual development is
an object that is conceived of as having an utterly different function.
Analysis insists on introducing a functional notion of the object
that is quite different from that of something that simply corre-
sponds, that simply coapts the object to a particular demand from
the subject. The object has an altogether different role here. It is,
as it were, placed against a backdrop of anxiety, insomuch as the
object is an instrument for masking off, for fending off, the funda-
Introduction 15
mental backdrop of anxiety that characterises the different stages in

the development of the subject's relation to the world. This is how
the subject needs to be characterised at each stage.
As we near the end of today's talk, I should cast some light on
what I am asserting by means of an illustrative example. It will be
enough to punctuate Freud's classic and fundamental conception
of phobia.
Freud, and all those who studied phobia both with him and after
him, could not fail to note that there is no direct relation between
the object and the purported fear that tinges this object with its
crucial mark, constituting it as such as a primal object. On the
contrary, considerable distance lies between the fear at issue - and
which may be a primal fear in some cases but not so in others - and
the object that is constituted in relation to this fear in order to keep
fear at a distance. This object encloses the subject in a circle, a
bulwark wherein he shields himself from these fears. The object is
essentially linked to the sounding of an alam signal. It is an outpost
against an established fear. This fear furnishes the object with its
role, its function, at a point that is determined by a certain crisis of
the subject, but which, for all that, is neither a typical crisis nor a
developmental crisis.
This modern notion, as it were, of phobia is something that is
more or less legitimately asserted - though we shall also have to
criticise it - at the origin of the notion of object such as it is pro-
moted in Glover's papers and in the way of conducting analysis that
is characteristic of his thought and technique.
We are told that the anxiety at issue is castration anxiety, and
until recently this has seldom been contested. Nevertheless, it is
remarkable that things have got to the point that the desire for
reconstruction, in the genetic sense, has gone so far as to try to
make us deduce the very construction of the paternal object from
something that would be seen as its sequence and culmination,
namely the burgeoning of primal constructions that are phobic and
objectal. There is a report by Mallet on phobia that goes in precisely
this direction, curiously reversing the trail that effectively allowed us
to trace back from the phobia to the notion of a protective function
which the phobic object holds in relation to anxiety.
In another register, it is no less remarkable to see what has become
of notions of the fetish and fetishism. I'm introducing this today to
show you that, if we take them from the object-relations perspec-
tive, fetishes are seen to fulfil a function that in analytic theory is
also articulated as a protection against anxiety and, oddly enough,
against the same anxiety, that is to say, castration anxiety. This
doesn't seem to be the same angle from which fetishes are purported
to be more particularly bound to castration anxiety in so far as it

is linked to the perception of the absence of a phallic organ in the
female subject, and to the negation of this absence. What matter.
You cannot fail to see, here too, that the object has a certain func-
tion of complementation in relation to something that presents as a
hole, even an abyss, in reality.
The question is whether there is a relation between the two,
whether there is something in common between these fetishes and
phobic objects.
However, in posing such questions in such terms, perhaps, without
declining to broach these problems on the basis of the object rela-
tion, we ought to find in the phenomena themselves the opportunity
and the starting point for a critique that - even if we submit to
the interrogation that is pressed on us regarding the /};pc-object,
the ideal object, the functional object, indeed all these forms of the
object that you may presume in mankind - does effectively lead
us to tackle the question in this light. But then, let's not content
ourselves with uniform explanations for a variety of phenomena.
Let's focus our opening question upon what constitutes the essential
functional difference between a phobia and a fetish, in so far as both
are centred on the same backdrop of fundamental anxiety, where
both one and the other are called upon by the subject as a protective
measure, as a security measure.
It is precisely this that I have resolved to take as my point of
departure to show you where we start from in our experience in
order to reach these same problems. Indeed, this needs to be posed,
not in a mythical fashion, nor in an abstract fashion, but in a direct
fashion, in the way the objects are presented to us.
It is insufficient to speak about the object in general, or about an
object that, by goodness knows what property of magical commu-
nication, would have the function of regularising relationships with
every other object, as though the fact of having come to be a genital
individual would be enough to resolve each and every question. For
example, one such question is what one particular object might be
for a genital individual, an object that doesn't strike me as having to
be any the less enigmatic from the essentially biological viewpoint
that is foregrounded there, an object of everyday human experience,
namely a coin.
This object does not pose in and of itself the question of its object
value. Doesn't the fact that, in a certain register, we might lose the
coin as a means of exchange - or any other kind of regard for the
exchange of any item whatsoever of human life transposed into its
commodity value - introduce in umpteen different ways the ques-
tion of what has effectively been resolved in Marxist theory by an
Introduction 17
altogether coterminous, though not synonymous, term, namely the

fetish? In short, there is the notion of the fetish object and, if you
like, the screen object. Likewise, we can only wonder why its rightful
value is still not being accorded to the function of the constitution
of an altogether singular reality on which, right at the start, Freud
shed a truly piercing light, namely the notion of scrce# mcmorz.c's as
what are especially constitutive of the past of each and every subject
as such. All these questions deserve to be taken in themselves and
on their own terms.
They should also be analysed in their mutual relations, because it
is from these relations that the necessary distinctions between differ-
ent planes can emerge, which will enable us to define, in a way that
hangs together, why a phobia and a fetish are two different things.
What relation is there between the widespread use of the word
/c/I.sfe and the precise employment of the term to designate a sexual
perversion? We are hereby introducing the subject of our next talk,
which will be on phobias and fetishes.
It is along this path back to the experience that we will be able to
establish anew the term oZ)y.ccr re/cz/j.o7!s and restore its true value.
21 November 1956
11
THE THREE FORMS OF THE

LACK OF OBJECT
What is an obsessional?
The imaginary triad
Phallicism and the imaginary
Reality and Wirklichkeit
Mr Winnicott's transitional object
This week, with you in mind, I did some reading. I've been reading
what psychoanalysts have written on what is going to be our subject
this year, namely the object, and more specifically the genital object.
The genital object is, to call it by its name, woman. So, why not
call it by its name?
I rewarded myself, therefore, by reading a number of texts on
female sexuality. It would be more important for you to do this
reading than for me. It would make you more at ease when it comes
to understanding what I've been led to tell you on this subject. And
then, what I have read is very instructive from yet further points of
view, principally from the following. fJwmcz# sfwpz.dz./); gz.vex o# !.dccz
o//fee j.#¢77!./e, said Renan. Well, I have to say that, had he lived in
our times, he would surely have added - ¢s do jAc /focorc/I.ccz/ r¢m-
blings of psychoanalysts .
Don't believe that I'm equating them with stupidity. I'm not.
Rather, they belong to the realm of what may afford an idea of the
infinite. Indeed, it is exceedingly striking to see what extraordinary
difficulties the minds of different analysts have had to cope with in
the wake of Freud's altogether sharp and astonishing statements.
What did Freud, ever on his own, contribute on this subject? What
I shall tell you today will probably not go beyond this. Freud's con-
tribution here is that the idea of a harmonious object that of its very
nature would bring about the subject-object relationship is at abso-
lute variance with experience. I won't even say analytic experience,
but the common experience of relations between man and woman.
The Three Forms of the Lack of Object 19
If harmony in this realm were not a problematic thing, there would

be no analysis at all. Nothing is more precise than Freud's formula-
tions on this matter. In this realm there is a wide gap, something that
doesn't work out, though this doesn't mean that it suffices to define
it. Freud positively aflirms that things don't work out. You will find
this affirmation in Cj.vj./j.zo/i.o# o#d Jfs Dj.sco73/errs and in one of the
New Introdrctory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
This leads us back, then, to asking ourselves about the object.
I remind you that what is commonly forgotten in regard to the

notion of the object is nowhere more greatly accentuated than in
the contours through which the experience and the expounding of
Freudian doctrine locate and define this object.
The object first presents in a quest for the lost object. The object is
always a re-/o#7€d object, the object caught up itself in a quest. This
stands in categorical opposition to the notion of an autonomous
subject, which is what the idea of an object that would bring about
a subject-object duality leads to.
Likewise, I underscored last time the notion of an object that
is focz//wcj.#¢/ecJ against a backdrop of anguishing reality. This is a
notion of the object such as it arises in the exercise of what Freud
calls the primary system of pleasure. In complete contrast to this,
in analytic practice there is the notion of the object that ultimately
boils down to the real. It's a matter of re-finding the real. This object
stands out, not against a backdrop of anxiety this time, but against
a backdrop of common reality, as it were. The terminal point of the
analytic search is to realise that there is no reason to hold this in
fear. Fcczr is a term to be distinguished from the term cz#xz.c/);.
Lastly, the third term under which the object becomes apparent
when we trace it in Freud is that of j.mczgz.#czr); rccjprocz./}J, namely,
in any relationship with the object, the place of the term that is in
the relation is simultaneously occupied by the subject. Identification
with the object thus lies at the root of any relationship with the
object.
In truth, this last point has not been forgotten, but it's clearly the
point to which object-relations practice in the new-fangled analytic
technique is most attached, resulting in what I shall call an impe-
rialism of identification. Sz.#cc };ow co# I.cJc#f!/y wz.ffe mc, a#d s!.7€cc J
can identify with you, out of the two of us the ego that best adapts to
rc¢/j./}7 j.s swrc/); /fee bcf /cr mode/. Ultimately, the furtherance of the
analysis would be dragged, in a pure stripping back, towards an
identification with the analyst's ego. To show the extreme deviation

that such partiality in the steering of the object relation can condi-
tion, I would like to illustrate this by recalling how practice with
obsessional neurosis has been particularly exemplary in this regard.
As most of you here accept, obsessional neurosis is a structuring
notion that can be expressed more or less as follows. What is an
obsessional? All in all, he is an actor playing his part, carrying out a
certain number of acts as though he were dead. It's a way of shield-
ing himself from death. The game he plays is in some sense a lively
game that consists in showing that he is invulnerable. To this end,
he practises a sort of subduing that conditions his every approach to
others. This can be seen in a sort of exhibiting of how far he can go
in this practice that has every aspect of a game, including its illusory
aspects. He exhibits how far this little other, which is his alter ego,
his own double, can go, and does so before an Other who witnesses
the spectacle in which he himself is a spectator. Therein lies the very
possibility of the game and all the pleasure he takes in it. However,
he doesn't know what place he occupies, and this is what is uncon-
scious as far as the obsessional is concerned. He does what he does
to distractive ends. He is able to glimpse this, and is well aware
that the game is not being played where he is, which is why almost
nothing of what occurs has genuine importance for him. But that
he should know where he beholds all of this from is another matter.
Who, ultimately, calls the shots? We know that he does, but we
will make countless mistakes if we don't know from where these
shots are called. Hence the notion of the objeet, and of one signifi-
cant object for this subject.
It would be quite wrong to believe that this object can be desig-
nated in any of the terms of a dual relationship. You are going to
see now where this leads with the notion of the object relation that
is developed by the author in question. It's quite clear that in this
very complex situation, the notion of object is not given immedi-
ately because it takes part in an illusory game, a game of aggressive
retaliation, a cheating game, which consists in steering as close as
possible to death while keeping out of range of every blow, because
the subject has in some sense killed his desire in advance, mortifying
it, so to speak.
The notion of object is infinitely complex here, and deserves to
be accentuated from one instant to the next so that at least we may
know which object we are talking about. We shall try to furnish this
notion of the object with a uniformity, which will allow us to find
our way in our vocabulary.
This is a notion that, I won't say steals away, but rather pre-
sents itself as something difficult to circumscribe. To bolster our
The Three Forms of the Lack of object 21
comparison, let's say that it's a matter of demonstrating something

that the subject has articulated for the other spectator that he is,
unknowingly, and at the site where he positions us as the transfer-
ence advances.
I urge you to take up the case of the obsessive reported by the
author I've been speaking about in order to see what to his mind
constitutes the furtherance of the analysis. You will see that the
way of handling the object relation in this case consists in doing
something analogous to what would happen if you were to witness
a circus routine where Auguste and Chocolat administer each other
a series of simultaneous, alternating slaps. i It would consist in step-
ping down into the arena and forcing oneself to brave the fear of
being smacked. In actual fact, it is the obsessional subject's aggres-
siveness that leads him to land each slap and makes the relation
with him in the consultations an aggressive one. Whereupon the
RI+ngma,stet rot+s up alnd says - Look. This is all quite unreasonable.
Pack it in. Swallow your cane, each of you. That way you'll have it in
the right place. You'll have interiorised it.1ndeed, this is one way o[
resolving the situation and securing an outcome.
You can sing a little tune to this, the enduring song by N*, who
was something of a genius. Those of you who never saw him when he
was performing in one of the Parisian cabaret clubs cannot possibly
form an idea of what he was capable, simply clowning around with
a hat.2 However, one will never understand a single thing, either
about what here I am calling the somewhat sacred character of
what we would be witnessing on such occasions, or about the forced
exhibiting, however dark it may appear, but nor perhaps will one
understand what the object relation means, strictly speaking, until,
between the lines, there appears the profoundly oral character and
backdrop of the imaginary object relation. This also enables us to
see what can be narrowly and rigorously imaginary in a practice that
is unable to escape from the laws of the imaginary, from this dual
relationship that it takes as real, because in the end the culminating
point of this object relation is the fantasy of phallic incorporation.
Why phallic? Not only does experience not follow the ideal notion
that we may have of its accomplishment, but furthermore this notion
only highlights its paradoxes all the more, to the extent that the full
accomplishment of the dual relationship as such brings to the fore,
the closer one gets to it, the imaginary object known as the phallus,
as a privileged object. This is what I'm introducing today in the step
I'm trying to get to you take.
The notion of object relations cannot be dealt with, cannot be
understood, cannot even be put into practice, if one doesn't include
the phallus as a third-party element. I won't call it a mediating
element, because that would involve taking a step that we haven't

yet taken together. I'm calling this to mind today, writ large in the
following diagram which I gave you at the end of the last academic
year as both a conclusion to the analysis of the signifier with which
we carried out our exploration of psychosis, and as an introduc-
tion to what I'm putting forward this year concerning the object
relation.3
Mother
The imaginary relationship, whichever it may be, is moulded on

a certain relation that is effectively fundamental - the mother-hild
relation, with everything that is problematic therein. This relation
certainly gives us the idea that a real relationship is at issue, and
indeed this is the point to which all analysis of the analytic situation
is currently heading. They have been trying ultimately to reduce it to
something that can be conceived of as the development of mother-
child relationships, and what thereafter in the early stages bears the
traces and the reflections of this initial position.
It is impossible, however, even for those authors who have turned
this into the base of the whole analytic genesis in the strict sense, to
bring in this imaginary feature without what we may term the pfe¢/-
/z.cz.sin of the analytic experience revealing itself as a key point at the
heart of the notion of the object relation. This is demonstrated by
experience, and by the evolution of analytic theory. In particular, I
will be trying to show you in the course of this lecture the impasses
that result from every attempt to reduce this imaginary phallicism
to anything whatsoever that is given in the real. Indeed, when one
seeks the origin of the entire analytic dialectic in the absence of the
trinity of terms - symbolic, imaginary, and real - ultimately one can
refer only to the real.
To offer you a final remark, to put the final touch to my descrip-
tion of how the dual relationship is being conducted in a certain
orientation and theorisation of the analytic experience, I shall again
make reference to the leader article in the collective work I spoke to
you about.
When the analyst, entering the obsessional's imaginary game, is
insistent in making him acknowledge his aggressiveness, that is to
say, in making him situate the analyst in the imaginary relation-
ship, the same that earlier I described as that of reciprocations, we

find in this text something that is offered as testimony of the sub-
ject's refusal, his misrecognition of the situation. This is the fact
that he never wants to express his aggressiveness and only does
so dy way Of a slight irritation provoked by the analyst's technical
rz.gz.dz./);. The author confesses that he insists on perpetually bring-
ing the subject back to the theme of aggressiveness, as though it
were the central significant theme. He adds, tellingly, that in the
end everybody knows that z.rrz./a/I.o# o#d z.rony czrc crggrcfsz.ve b}J
#o/wrc. Is it really so obvious that irritation is characteristic of
aggressive relationships? We do know, however, that aggression
can be provoked by any other feeling, and that for example it is
not ruled out that a feeling of love may be the basis of a reaction
of aggression. As for saying that a reaction like that of irony
is cJggressj.vc a); #¢/wrc, this doesn't seem to me to be compat-
ible with what everybody knows, namely that far from being an
aggressive reaction, irony is above all a way of questioning. It's a
mode of question. If there is an aggressive element, it is second-
ary to the structure of the element of questioning that there is in
irony.
This shows you the kind of reductive perspective that such a
conception of the object relation culminates in. Anyway, with this, I
resolve not to speak to you any further on this matter.
On the other hand, we have now been led to the fundamental
question as to relations between anyone and anything. We have to
begin with this question because we are going to have to return to it.
It will be our end point. The whole ambiguity of the question that
arises around the object can be summarised as - is the object real or
not?
We arrive at this question both along the path of the expanded

vocabulary that we are using here - symbolic, imaginary, and real -
and through the most immediate intuition.
When they speak to you about the object relation purely and
simply along the lines of a point of access to the real, an access
that the terminal point of analysis should constitute, what does this
represent for you, as a spontaneous intuition? Is the object the real,
or not? Is the object what is found in the real?
It's worth taking the trouble to ask oneself this, even without
going into the problematic of phallicism that I'm introducing today,
that is, without taking into account a truly prominent point in
analytic experience, a major object around which the entire dialectic

of individual development revolves, along with the entire dialectic
of an analysis. We shall be seeing in greater detail that phallus and
penis are not to be conflated. When in the 1920s and 1930s the
notion of phallicism and of the phallic period fell into place around
a great ruckus that occupied the whole of the analytic community,
what was at stake was to draw a distinction between the penis as a
real organ, with functions that can be defined by certain real coordi-
nates, and the phallus in its imaginary function. Even if there were
no more than that, still it is worth taking the trouble to ask ourselves
what the notion of the object means.
It cannot be said that this object is not a supervalent object in
the analytic dialectic, an object that the individual has an idea of
as such. While it has never been formulated that the singling out
of this object is, strictly speaking, conceivable solely on the plane of
the imaginary, this represents no less how the notion of phallicism
entails the extrication of this category of the imaginary. It will leap
out at you from every line of what Freud contributed at a particular
date, and from the responses of Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein and
Ernest Jones in particular.4
Before we move into this, however, let's ask ourselves what is
meant by the relationship, the reciprocal position, of the object and
the real. There is more than one way to broach this question because
as soon as we do broach it we realise that the real carries more than
one meaning. Some of you, I think, will let out an immediate sigh
Of rehef - At last he's going to speak to us about the notorious real
/fecz/ so/czr Aczs a/a);ec7 ;.# /fee sfeczcJows. Indeed, it should come as no
surprise to us that the real is something that lies on the fringes of
our experience.
This position in relation to the real is quite amply explained by
the screen of our experience, the conditions of which are so artificial,
contrary to what we are told when it is presented as being such a
straightforward situation. None the less, we cannot do otherwise
than to refer to the real when we theorise. What do we mean when
we invoke the real? It is highly unlikely that each of us has the same
notion of it at the outset, but it is also plausible that each of us is
able to reach certain essential distinctions and dissociations to be
applied to the handling of the term rccz/, or rccz/!./j;, if we look closely
at how it is used.
When one speaks about the real, one may be driving at several
things. What is at issue first of all is the whole of what effectively
occurs. This is the notion of reality that is implied in the German
term Wj.rk/j.cAkc!./, which advantageously discerns a function in
reality that French can isolate but poorly. It is what implies in
itself any possibility of effect, of Wj.rkw#g. It's the mechanism as a

whole.
I shall just share a few reflections here in passing, to show the
extent to which psychoanalysts have remained captive to categories
that are utterly foreign to everything that their practice ought, in
all appearance, to have introduced them to - with ease, I daresay
- with respect to this very notion of reality. While it is conceiv-
able, for a mind steeped in the tradition of mechanodynamics that
reaches back to the eighteenth-century attempt to devise A4ch cz
A4locfez.#e, with La Mettrie, that everything that happens at the level
of mental life should require that we relate it to something that is
posited as matter, how could this possess the slightest interest for an
analyst? In what way could this possess the slightest interest when
the very principle through which the analyst's technique and func-
tion is practised plays out through a succession of effects that are
hypothetically accepted, if analyst he is, as having their own specific
order? If he follows Freud, if he conceives of what directs the sense
of the system as a whole, the perspective thereof that he must adopt
is one of energetics.
Matter, this primitive S/ojff, is so intriguing for the medical mind
that people think they are actually saying something when they
mindlessly assert that we, like all other doctors, posit an organic
reality as the basis of everything that is brought to bear in analysis.
Freud put is as simply as this. One just has to refer to where he said
it and see the function it has. But in the end this remains a kind of
need for reassurance. You can see analysts repeating it endlessly in
their texts, Like touching wood - In the end, it's quite clear that these
are merely superficial mechanisms, and everything must ultimately
be roferred to things that perhaps we shall know one day, namely the
basic matter of what lies at the origin of everything that happens.
There is a kind of absurdity in this for an analyst, if indeed he
accepts the realm of effectiveness he moves about in.
Allow me to draw a simple comparison to illustrate this. It's a
little as though someone in charge of a hydroelectric power station
on a wide river, the Rhine for instance, in an attempt to get you to
understand what goes on in the machine, were to start going on
about the time when the landscape was still untouched, when the
Rhine flowed freely, and so on. However, it is the machine that
is the source of the accumulation of energy, in this case electrical
energy, which can thereafter be distributed and made available to
consumers. What is accumulated bears the strictest relation to the
machine, above all else. Saying that the energy was already there in a
virtual state in the flow of the river doesn't get us anywhere. Strictly
speaking, it means nothing, because energy only starts to concern
us in this instance from the moment it begins to accumulate, and

it only accumulates from the moment the machines are set running
in a certain way. Yes, they are kept going by a sort of permanent
propulsion that comes from the river's flow, but referring to this
flow as though it were the primal organisation of this energy is
an idea that can only occur to someone who is utterly foolish. It
amounts to conflating this energy with a notion that strictly speak-
ing belongs to the realm of A4:cr#cz. The realm of energy, even force,
is quite different. Well, the same foolishness is to be met in anyone
who, by any means possible, seeks out the permanence of what is
ultimately accumulated as the element of W!.rkw#g, of a possible
Wj.rk/z.cfekej.f, in something that has been there in some kind for all
eternity.
In other words, this kind of urge that we have to conflate the
S/o#, or primal matter, or forward thrust, or flow, or tendency, with
what is really at stake in the exercise of analytic reality represents
nothing less than a misrecognition of symbolic Wr!.rk/z.cfekcz./. The
conflict, the dialectic, the organisation and the structure of the ele-
ments that are assembled and composed, lend what is at issue an
altogether different energetic scope. Keeping up this urge to speak
of this ultimate reality as though it existed elsewhere than in this
exercise itself amounts to misrecognising the specific reality that we
move about in. I may verily qualify this reference as a superstitious
one. It's a sort of legacy of the organicist postulate, which in the
analytic perspective can hold absolutely no meaning whatsoever.
I'm going to show you that it carries no more meaning in the realm
where Freud appears to be touching upon it.
A different use of the notion of reality is made in analysis, which
is far more important and has nothing to do with the previous one.
This other question of reality is the one that is brought into play
in the twofold principle of the pleasure principle and the reality
principle. Here, something utterly distinct is at issue, because it's
quite clear that the pleasure principle is not something that is carried
through in a way that is any less real than the reality principle. I even
think that analysis is designed to demonstrate the contrary. Its use
of the term re¢/z./}; is quite different.
There is a rather striking contrast here. While this use initially
proved to be exceedingly fruitful, with the furtherance of analysis
the terms of this prj.mczr); ryf fcm and seco#c7c}r); sj;sfc7„ in the realm
of the psyche turned out to be more problematic, but in a way
that was tremendously elusive. To perceive the distance that has
been covered between the first use of the opposition of these two
principles and the point we have now reached, through a certain
sliding, we almost need to refer - and we do once in a while - to the
child who says that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Is this child a
simpleton? Is he a genius? Is he a cheerful soul? Is he a brute? No one
will ever know. He is surely a fairly liberating fellow.
Well, this happens once in a while. We see analysts coming back
to a kind of primitive intuition, realising that everything people have
been saying explains nothing. This is what occurred to Mr Winnicott
in a short article he wrote to speak about what he calls rrcz#sj.Jj.o#¢/
Oky.ecfs - we should think of these as objects in transition - cz#d
Transitional Phenomena.
Mr Winnicott simply notes that as we start becoming more inter-
ested in the mother's function and start deeming her to be absolutely
primordial and decisive in the infant's apprehension of reality, that
is, as we start replacing the impersonal and dialectical opposition
between the reality principle and the pleasure principle with some-
thing to which we have given actors, subjects - they undoubtedly
are exceedingly model subjects, who look far more like bit parts
or imaginary puppets, but this is what we've come to - the pleas-
ure principle starts to be identified with a particular relation to an
object, namely the maternal breast. The reality principle, mean-
while, starts to be identified with the fact that the child has to learn
to go without the breast.
Mr Winnicott has noted quite rightly that z/ cz// goes wc// -
because it is important that all should go well - we are to make all
that goes badly divert into a primordial anomaly, into /rws/ro/;.oJt,
this term which is becoming the key term in our dialectic. Winnicott
notes that for things to turn out well, namely for the infant not to
be traumatised, everything should happen as though the mother
operates by always being there at just the right moment, that is,
precisely by coming to lay out in just the right place, at the moment
of the infant's delusional hallucination, the real object that fulfils
him. Thus, to start with, there isn't any kind of distinction in the
ideal mother-hild relationship between the hallucination of the
maternal breast, which arises in principle from the notion that we
have of the primary system, and the encounter with the real object
at issue.
Therefore, if all goes well, the infant has no means of distinguish-
ing between what belongs to the realm of the satisfaction that in
principle is rooted in hallucination - which is bound to the exercise
and functioning of the primary system - and the apprehension of
the real that effectively fulfils and satisfies him. What is at issue,
then, is for the mother gradually to teach the child to tolerate these
frustrations, and by the same stroke to perceive, in the form of a
certain inaugural tension, the difference that lies between reality
and illusion. This difference can be brought to bear only along the
path of disillusionment, when every now and then reality does not
coincide with the hallucination that has arisen from desire.
Winnicott simply notes, first of all, that in this dialectic it is incon-
ceivable that anything whatsoever could be elaborated that would
go further than the notion of an object that strictly corresponds to
primary desire. The wide variation of objects, as much fantasmatic
as instrumental, which crop up during the development of the field
of human desire, is strictly unthinkable in this dialectic once you
start embodying them in two real actors, namely the mother and
the child. Second, it is a fact of experience that, even in the youngest
infants, we see these objects appearing which Winnicott calls /r¢#sj.-
fz.o#cz/, because we cannot say on which side they lie in this reduced
and embodied dialectic between hallucination and real object.
All objects in the infant's play are transitional objects. The infant
doesn't need to be given toys in the strict sense, because he turns
anything that falls in his hands into a transitional object. 47!d wc c7o
not challenge the infant in regard to subjectivity or objectivity just here
wfecrc /Acre j.s /foe /rcz#sl./j.o#¢/ ody.CCJ. It is of a different nature, the
limit of which Winnicott does not cross by naming it thus. We shall
simply call these objects z.mczgz.#czry.
In articles that are certainly very tentative, full of digressions and
confusion, we can see all the same that their authors are invariably
led back to these objects when they seek to explain the origin of a
fact like the existence of sexual fetishes. They are led to see, as far as
they can, what the common points are between the infant's object
and the fetish, which comes to the forefront of objectal requirements
on account of the great satisfaction that there can be for a subject,
namely sexual satisfaction. They are always on the look out for any
somewhat preferential handling on the part of the infant of some
trifling object - a handkerchief pilfered from his mother, a corner
of a blanket, some incidental piece of reality left within reach of his
clasp - and which appears during this period that, despite here being
called /r¢#sj./z.o#¢/, does not constitute an intemediate period but a
permanent period in the child's development. They are thereby led
almost to conflate these two kinds of object, without asking any
questions about the distance that can lie between the eroticisation
of the fetisb object and the first appearance of the object as an
imaginary object.
What is forgotten in this dialectic - a forgetting that of course
calls upon these foms of supplementation that I'm accentuating
in connection with Winnicott's article - is one of the most essential
mainsprings of the entire analytic experience, and has been so since
the very beginning, namely the notion of the lack of object.
We can never do without a notion of the lack of object as a central

matter in our concrete practice of analytic theory. The missing
object is not a negative, but the very mainspring of the subject's
relationship with the world.
From the start, analysis, the analysis of neurosis, has begun with
the altogether paradoxical notion of cczsfro/z.o#, which we may say
has still not been fully developed.
We believe we are still speaking about it in the same way it was
spoken of in Freud's time. This is utterly mistaken. We speak about
it less and less, and in this we are wrong. What we have been speak-
ing about much more is the notion of/rwsfrcz/j.o#. There is yet a third
term, which is starting to be spoken of. More precisely, we are going
to see how this notion has necessarily been introduced, by what path
and by what requirements. This is the notion ofprz.v¢/;.o#.
On no account are these three things equivalent. To distinguish
between them I would like to make a few remarks simply to try to
help you first to understand what this is.
We should begin with the one that is most familiar to us by use,
namely the notion of frustration.
What difference is there between a frustration and a privation?
Let's take this as our point of departure, because Jones has gone so
far as to introduce the notion of privation and to say that these two
notions are experienced in the same way in the psyche. This is some-
thing that is tremendously brazen. It's quite clear, however, that we
shall have to refer to privation to the extent that while phallicism,
the requirement of the phallus, is, as Freud says it is, the major point
of the entire playing out of the imaginary in the conflictive progress
that the analysis of the subject describes, when it comes to a very dif-
ferent thing from the imaginary, namely the real, we can speak only
of privation. This is not where the phallic requirement is brought
to bear, because one of the things that appears most problematic is
how a being presented as a totality can feel deprived of something
that by definition this being does not have. We shall say, therefore,
that privation is essentially something that of its nature as a lack is
a real lack. It's a hole.
The notion that we have of frustration, simply by referring to the
use that is effectively made of these notions when we speak about
them, is the notion of detriment. It is an injury, a harm done, and
from the way we are used to allowing it to play out in our dialectic
we can see that it is only ever an imaginary detriment. Frustration
is, in essence, the domain of rcvc7cdj.cczf!.o#. It concerns something
that is desired and is not held to, but rather which is desired without
reference to any possibility of satisfaction or acquisition. Frustration
is, in and of itself, the domain of unbridled demands, of lawless
demands. The crux of the notion of frustration, insomuch as it is
one of the categories of lack, is an imaginary detriment. It is to be
located on the imaginary plane.
On the basis of these two remarks it is perhaps easier for us to see
that the essential nature of castration, its Wcfc#, has been neglected
and abandoned far more than it has been dealt with in depth.
Freud introduced castration in a way that coordinated it fully with
the notion of primordial Law, of the fundamental Law that there is
in the incest prohibition and in the structure of the Oedipus complex.
If we think from where we are now about the meaning of what Freud
first stated, it was by taking a kind of mortal leap into experience that
he placed so paradoxical a notion as castration at the heart of the
major, decisive and shaping crisis of the Oedipus complex. We can
only remark on this after the event, because it certainly is remarkable
that we think only of not speaking about it. Castration can only be
classified in the category of symbolic indebtedness.
With symbolic indebtedness, imaginary detriment, and real
absence - the hole - we have what allows us to locate these three
elements that we shall call the three terms of reference for the lack
of the object.
For some, this will undoubtedly seem to be something that cannot
be taken on board unreservedly. They would be right in that, in
reality, for it to be valid we are going to have to cling firmly to the
central notion of this having to do with categories of the lack of
object. I'm saying /czck a/oZ)y.cc/ and not ozy.cc/ because if we position
ourselves at the level of the object we shall be able to ask ourselves
what the object is that lacks in each of the three cases.
This is most immediately apparent at the level of castration. What
lacks at the level of castration - in so far as it is constituted by sym-
bolic indebtedness, something that is recognised by law and which
lends it both its support and its inverse, namely punishment - is
quite clearly not, in our analytic experience, a real object. Only in
the A41¢7t%rmrf!. is it said that he who has slept with his mother must
cut off his own testicles and, cupping them in his hand, walk in a
westerly direction until he drops down dead.5 Until further notice,
we have observed such things only in exceedingly rare cases that
have nothing to do with our experience and which appear to us to
require explanations that still belong to a very different realm from
that of the structuring and normalising mechanisms put at stake in
our experience.
Here, the object is imaginary. The castration at issue is always the
castrating of an imaginary object. It was this commonality, between

the imaginary character of the object of castration and the fact that
frustration is an imaginary lack of the object, that made it easier for
us to believe that frustration was something that could allow us to
proceed more easily to the heart of these problems. Yet it is by no
means sure that /¢ck, oky.ec/, and even a third term that we shall call
czge"J, stand on the same level within these categories. In fact, the
object of castration is an imaginary object, and this is what ought
to make us ask what is meant by this phallus that it took so long to
identify as such.
The object of frustration, on the other hand, is well and truly real,
even though frustration itself is wholly imaginary. The infant, the
choice subject of our dialectic of frustration, is always missing a real
object. This will help us to perceive something that is obvious - and
which requires a slightly more metaphysical handling of the terms
than people usually have when referring to precisely those criteria of
reality we were speaking about earlier -namely, the object of priva-
tion is never anything but a symbolic object.
This is absolutely clear. How could something not be in its place,
not be in a place where, precisely, it is not? From the point of view
of the real this means absolutely nothing. Everything that is real is
always and necessarily in its place, even when it is being interfered
with. The property of the real is first and foremost that of carrying
its place around with it on the soles of its shoes. You can disrupt the
real as much as you like, it remains the case that, after our bodies
have been blown apart, they will still be in their place, their place of
fragments. The absence of something in the real is purely symbolic.
An object is missing from its place to the extent that we would have
defined it by law as having to be there. There is no finer reference
for this than the following. Think of what happens when you ask for
a book in a library and you're told that it's missing from its place.
It might be just alongside, but it is no less the case that it's missing
from its place. It is, in principle, invisible. This means that the librar-
ian lives entirely in a symbolic world. When we speak of privation, a
symbolic object is at issue, and nothing else.
This might appear somewhat abstract, but you will see how useful
this will be to us hereafter when it comes to detecting those sleights
of hand whereby mock solutions are given to false problems, in
other words, those sleights of hand whereby, in the ensuing part
of the dialectic that is debated in an effort to break away from
what appears to be intolerable, namely the utterly different develop-
ment in men and in women of what is called sexuality, in analytic
terms, desperate bids are made to bring these two terns back to a
single principle. Yet perhaps from the very first there was something
that permits of explaining and appreciating in a very clear and

straightforward fashion why their respective development will be
so different.
I simply want to add something that is also going to have a certain
scope, and this is the notion of an agent. Here I'm making a leap
that would mean having to come back to the imaginary triad of
mother, child and phallus, but I don't have time for that. I simply
want to complete the picture. The agent will also play a part in the
lack of object.
Regarding frustration, we have the paramount notion that the
mother plays this part. But is the agent of frustration symbolic,
imaginary or real? And what is the agent of castration? Is it symbolic,
imaginary or real? What is the agent of privation? Is it ultimately
something that has no real existence whatsoever, as I said earlier?
These are questions that at the very least warrant the posing.
Nearing the end of this session, I am going to leave these ques-
tions open. While the answer could perhaps be gone into here, even
deduced, in an altogether formal manner, either way it would be
unsatisfactory at the point we've reached because the notion of
agent is something that lies completely outside the framework of
what we have confined ourselves to today. Today we have dealt with
a first question concerning the relations between the object and the
real. We have stayed within the categories of the imaginary and the
real, whereas the agent plainly belongs to another realm.
You can see nevertheless that the question of qualifying the agent
at each of these three tiers is a question that is plainly connoted by
this initial construction of the phallus.
28 November 1956
Ill
THE SIGNIFIER AND THE
HOLY SPIRIT
The body image and its signifier

The power station of the Jd
Signifier, signified and death
The signifying transmission of the object
Its imaginary discordance
Yesterday evening you heard an expose by Madame Dolto on

the body image. Circumstances were such that I was unable to go
beyond a general statement of how well I thought of it. Had it fallen
to me to speak about it, it would have been to say where it stands in
relation to what we are doing here, that is, all in all, teaching. This is
something I am loath to do in a context of scientific work that really
is of a very different kind, and I'm not upset at not having had to
speak about it.
If we take as our point of departure this body image in the way it
was presented to us yesterday evening, I think that, to situate it in
relation to what we are doing in this seminar, you are all quite well
enough aware of something that is obvious above all else, namely
that this image is not an object.
When an object was spoken of yesterday, it was in an attempt
to define stages of development, and the notion of object is indeed
important in this regard. It is still no less the case, however, not only
that the image of the body is not an object, but also that it cannot
even become an object. This simple remark, which no one stated
except indirectly, will better allow you to situate the body image in
contrast to other imaginary formations.
In the analytic experience we do indeed deal with objects that
can lead us to pose the question as to their imaginary nature. I'm
not saying that these objects are imaginary, but rather that this is
the question we are asking here. It is the central point at which we
position ourselves in order to introduce at the clinical level what is
of interest to us in the notion of the object. This doesn't mean that

we subscribe to the hypothesis of the imaginary object, nor does it
mean that it is our point of departure. Actually, it is so scarcely our
point of departure that this is precisely what we are questioning.
You are already familiar with this possibly imaginary object in
the way it is evinced in the analytic experience, To anchor your ideas
about it, I have taken two examples which I said I would be focusing
on - the phobia and the fetish.
You would be wrong to believe that these objects have already
yielded their secrets. Far from it. Irrespective of the exercise, the
acrobatics, the contortions, the fantasmatic genesis, which people
have given themselves over to, it still remains rather mysterious that
during certain periods of children's lives, whether they are male
or female, they feel they have to be afraid of lions, despite the lion
not being an object they commonly meet in their experience. It is
difficult to conjure up its form, or any kind of primitive feature that
would, for example, be inscribed in the inage of the body. One may
try to, one may do all one can, but even so a residue remains. The
residues in scientific explanations are invariably what are most fruit-
ful for our consideration. In any case, we certainly won't make any
progress by skirting round them.
Similarly, you have been able to note how, across the board, the
number of sexual fetishes remains fairly limited. Why so? Apart
from shoes, which play such a stunning role that one may wonder
why more attention is not paid to this, we find scarcely more than
garters, stockings, brassieres and the like, all of which cling to the
skin. Chief among them, however, is the shoe, and there too there
is a residue. How could one be a fetishist in the time of Catullus?I
We shall ask ourselves whether these objects are imaginary. How
might we conceive of their kinetic value in the economy of libido?
Can we do so only on the basis of indicating what might emerge
from a point of origin? Ultimately this always has to do with the
notion of an ectopia with respect to a certain typical relation. Do
these objects arise from a typical relation of so-called stages that
follow on one from the next?
Whichever the case may be, if these are the objects you were
hearing about yesterday evening, then it's clear that they represent
something that puts us in quite a bind. You have only to consider
the interest generated in the audience, and the extent of the discus-
sion, to appreciate how enthralling this is. On first approach, we
could say that these objects are constructions that order, organise
and articulate a certain lived experience. What is altogether strik-
ing however is the use that is made of this - and one doesn't doubt
for a second its effectiveness - by the operator, Mine Dolto on this
The Signifier and the Holy Spirit 35
occasion. This is quite certainly something that can be situated at

the outset, and in a fully comprehensible way, only on the basis of
the notions of signifier and signified. Mine Dolto uses this object, or
what is supposed to be such, this image, as a signifier. It is as a signi-
fier that the image comes into play in her dialogue. It is as a signifier
that it represents something. This is particularly apparent in the fact
that not one of them is supported on its own. It is always in relation
to another of them that each one assumes its crystallising value that
orients and penetrates the subject at stake, namely the infant.
So, here we are, brought back once again to the notion of the
signifier.
Since here it's a matter of teaching, and since there is nothing

more important than misunderstandings, I would like to begin by
saying that I have observed, both directly and indirectly, that a few
things I said last time when I was speaking about reality were not
understood.
I said that psychoanalysts have such a mythical notion of reality
that it overlaps the notion that for decades has been hindering any
progress in psychiatry. This is precisely the hindrance that one might
have thought psychoanalysis would deliver them from, namely
that of seeking out reality in something whose character would be
more material. To make myself understood, I gave the example of
the hydroelectric power station, and I said that it was as though
someone who is involved in whatever changes the station might
undergo, its up-scaling or downscaling, its shutdowns and repairs,
always thought they could reason in a valid way about what is to be
done with it by referring to the prime matter that comes into play to
set it running, namely the downward flow of water.
Whereupon someone came up to me to say -wfeczf are );oc/ goz.#g fo
get out of that? You can well inagine that for the engineer this run of
water counts for everything. You speak of energy accumulated in the
power station, but this energy is no less than the transf;ormation of the
potential energy that is given in adrance at the site where the power
station is to be located. When the engineer has measured the height of
the water upstream in relation to the outflow point, he can make his
calculation. Everything is already given at the level of the potential
energy. The power of the hydroelectric plant is already determined by
prior conditions.
This objection calls for a number of remarks. The first is that
having to speak to you about reality, I started by defining it as
Wj.rk/j.cAkc!./, as the efficacy of the system as a whole, in this instance

the psychical system. I then wanted to specify for you the mythical
character of a certain way of conceiving of this reality, which I laid
out for you by means of the example of the power station. I didn't
manage to get to the third point, which is a yet further perspective
from which the theme of the real can present, namely the real that is
there before we are constantly reckoning with it.
Of course, this is precisely yet another way of considering reality.
Considering what is there prior to when a certain symbolic func-
tioning is brought to bear is what is most substantial in the mirage
harboured in the objection that was levelled at me. In truth, on no
account am I denying that there is something that was there before.
For instance, before the advent of the J, there was something else.
The Jd was there. It's simply a matter of finding out what this Jd is.
So, in the case of the power station, I'm being told that what
was there before is, effectively, energy. I never said any different.
But energy and natural reality are worlds apart, because energy
only begins to be taken into account once you start measuring it.
And you only dream of measuring it once these power stations are
up and running. Thenceforth, you have to make numerous cal-
culations, one of which is indeed the energy that you will have at
your disposal. This notion of energy is effectively constructed upon
the necessity imposed by a civilisation of production that seeks to
balance the books when it comes to the labour necessary to obtain
from it this available remuneration of efficacy.
For instance, you always measure this energy between two refer-
ence points. There is no absolute energy of the natural reservoir.
There is an energy of the reservoir in relation to the lower elevation
to which the flowing liquid will travel when you have added a spill-
way to this reservoir. But the spillway all by itself will not allow for
any calculation of energy. The energy will be calculable in relation
to the lower elevation.
However, the question does not lie here. The question is that
certain natural conditions have to be realised in order for it to be
even faintly worthwhile calculating the energy. Any difference in
elevation in running water, even if these are mere brooks or even
driblets, will always potentially hold a certain value of energy in
reserve, but this is of strictly no interest to anyone. To spell it right
out, there has to be something in nature that presents the different
materials that will come into play in the running of the machine,
which are in a certain fashion privileged and, quite frankly, signi-
fying. There have to be, in nature, certain privileged things that
present themselves as useable, signifying and measurable, to enable
the plant to be installed. On the path of a system that is taken to be
signifying, this is obviously something that on no account is to be

contested.
What is important is the comparison I'm making with the psychi-
cal system. Let's see now how it takes shape.
Freud was led by the notion of energetics to designate a notion
that we have to use in analysis in a way that would be comparable
with the notion of energy. This is a notion that, just like energy, is
entirely abstract and consists solely in the fact that it can posit, in
analysis, yet in a virtual way, a simple bid for a principle designed
to allow a certain leeway in thinking. This is strictly the energy that
was introduced by the notion of equivalence, that is, the notion of
a common measure between manifestations that present as being
qualitatively very different. This notion of energy is precisely the
notion of libido.
Nothing is less anchored in a material underpinning than the
notion of libido in analysis. It is marvelled at, in the 7ltrcc Esscz}7s
on Sexuality. how small a modification was made necessary in Freud' s
A)/po/fecfj.a -the first time, in 1905, speaking about the biological
underpinning of libido -b)/ /Ac dj.scovcr)/ o//Ac sex feormo#cf. There
is no marvel here. It means that, in either case, when it comes to
libido, Freud cz//c7cAes #o j.mpor/cz#cc to this reference to a chemi-
cal factor, strictly speaking. Freud spells this out. Whether there is
one libidinal substance or several - one wAosc prcsc#cc prodwccs cz
male sexual excitation and another substance which produces afemale
one -he says that tor us it is a matter of indifference whether there
is a single sexually exciting substance in the body or two or countless
##773bcrs a//teem. Whichever is the case, analytic experience makes it
necessary for us to think wj./A a sj.#g/c /zbj.c7o. In this way, he locates
libido on a plane that is, if I may say so, 7}ewfrcz/;.fed, as paradoxical
as the term may seem.
Libido is this something that will link the behaviour of two beings,
for example in a way that will ascribe to them the active position or
the passive position. However, Freud tells us that in every case, even
in the passive position, we take this libido as having active effects.
Indeed, to adopt a passive position, a certain activeness is required.
Thus, Freud comes to indicate that, ipso facto, libido takes on an
aspect that presents only in this effective and active form, and is thus
invariably rather akin to the masculine position. He goes so far as to
say that only the masculine form of libido is within our reach.
How paradoxical all this would be, were it not merely a notion
that is there simply to allow us to embody and to support the par-
ticular type of liaison that occurs on what is strictly speaking the
level of the imaginary. It is what binds the behaviour of each living
being in the presence of another living being by what are called
bonds of desire, that is, all the yearning that is one of the essential
mainsprings of Freudian thought when it comes to organising what
is at issue in any line of behaviour in sexuality.
We tend to regard the Es as an agency that bears the strongest
relation to the drive tendencies, the instincts and libido. But what
is the Es? And to what does the comparison with the power station
allow us to compare it? Well, precisely to the power station as seen
by someone who has absolutely no idea how it works. The unin-
structed person who sees it might indeed think that it is the genie
in the current who has started playing around inside, transforming
water into light or force.
The Es is what, through the intemediary of the Other's message,
is liable to become J.2 This is the best definition there can be of the
EJ.
If analysis has brought us something, it is the following. The
Es is not a physical reality, nor is it merely what was there before.
The Es is organised and articulated as the signifier is organised and
articulated.
This is also true for what the machine produces. All the force
that is already there can be transformed, with the slight difference,
nevertheless, that it is not only transformed but accumulated as
well. This is even what is essentially interesting in the fact that the
plant is a hydroelectric power station and not simply a hydraulic
pumping station, for example. Of course, there is all this energy,
but nevertheless no one can challenge the fact that when the plant
has been constructed there is a palpable difference, not only in the
landscape, but in the real.
The plant was not constructed through the intervention of the
Holy Spirit. More precisely, it wars constructed through the interven-
tion of the Holy Spirit, and if you have any doubt about this, you're
Wrong.
I'm producing this theory of the signifier and the signified precisely
to remind you of the presence of the Holy Spirit, which is absolutely
essential for the furthering of our understanding of analysis.
Let's take this up at a different level, at the level of the reality prin-
ciple and the pleasure principle.
In what respect is there an opposition between the two systems,
primary and secondary? If you stick to what defines them when they
are looked at from the outside, you can say the following. What
occurs at the level of the primary system is governed by the pleas-
ure principle, that is, by the tendency to return to rest, while what
occurs at the level of the reality system is defined purely and simply
by that which forces the subject into what is called exterior reality,
conducting him to make a detour. Yet nothing in these definitions
gives us a sense of what in practice will emerge from the conflictive
and dialectical character of the use of these two terms, simply in
the concrete use that you make of them on a day-to-day basis. You
never fail to make use of them in this fashion, with each of the two
systems, endowed as they are with a particular indication that is in
some way its own specific paradox. This paradox is often eluded,
but is never left out in practice.
The paradox of the pleasure principle is that what presents at this
level is linked, as indeed is pointed out to you, to the law of a return
to the state of rest, to the tendency towards rest. Nevertheless, what
is striking, and this is why Freud put it in a categorical way in his
text, is that he introduced the notion of libido because pleasure, in
its concrete sense, is linked not only to rest but to yearning, to the
elevation of a desire. The word in German is LWF/, with the ambigu-
ous meaning that Freud underscores, both pleasure and yearning,3
which are indeed two things that can appear contradictory but
which are no less efficaciously linked in experience.
A no lesser paradox is found at the level of reality. Just as at the
level of the pleasure principle there is, on one side, the return to rest,
but on the other, yearning, so too at the level of reality is there not
only the reality that one bumps into, but also the principle of edging,
of taking a detour through reality.
This appears more clearly if, correlatively to the existence of these
two principles, we bring in the two terms that bind them together in
a way that allows for their dialectical functioning, namely the two
tiers of speech such as they are expressed in the notions of signifier
and signified.
I have already placed the course of the signifier, or of concrete
discourse, for example, in a kind of parallel superposition over the
course of the signified, in which and as which the continuity of lived
experience presents itself, the flow of tendencies within a subject and
between subjects.
signifier
signified
This presentation4 is all the more valid given that nothing may
be conceived of, not only in speech or in language but in the very
functioning of everything that presents as a phenomenon in analy-
sis, unless we accept the essential possibility of a perpetual sliding of
the signified under the signifier, and of the signifier over the signi-
fied. Nothing in the analytic experience can be explained except in
reference to this fundamental schema.
This schema entails that what is the signifier of one thing may at
any moment become the signifier of something else, and that what
presents in the subject's yearnings, tendencies and libido, is always
branded with the mark of a signifier. In so far as it concerns us,
there is nothing else. There might be something else in the drive
and in yearning that is not branded in any way by the signifier,
but we have no access to it. Nothing is accessible to us unless it
is branded by this mark of the signifier, which is introduced into
natural movement, into desire, or into the particularly expressive
term c7em¢#d to which the English language has recourse as a
primal expression of appetite, of exigency, even though it is not
marked by laws that are specific to the signifier. Thus, yearning
becomes what is signified.
The intervention of the signifier poses a problem that earlier led
me to remind you about the Holy Spirit. The year before last, we
saw what this means for us and what it means in Freud's thought
and teaching. This Holy Spirit is, on the whole, the coming into
existence of the signifier.
This is undoubtedly what Freud brings us under the term dccJ/A
I.#sJJ.#c/. What is at stake is the limit of what can be signified, which
can never be reached by any living being, save in exceptional cases
because we meet it only in the last-gasp writings of a certain philo-
sophical experience. This is all the same something to be found
virtually at the limit of man's reflection on his life as what allows
him to glimpse death as the absolute and unsurpassable condition of
his existence, as Heidegger puts it. Man's existence in the world, at
any rate his potential relations with the signifier as a whole, is bound
very precisely to this possibility of the suppression, the bracketing
off, of everything that is lived.
What lies at the bottom of the existence of the signifier, of its
presence in the world, is something that we will put there, and which
is this efficient surface of the signifier as something where it reflects
in some way what may be called the last word of the signified, that
is, of life, of lived experience, of the flux of emotions and libido. It is
death, insomuch as this is the support, the base, the intervention of
the Holy Spirit through which the signifier exists.
Is this signifier, which has its own laws that may or may not be
recognised in any given phenomenon, what is designated here in the
Es? We ask this question, and we answer it. To understand anything
of what we do in analysis, we have to answer in the affirmative.
The Es that is at issue in analysis is the signifier that is already
there in the real, the uncomprehended signifier. It's already there,

but it's a signifier, and not some confused and primitive property
of goodness knows what pre-set harmony, this being loosely the
hypothesis that is always hauled out by those I would unhesitatingly
describe as feeble-minded.
Foremost among these is a certain Dr Ernest Jones. 1'11 be telling
you presently how he tackles the issue, for example, of the early
development of women and their infamous castration complex,
which has posed an unsolvable problem to all analysts whenever it
rears its head.
The error is to start off from the idea that because there are, as
one says, needle and thread, so there are also girl and boy, and so
there can be the same pre-set harmony between them, such that
should some difficulty arise, it can only be due to some secondary
disorder, some defence process, or some purely accidental and con-
tingent occurrence. When one imagines that the unconscious means
that whatever lies in one subject is designed to perceive what must
respond to it in another, one is simply presupposing the notion of a
primitive harmony.
This notion can be contrasted with Freud's altogether straight-
forward remark in his 7lfercc Ess¢ys o# Sexwcz/j./}7 concerning what
is such an important theme in child development in respect of
these sexual impressions, namely that it's a great pity that things
are not laid out in such a way that guiderails leading to man's open
access to woman5 would be installed and signposted in advance.
On no account is this an encounter in which the only obstacles
are those that may crop up along the way. On the contrary,
Freud asserts that the subject's infantile sexual theories, those
that will leave their mark on the entire development and history
of the relation between the sexes, are linked to the first maturity
of the genital stage that occurs before the full development of the
Oedipus complex, namely the so-called pfecz//i.c pfeosc.
This phase is called pfea//z.c not in the name of a joining of some
sort of fundamental equality at the level of energetics, which is there
solely for the convenience of thought. It's not on account of there
being only one libido. Rather, it is because this time, on the imagi-
nary plane, there is a single primary representative of the genital
state and stage, and this is the phallus as such.
The phallus is neither wholly nor merely the full male genital
apparatus. The phallus is excepted, says Freud, from fAe o/fecrparf
o/ffee m¢/c ger!i./cz/s, the testes, say. The erect image of the phallus is
what is crucial here. There is only one. There is no other choice but
a virile image or castration.
I'm not enshrining Freud's term. I'm telling you that this is the
starting point that Freud offers us when he performs this reconstruc-

tion. In relation to everything that came before, the 7lforee Esscr}7s
did indeed set off in search of natural references for the idea which
had been uncovered in analysis, but what analysis underscores is
precisely that there are a whole host of accidental occurrences that
are far from being as natural as all that.
Furthermore, we posit what I'm laying out here as the principle
behind the analytic experience, namely that it begins with the
notion that there is something of the signifier already installed and
already structured. A power station is already up and running. You
are not the one who has made this power station. It is language,
which has been functioning here for as long as you can remem-
ber. Literally, you cannot remember further back. I'm speaking
about the history of the whole of humanity. For as long as there
have been functioning signifiers, subjects have been organised in
their psychical systems by the specific play of the signifier. This is
precisely what means that the Es of what is already given, which
is something you will seek out in the depths, is not as natural as
all that, and even less so than images. Indeed, the existence in
nature of the hydroelectric power station, constructed through
the intervention of the Holy Spirit, stands in stark contrast to the
notion of nature.
The analytic position inheres in this scandal. When we approach a
subject, we know that already in nature there is something that is his
Es and which, ipso facto, is structured in accordance with a signify-
ing articulation that leaves its mark -its imprints, its contradictions,
its profound difference from natural coaptations - on everything
that is brought to bear on this subject.
I thought I ought to remind you of these positions, which strike
me as fundamental. I note that I placed the signifier behind this
ultimate reality, which is completely veiled with respect to what is
signified. Moreover, the use of the signifier also entails the possibil-
ity that nothing of what is signified exists. This is none other than
the death instinct, the awareness that life is completely obsolete
and improbable. Here we have a whole host of notions that have
nothing to do with any kind of living exercise, because any living
exercise consists precisely of making one's own little way in exist-
ence by falling exactly in line with all those who have come before
uS.
The existence of the signifier is bound to nothing other than the
fact - for it is a fact - that discourse exists and is introduced into
the world against a backdrop that is more or less familiar or mis-
construed. Yet it is curious all the same that Freud was led by the
analytic experience not to be able to do otherwise than to spell this
out by saying that if the signifier functions, then it is against the

backdrop of a particular experience of death.
This experience has nothing to do with any kind of lived experi-
ence. IT our com"enta,ry or\ Beyond the Pleasure Principle two yea.rs
ago was able to show something, then it was that what is there at
issue is a reconstruction, which is prompted by the fact of certain
paradoxes that in experience are inexplicable, that is to say, by
the fact that the subject is led to behave in an essentially signifying
fashion, repeating indefinitely something that for him is, strictly
speaking, deathly.
Conversely, just as this death is reflected here at the bottom of the
signified, so there is a whole series of things in the signified, things
that are there but which have been imprinted by the signifier. These
are precisely the things that are at issue, namely certain elements
that are linked to something that is just as profoundly engaged in
the signified, and this is the body. There are a number of elements,
of accidental occurrences of the body, that amount to experiential
givens. Just as in nature certain natural reservoirs are already there,
so too in the signifier there are certain elements that are taken up in
the signifier in order to furnish it with, as it were, its first weapons.
These elements are things that are ungraspable in the extreme, and
yet they are irreducible. Among them is the phallic term, the pure
and simple erection. The upright stone is one such example. The
notion of the erect human body is another. Thus, a number of ele-
ments are each linked more or less to bodily stature, and not merely
to the lived experience of the body. They constitute the first ele-
ments, and are effectively borrowed from experience, but completely
transformed by the fact that they are symbolised. Sj;moo/;.sec7 means
that they are introduced into what characterises the bond of the
signifier as such, the signifier being something that is articulated in
keeping with its own logical laws.
I led you back to the first of these logical laws in connection with
the death instinct, at the very least getting you to play the game of
odds-and-evens, in order to remind you that what these laws finally
boil down to - that is, the pluses and minuses and their groupings
in twos and threes within a temporal sequence - is that there are
ultimate laws that are the laws of the signifier. These laws are of
course implicit, wherever you start off from, but it is impossible not
to encounter them.
Let's come back now to where we left things last time, namely at
the level of the analytic experience.
The central object relation, the one that is dynamically creative, is

that of lack. At the level of the analytic experience, every Fz.#cJ##g of
the object is, Freud tells us, a Wz.cdcr¢#cJw#g.
Or\e ougivtn't to read the Three Essays on the Theory Of Sexuality as
though it were a book written in one go. Admittedly, not a single one
of Freud's major works went unrevised - they all include added notes
-but there are very few textual modifications. The rrczw7#c7e#fw#g, for
instance, was expanded without anything of its original balance being
altered. However, the first thing you have to bear in mind should you
read the first edition of the 7lrferee Essays is that you won't get over it,
so to speak, because you won't recognise any of what you think of as
the familiar themes of the 7lferee Essays from your usual reading of the
book,thatistosay,withtheadditionsthatweremademanyyearslater,
chiefly in 1915. Everything that has to do with the pregenital develop-
ment of libido could be conceived of only after the appearance of the
theory of narcissism. At any rate, it was never included in the 7ltirce
Essczyf before the modification of everything that comprised the sexual
theory of childhood, with its major misunderstandings that consist, in
particular, in Freud's telling us that the child has no notion of coition
or of begetting. This is their essential failing. That this should have also
been repeated after 1915 is due largely to the fact of a notion that only
saw light of day after the final edition of the 7lrferec Esscz}Js in 1920, in the
1923 article on D!.c !.#/a7tfi./c Ge#z./cz/org¢#z.sa/j.o#.6 This crucial element
of gc#z.fcz/I.J)/ in development remains beyond the confines of the 7lfercc
Essays, which don't quite come to this. Their progress, in this research
on the pregenital relation as such, can only be explained by the impor-
tance of sexual theories and the libido theory itself.
The chapter entitled 7lrfec I;bj.do 7lfecor); concerns the narcissistic
notion, along with the discovery and origin, and even the very idea,
of the theory of libido. Freud tells us that we can account for all this
when we possess the notion of an Jch-/!bz.do as a reservoir of libido
that constitutes objects. He adds that we can do no more than peep
at this reservoir over its walls. In sum, it is in the notion of narcis-
sistic tension as such, that is to say, in a relation between man and
image, that we may form the idea of a common measure. At the
same time, we have an idea of the central reserve from which any
objectal relation is established insomuch as it will be fundamentally
imaginary. In other words, one of these essential articulations is the
subject's fascination with the image. All things considered, this is an
image that is only ever an image that he bears within himself. This is
the last word on the theory of narcissism as such.
So, everything that thereafter took its bearing from this, heading
in the direction of acknowledging an organising value in fantasies,
is something that is backed up, not at all by the idea of a pre-set
harmony, of a natural inclination between object and subject, but
on the contrary by something that first and foremost presupposes
an experience, laid out for us in the 7lfercc Esscz)/f in their origi-
nal version, that revolves entirely around a diphasic development.
This two-stage temporal development of child sexuality hinges on
the fact that the re-finding of the object will always be marked by
the fact of the latency period, of the latent memory that persists
throughout this period. Freud spells this out. The result is that the
first object, the mother, is remembered in a way that has not been
able to change. It is, as he puts it, w77verwe#dbcrr, unutilisable. The
object, which will only ever be a re-found object, w!.cdergc/w#c7c#,
will bear the mark of the initial style of this object. This will intro-
duce an essential and fundamentally conflictive division into this
re-found object and into the very fact of its re-finding. Thus, Freud's
first dialectic in the theory of sexuality is introduced around an
initial notion of the discordance between the re-found object and the
object that is sought.
This fundamental experience supposes that throughout the
latency period the object is preserved in the subject's memory, but
unbeknown to him. That is to say, during the latency period, there
is a signifying transmission of an object that thereafter divides,
becomes discordant, and plays the role of a disturbing force in all
the subject's subsequent object relations. It is within this frame that,
at certain moments, in certain choice articulations, during certain
phases of this evolution, the strictly imaginary functions are uncov-
ered. Everything that falls within the remit of pregenital relations
is taken up within this parenthesis. This notion of an imaginary
layer is introduced into a dialectic that is first and foremost, in our
vocabulary, essentially a dialectic of the symbolic and the real.
This introduction of the imaginary, which has since become such
a prevalent notion, only comes about, first, with the article on nar-
cissism, which is not articulated into the theory of sexuality until
1915, and then, second, with its formulation in connection with the
phallic phase, which doesn't happen until 1920. However, at the
time this was formulated in a categorical way, it seemed disturbing
and threw the entire analytic audience into a state of bewilderment.
Things are such that the dialectic that at the time was termed prc-
ge#z./cz/ - and not, I note, prcoedj.par/ - is situated in relation to the
Oedipus complex.
The tern prcocc7zPcz/ was introduced in connection with female
sexuality, ten years later. In 1920, however, what is at issue is the
pregenital relation, which is situated in the emergence of experi-

ences that are preparatory to the Oedipal experience but which only
come to be linked up in this latter experience. It is on the basis of
the signifying articulation of the Oedipus complex that we are able
to behold the signifying material of these images, these fantasies,
which do indeed arise from a certain experience of contact between
signifier and signified. In such experience, the signifier has drawn its
material from somewhere in the signified, from a certain number
of living and lived relations. This past is grasped retroactively, ena-
bling us to structure this imaginary organisation that we meet first
and foremost as having a paradoxical character. It is paradoxical in
that it opposes, far more than it accords with, any idea of a regular
harmonious development. On the contrary, it is a critical develop-
ment, in which from the very first the objects, as they are called, of
the different oral and anal phases, are already taken to be something
other than what they are. They are objects that have already been
worked over. Yet people have been working with these objects in
such a way that it is impossible to extract their signifying structure.
This is what people have been referring to with all these notions
of j.#corporcz/j.o#, notions that organise them, dominate them, and
enable them to be linked up.
How ought this experience to be arranged? As I told you last time,
we should be arranging the entirety of the experience around the
notion of the lack of object.
I showed you the three different tiers of this lack, which for us are
essential when it comes to understanding all that occurs whenever
there is a crisis, an encounter, or an efficient action in the search
for the object, which in and of itself is essentially a critical notion
of search. These tiers are cc}sJr¢/z.o#, /rws/ra/J.o7t and prj.v¢fz.o#. Their
central structure, what they amount to as lack, is essentially three
distinct things.
In the coming lessons we are going to position ourselves at the
precise point where the new-fangled theory and current practice
are entrenched. The analysts of today have been reorganising the
analytic experience upon the tier of frustration, while neglecting
the notion of castration, which, along with the Oedipus complex,
was Freud's original discovery. Next time I shall take as my point
of departure an example that I chose at random in volumes Ill and
IV o£ The Psychoanalytic Study Of the Child, puhi\shod in 1949. I.t's
a presentation by Mrs Anneliese Schnurmann, one of Anna Freud's
pupils.
Mrs Schnurmann was able to observe the fairly sudden emergence
of a phobia in one of the young boarders at Anna Freud's Hampstead
Nursery. We are going to read this observation, which is one among
umpteen others, and we shall see what we can understand in it. We

shall also see what has been understood by she who reports the
observation with what seems to be exemplary fidelity. That is to say,
it does not exclude a certain number of pre-established categories.
However, what has been gathered together is ample for us to have a
notion of temporal succession. We shall see how, through a number
of points of reference, the phobia will appear and then disappear.
We are going to see a privileged imaginary creation in this subject,
which prevails for a certain while, and which has a whole series of
effects on the subject's behaviour. We shall have to see whether it
really is possible for the author to spell out what is essential in this
observation when she takes as her sole point of departure the notion
of frustration, in the way it is currently conceived, that is, as related
to the privation of a privileged object that is the object of the stage
to which the subject has arrived when the privation appears. This
is a loosely regressive effect, which can even be progressive in some
cases - and why not? But can a phenomenon like phobia be under-
stood by merely appearing, by merely being located, in a particular
chronological order? Don't things become clearer when we refer to
the three terms I have set out? This is what we are going to see.
I shall now simply underscore what these three terms mean. In cas-
tration, there is a fundamental lack that is located, as indebtedness,
in the symbolic chain. In frustration, lack can only be understood
on the imaginary plane, as an imaginary detriment. In privation,
lack is purely and simply in the real, as a real gap or limit.
When I say that in privation the lack is in the real, certainly
this only holds interest when we see that on no account does this
mean that it is something that is in the subject. For the subject to
reach privation, he already has to symbolise the real, to conceive of
the real as being something other than what it is. The reference to
privation, as it is set out here, consists in positing - before we can
say something sensible - that all of this does not come to pass as it
does in the idealist dream where we can see the subject in some sense
obligated in the genesis of the psychical system as it is laid out for us.
In the current analytic conception of psychogenesis, the subject
is like a spider who has to spin the entire web herself. There, each
subject has to envelop himself in the silk of his cocoon. He has to
make his entire conception of the world emerge from himself and his
images. In this psychogenesis, the subject secretes from himself his
successive relations, in the name of goodness-knows-what pre-set
maturation with the objects that will somehow manage to be the
objects of this human world of ours. So it is, in defiance of how
often analysis makes it apparent that giving oneself over to such
an exercise is impossible, because the partisans of this conception
only latch on to those aspects that support it. Moreover, each time
they get in a muddle, it seems to them that it is merely a difficulty
of language. In fact, this is simply a manifestation of the error they
are in. Somatognosis, the image of the body as a signifier, shows this
Well enough.7
The problem of object relations can be posed in the right way only
by positing a framework that must be regarded as fundamental to
the comprehension of this object relation. The framework, or the
first of these frameworks, is that in the human world the structure,
the point of departure for objectal organisation, is the lack of the
object. We have to conceive of this lack of object across its different
stages in the subject, not merely at the level of the symbolic chain,
the beginning and end of which are beyond his grasp, nor merely
at the level of frustration, though he is indeed poised at this level,
where his lived experience is thinkable for him. We also have to
consider this lack in the real, because when we speak of privation
here, it's not about feeling deprived.
Privation as a feeling of being deprived of a central reference that
we need, to such an extent that everyone makes use of this, is simply
the trick of making privation equivalent to frustration, which is
what Dr Ernest Jones does. Privation is not the equivalent of frus-
tration. Privation is in the real, and quite outside of the subject. For
the subject to apprehend privation, he must first symbolise this real.
How is the subject led to symbolise it? How does frustration intro-
duce the symbolic order? This is the question we shall be asking,
and it will allow us to see that the subject is neither isolated nor
independent. The subject is not the one who introduces the symbolic
order.
It is quite striking that yesterday evening no one spoke about a
major passage in what Mine Dolto offered us, namely that accord-
ing to her the only children who become phobic are those, of either
sex, whose mother happens to have endured a disturbance in the
objectal relation with her own parent of the opposite sex. Here
we are introduced to a notion that certainly brings in something
very different from the relationships between mother and child, and
indeed this is why I have set out for you the trio of mother, child
and phallus.
For the mother, there is nearly always this requirement of the
phallus on the side of the child. The child symbolises, sometimes
more, sometimes less, the phallus. As for the child, who has his own
relationship with his mother, he knows nothing about it, because if
there is one thing that surely must also have been apparent to you
yesterday evening when the body image was being spoken of in rela-
tion to this child, it's that, if this image is even accessible to him, is
this how the mother sees her child? This is a question that was never
raised.
Similarly, at what moment is the child in a position to realise that
what his mother desires in him, saturates and satisfies in him, is her
phallic image? What possibility is open to the child of having access
to this relational element? Is this something that belongs to a kind of
direct effusion, or even a projection? Doesn't this amount to suppos-
ing that any relationship between subjects is of the same kind as the
relationship between Mine Dolto and her child? I'm stunned that
no one asked her, she who sees all these body images, whether there
is anyone else, apart from analysts - of her school, at that - who
happen to see in the child such elements and such images. Yet this is
the important point.
How are we to conceive of the way in which the child, male or
female, is induced or introduced to this imaginary discordance that
means that, for the mother, the child is far from being just the child?
The child is also the phallus. This is something that falls within the
scope of experience, because certain elements can be extracted from
experience which show us, for instance, that there needs already to
be a period of symbolisation in order for the child to have access
to this, or even that in certain cases the child has broached the
imaginary detriment in a way that is in some sense direct - not foj.s
detriment, but the mother's detriment with respect to this privation
of the phallus. This really is essential in development. Is an imagi-
nary here being reflected in the symbolic? Or, on the contrary, is a
symbolic element appearing in the imaginary? These are the crucial
points in relation to which we ask ourselves the question of phobia.
So as not to fall short of your expectations, and in order to shed
some further light, I will tell you what is in question in the threefold
scheme of mother, child and phallus. It's a different question from
the question of phobia, and it will certainly take us a long way.
Why in fetishism does the child come more or less to occupy the
position of the mother in relation to the phallus? Or why, on the
contrary, in certain highly particular foms of dependency in which
anomalies can present with every appearance of normality, does the
child also come to occupy the position of the phallus in relation to
the mother? What leads him to this? It does indeed seem that this
mother-phallus relation is not afforded to the child in a spontane-
ous and direct fashion. Does everything happen simply because he
watches his mother and notices that what she desires is a phallus?
Apparently not. We shall be coming back to this.
A phobia, when it develops, is not at all of the same kind. It has
nothing to do with this liaison that the infant establishes between
the phallus and the mother by putting something of his own into it,
50 Theorising the Lack of object
and rather a great deal. A phobia is something else. It's another type
of solution to the difficult problem introduced by the relationships
between child and mother. I showed you this last year. For there to
be the three terms of the trio - it was in a closed forum - there has
to be an organisation of the symbolic world, and this is called the
father. The phobia belongs rather to this realm. It has to do with this
circumscribing bond. At a particularly critical moment, when no
path of any other nature is open for solving the problem, the phobia
constitutes a call for rescue. It's an appeal to a singular symbolic
element.
In what way is it singular? Let's say that it appears always to be
exceedingly symbolic, that is, exceedingly far from any imaginary
apprehension. When it is called to the rescue of a solidarity that it
is essential to maintain in the gap introduced by the appearance of
the phallus in the orientation between mother and child, the element
that intervenes in the phobia has a truly mythical character.
5 December 1956
IV
THE DIALECTIC OF
FRUSTRATION
Frustration placed at the centre of the mother4hild relation

Revisiting the For/-D¢ game
The mother, from symbolic to real
The infant and the phallic image
The young English girl's phobia
agent lack of object object
castration
imaginary
symbolic indebtedness
frustration
imaginary detriment
privation
symbolic
real hole
This is the chart at which we have arrived, and which allows the
issue of the object such as it arises in analysis to be spelt out with
precision.
The lack of rigour in this matter, the confusion that analysts have
shown, has resulted in a curious slippage.
Analysis partakes of a sort of scandalous notion of man's affective
relations. I think I have already underscored on several occasions
what at the start gave rise to so much outrage in analysis. It was not
so much that it highlighted the role of sexuality, and that it played
its part in the fact that this has become commonplace - in any case,
these days no one dreams of taking offence at it - rather, it was
precisely that at the same time as introducing this notion, and far in
excess of this, it introduced the notion of a paradox, of an essential
difficulty, that is inherent, so to speak, in the approach to the sexual
object.
It is peculiar indeed that since then we have slid from this to a
harmonic notion of the object.
To take measure of the distance that lies between this notion and
what Freud spelt out with the greatest rigour, I chose a sentence
from the 7lrfercc Esscr)/s o# Scxwcz/j.ty. Even those who are the least
informed with respect to object relations have remarked that it may
quite readily be seen that in Freud's writings there are many things
pertaining to the object - object-choice, for example - but that
the notion of object relations on its own is neither highlighted nor
cultivated, nor brought to the fore of the question. Here is Freud's
sentence that can be found in the article Drj.vcs cz#d 7lfocj.r Fcz/cs -
The object of the drive is that [. . . ] through which the drive is able to
achieve its aim. It is the most variable aspect of a drive, not originally
cormected with it, but merely appropriated by it on grounds of suit-
¢bj./i./}J fo provj.de fa/;.s/ac/j.o#. One might also say that it's about
the possibility of satisfying the drive. It's a matter of satisfaction
insomuch as the position that the pleasure principle takes as the goal
of the drive tendency is that of arriving at its own satisfaction.
So, the notion that there is no pre-set harmony between object
and drive tendency is spelt out. The object is literally bound to the
drive tendency only by conditions that are its own. In short, one gets
by as best one can. This is not a doctrine. It's a quotation. But it's
one quotation among others that motion in the same direction, and
it's one of the most significant. What is this conception of the object
that is at issue here? Along what winding paths does it lead us before
we manage to conceive of its effective impact?
We have already managed, thanks to a number of points that
have also been spelt out by Freud, to give some depth to the notion
that the object is only ever a re-found object, based on a primary
F!.#dw#g. This means that the Wj.cder¢#c7w#g, the re-finding, is never
satisfactory. What is more, drawing on further characteristics, we
saw on the one hand that this object is inadequate, and on the other
that it steals away, partially, from any conceptual grasp. This is now
leading us to take a firmer grip on the fundamental notions, and
in particular to revise the one that has been placed at the centre of
latter-day analytic theory, that of frustration.
To what extent has it been turned into something necessary? To
what extent, too, ought it to be revised? It's up to us to critique it so
The Dialectic of Frustration 53
as to make it both usable and, to spell this right out, coherent with
what constitutes the grounding of analytic doctrine, which is still
fundamentally Freud's thought and teaching. I have underscored
for you many times now that the notion of frustration is quite mar-
ginal in Freud's thinking.
I reminded you of what presents at the outset in what is given -

cos/rc}/!.o#, /rws/rcz/I.o# and prj.v¢/z.a;c. Marking out the differences
between these three terms is going to be productive.
What is involved in castration?
Castration is essentially linked to a symbolic order qua already
established, which as such comprises a long coherence in which the
subject can on no account be an isolated given. The liaison between
castration and the symbolic order is evinced as much in each of our
earlier reflections as in the straightforward remark that, from the
very first, Freud yoked castration to the central position he gave to
the Oedipus complex as the essential articulation of any develop-
ment in sexuality. The Oedipus complex already bears within it, and
fundamentally so, the notion of Law that is absolutely ineradicable.
I think that the fact that castration stands at the level of symbolic
indebtedness will appear amply confirmed and even amply demon-
strated by this remark, which has been weighed up and supported
through each of our earlier reflections.
What is the object that is at issue, or that is brought into play, in
the symbolic indebtedness established by castration? As I indicated
last time, it is an imaginary object, the phallus as such. At least this
is what Freud asserts, and this will be my point of departure today
in order to push the dialectic of frustration a little further.
Frustration holds the central position on this chart. In itself, this
does not harbour anything that should throw us out of kilter or off
track. By laying the emphasis on the notion of frustration we do
not stray very far from the notion that Freud placed at the heart
of analytic conflictedness, this being the notion of desire. What is
important here is to grasp what is meant by frustration, how it was
introduced, and what it refers to.
Clearly, insomuch as it is placed to the fore in analytic theory,
the notion of frustration has been linked to the earliest age of life.
It has been linked to research into traumas, fixations and expe-
riential impressions that in themselves are preoedipal. This does
not imply that they lie outside the scope of the Oedipus complex
but rather that in some sense they provide its preparatory ground,
its base and foundation. They model it in such a way that certain
inflexions are prepared within it, and they will furnish those aspects
through which the Oedipal conflict will be led to reorient, in a more
or less pronounced way, in a direction that is loosely atypical or
heterotypic.
What, then, is the pattern of relationship with the object that is
in play in frustration? Clearly it introduces the question of the real.
Indeed, along with the notion of frustration we can see a whole
host of other notions being placed to the fore in the subject's con-
ditioning and development. These notions have been conveyed in
a language of loose quantitative metaphor. People speak about
satisfactions, gratifications, and a certain number of well-adapted
benefits that correspond to steps in the young subject's develop-
ment. Furthermore, when it more or less reaches saturation point,
or on the contrary when it comes up short, this is considered to be
an essential feature.
I think that just making this remark is enough to open our eyes
to the evidence, when we consult the texts, and to see what step has
been taken in this research, guided by an analysis of this fact of a
basic shift of interest within the analytic literature. This can already
be seen fairly easily, at least for those who are sufficiently familiar
with these three notions to be able to recognise them with ease. You
will see in one article from the analytic literature, in which you can
recognise this element of the conceptual articulation of the matter
quite straightforwardly, that the thrust of it bears on certain real
conditions that we are supposed to be able to ascertain in a subject's
history through the analytic experience. In the first analytic observa-
tions, it is on the whole apparent that any such foregrounding of
this element of interest is absent, in the sense that it is articulated
differently.
So, here we are led back to the level of frustration regarded as
a sort of feature of a real impression, experienced by the subject
during a period when his relationship with this real object, whatever
it might be, is habitually focused on the so-called primordial image
of the maternal breast. It is essentially in relation to this primordial
object that what just now I called its first aspects and first fixations
will take shape in the subject. Faced with these aspects and fixa-
tions, descriptions have been made of the various typical instinctual
stages, which are characterised by the imaginary anatomy of the
subject's development that they offer us. This is where the relation-
ships of the oral stage and the anal stage have been articulated,
with their various subdivisions - phallic, sadistic, and so on. Each
of these bear the mark of the element of ambivalence whereby the
subject's position partakes of the other's position, where the subject
is twain, where he participates always in a dual situation without

which any comprehensive assumption of his position is not possible.
By simply limiting ourselves to this, let's see where it takes us. We
are, therefore, in the presence of a subject that is in this position,
which is a position of desire. Let's take it in the form it is given to
us, as the breast qua real object. Here we are led to the heart of the
question of what this relationship is, this most primitive of relation-
ships, between the subject and the real object.
You know the extent to which the theoretician-analysts have
found themselves in a sort of discussion that is teeming with all
manner of misunderstanding. After Freud spoke of a lived stage
of autoeroticism, some preserved this autoeroticism as the primal
relationship between the infant and the primordial maternal object,
while others objected that it was difficult to refer to a notion that
seems to be founded on the fact that the subject that it implies is
acquainted only with himself, given how a good many features from
direct observation seem to run athwart the idea that in this instance
there are no effective relations with an object. We conceive of these
features as necessary when it comes to explaining the development
of relations between child and mother. Furthermore, what could be
more overtly exterior to the subject than this something for which
he feels the most pressing need, and which is the first nourishment
par excellence?
In truth, it seems that there is a misunderstanding here, begotten
essentially by a kind of confusion, whereby the discussion comes
to a standstill, culminating in formulations that are so diverse that
simply to list them would take up considerable time. This is why I
can't do so straightaway, because we need to make some headway in
the conceptualisation of what is at issue here. I shall simply remind
you of the theory we have already spoken about, Alice Balint's
theory.
This theory seeks to reconcile the notion of autoeroticism, such as
it is set out by Freud, with what seems to impose on the reality of the
object that confronts the infant during an altogether primary stage
of his development. This culminates in the strikingly articulated
conception that Mr and Mrs Balint call Pr;.mczr)/ £ovc. According to
them, this is the only form of love in which egoism and altruism are
perfectly reconcilable, allowing of a perfect and fundamental reci-
procity between what the infant requires of the mother and what the
mother requires of the infant, a perfect complementarity between
the two poles of need.
This conception runs quite contrary to all clinical experience, in
that we are constantly dealing with the evocation, within the subject,
of the mark of each truly fundamental discord that may have arisen.
The theory of this so-called primary love, which would be perfect

and complementary, contains in its very wording the hallmark of
this discord, Alice Balint tells us, in Love/or /Ac "ofAcr cz#d 114lo/fecr
fovc, that where relations are natural, that is, in the wild, the child
is always carefully maintained in contact with its mother.I In other
words, this always happens elsewhere, in dreamland, in the Garden
of the Hesperides, there where, as everyone knows, the mother
always carries the child on her back. Such a strict complementary
notion of love, destined in and of itself to find its reciprocity, con-
stitutes an evasion that is so scarcely compatible with an accurate
theorisation that ultimately it has to be admitted that this is, there-
fore, an utterly ideal stance, if not an idealist one.
Actually, I have taken this example only because it serves as an
introduction to what is going to be the driving element in our cri-
tique of the notion of frustration. It's clear that this is not quite the
image of fundamental representation that is given to us in a theory
like, say, Mrs Melanie Klein's. Here, too, it's amusing to see from
what angle the theoretical reconstruction that she proposes comes
under attack, especially given that object relations are at issue.
It so happened that a Bulletin fell into my hands reporting on the
activities of the Belgian Psychoanalytic Association. On its contents
page are the same authors who are to be found in the collection I
dealt with in my first lecture, and which I said is oriented around a
shamelessly optimistic and contestable view of the object relation,
this being the main thrust of the two volumes. In this Bulletin for a
slightly more restricted audience, things are broached with greater
nuance, as though it were the lack of assurance that was giving rise
to a mild shame on their part, and they were allowing it to show
through in places where certainly it becomes apparent, when one
becomes aware of it, that this is of greater merit.
So, we find in this Bulletin an article by Messrs Pasche and
Renard that reproduces the same critique of the Kleinian positions
that they delivered at the Geneva congress. It is quite striking to
read them reproaching Melanie Klein for a developmental theory
that, according to these authors and their criticisms, would place
everything within the subject in a preformed fashion. The whole
Oedipus complex, its whole possible development, would already be
included in what is given instinctually, and the different elements,
which would already be potentially articulated, would just have
to sprout from it. In the way the authors frame the comparison,
which is how it is for some in the biological theory of development,
the full-grown oak would already be wholly present in the acom.
Nothing would come to such a subject from the outside. From the
outset, he possesses his primitive aggressive drives - the prevalence
of aggressiveness is indeed manifest when comprehended within

Melanie Klein's perspective - and then, through the intermediary
of shocks that he feels from the outside, from the maternal field, in
return for these aggressive drives, there is a progressive construction
of something that we are told can only be received as a sort of full-
grown oak, namely the notion of the totality of the mother. On this
basis, the so-called c7cprcssz.veposj./I.o# is established, which can arise
in any experience.
Without taking each of these criticisms into account one after
the next, as would be necessary to appreciate their rightful worth, I
would simply like to underscore what they paradoxically culminate
in as a whole, which constitutes the crux and the core of this article.
The authors seem to be fascinated by the question of what, in
development, is brought in from the outside. What they think they
can read in Melanie Klein's work is that this is already given at
the start in an internal constellation, such that it would come as
no surprise that the notion of an internal object should thereafter
be foregrounded so prevalently. The authors come to the conclu-
sion that they think can be drawn from the Kleinian contribution,
namely the notion of a full-grown oak that follows hereditary pat-
terns, which they say is very difficult to represent in one's mind. So,
they slay - The child is born with certain inherited instinctual drives
into a world which he does not yet perceive but which he recalls, and
which later he will not have to create simply from within hinself and
from nothing else but a series of chance discoveries, but a world he will
come to recognise.
I think that for most of you the Platonic character of the wording
will not escape your notice. This world that one has only to recall,
and which will be established in accordance with a certain imaginary
preparation, to which the subject already corresponds, is something
that surely represents a critique of the position. However, we are
going to have to test out not simply whether this critique goes
against everything that Freud wrote, but whether we cannot already
glimpse how the authors themselves stand far closer to the position
for which they reproach Melanie Klein. For they are the ones who
indicate, in the subject, in the state of the full-grown oak, ready to
appear on cue, all the elements that will enable the subject to be
counted throughout a series of stages that can be called j.c7co/ only
to the extent that they are precisely the subject's memories, very
precisely his phylogenetic memories, and which furnish them with
their norm and type.
Is this what Mrs Melanie Klein intended? It is strictly unthinkable
to maintain as much. If there is indeed one thing that Mrs Melanie
Klein gives us an idea of -and, moreover, this is the thrust of the
authors' critique - it is surely that the first situation is far more

chaotic. At the start, it is truly anarchic. What characterises the
origin is the noise and fury of the drives. The question, therefore, is
much rather how something like an order can be established on this
basis.
That there is something mythical in the Kleinian conception is
absolutely beyond doubt. It's quite certain that the contradiction
that is introduced by a myth that the authors do not locate very
well, though it does resemble the Kleinian pfecI#fczs)/, is wholly on the
beam. Of course, these prfe¢#/¢sz.cs only have a retroactive character.
During the construction of the subject we see them being projected
back onto the past from points that can themselves be very early.
But how is it that these points can be so early? How is it that Mrs
Melanie Klein can take a toddler of fairly advanced age, of two-and-
a-half, and like the Pythia reading in a mantic mirror, a divinatory
mirror, is able to read retroactively in his past nothing less than the
Oedipal structure? There is some reason behind this.
Doubtless there is some manner of mirage here, and of course
she is not to be followed when she tells us that the Oedipus complex
was already there in the very forms, fragmented as they are, of the
penis roaming around amid the brothers and sisters on the inside of
the entire field that is defined as the interior of the mother's body.
But that this articulation should be detectable in a certain relation
with the child, and that it should be articulable very early on, is
something that certainly poses us a fruitful question.
That this theoretical articulation, which is in some sense a purely
hypothetical articulation, should allow us to provide at the outset
something that might better satisfy our idea of natural harmonies,
nevertheless does not conform to what experience shows us.
I think that this is starting to indicate for you the angle from which
we can introduce something new in the confusion that remains at
the level of the primordial motherrfhild relation.
I believe that this confusion is due to not having taken a central

notion, the true centre, as the point of departure. Frustration is
not the starting point. It's a matter of finding out how the child's
primary relationships are situated. A great deal can be clarified if we
approach things in the following way, which is that in this frustra-
tion there are from the very start two facets that will bracket it to
the very end.
On one side, there is the real object. And as we are told, /fee ody.cc/
can affect the subject before he has formed the least idea of it. This
object is real, and the subject is affected in his direct relations. It is
only as a function of this periodicity, in which holes and deficiencies
can appear, that a certain pattern of relation will be established that
on no account necessitates admitting that for the subject there would
be a distinction between mc and #o/-mc. This is so, for instance, in
the autoerotic position, in Freud's understanding of it, namely that
strictly speaking there is no constitution of the other, nor initially of
any fully conceivable relationship.
On the other side, there is the agent. Indeed, the object is instanti-
ated only in relation to lack. In this fundamental relation that is a
relation of lack, the notion of agent is something that should enable
us to introduce a formulation that from the very first is utterly
crucial when it comes to the way in which the overall position is
situated. In this instance, the agent is the mother.
To show you this I just have to remind you of what we have been
studying these last few years, namely what Freud spelt out concern-
ing the altogether principial position of the infant with regard to
repetitive play, and especially the game that Freud seized upon so
swiftly in the child's behaviour.
The mother is something other than this primal object. She does
not appear as such at the start but, rather, as Freud underscores, on
the basis of this first play, that of clutching an object that in itself
is perfectly insignificant, which has no biological value whatsoever.
On that occasion it was a spool, but it could equally be anything
else that a six-month-old child could send over the edge of his cot
in order then to retrieve it anew. This presence-absence pairing,
which is articulated by the child at a very early age, connotes the first
constitution of the agent of frustration that lies at the origin of the
mother. We can write the symbol of frustration S(M).2
The mother is spoken of as introducing a new element of total-
ity that ushers in a stage of development known as the depressive
position, which is characterised less by its opposition to the sort of
chaos of fragmented objects that typifies the previous stage than by
the connotation of presence-absence.
This presence-absence is not only set out as such objectively, it is
articulated as such by the subject. As we have already spelt out in
our studies from last year, this presence-absence is articulated by
the subject in the register of appeal. The maternal object is called
upon when it is absent, and rejected when it is present, all within the
same register of appeal, by modulating his voice.
Of course, this essential scansion of the appeal is far from being
something that gives us the entire symbolic order from the start,
but it does show us how it is first broached. It allows us to discern
something else, an element that is distinct from the real object rela-
tion and which will thereafter afford the subject the possibility of
establishing a relation to a real object, with its scansion, its marks,
and the traces that remain of it. This is what affords the possibility
of a link between this real relationship and a symbolic relationship
as such.
Before I show you this in a more manifest fashion, I simply want
to highlight what is entailed by the mere fact that in the child's
relations the presence-absence opposition is introduced into this
relationship with the constituting person. What is introduced here in
the child's experience is that he tends, quite naturally, to drop off to
sleep at the moment of frustration. So, the child is situated between
the notion of an agent, which already participates in the order of
symbolicity, and the contrasting couple of presence-absence, the
plus-minus connotation, which gives us the first element of a sym-
bolic order. This element is not sufficient to constitute a symbolic
order by itself alone because a sequence is required thereafter. This
is a sequence that will be grouped as such, but already in the opposi-
tion between plus and minus, between presence and absence, there
is the virtual origin, the virtual begetting, the possibility, the funda-
mental condition, of a symbolic order.
The question now is how we are to conceive of the moment when
this prinordial relationship with the real object can change tack
and open up to a more complex relationship. What, in truth, is the
turning point at which the mother<hild relation opens up to further
elements that will introduce what we have called a c7z.a/ccfj.c? I believe
that we can formulate this in schematic fashion by asking the fol-
lowing question - what happens if the symbolic agent, the mother
as such, who is so essential to the child's relationship with the real
object, no longer responds? What happens if she no longer answers
the child's call?
Let's provide the reply ourselves. Whereas the symbolic struc-
turation makes her the present-absent object in keeping with the
child's appeal, from the moment she is in decline she becomes real.
Why so? Until then she existed within this structuration as an
agent, distinct from the real object that is the infant's object of
satisfaction. However, outside of this structuration, she becomes
real. In a sense, she now replies merely as she pleases. She becomes
something that also ushers in the start of the structuration of reality
as a whole, and thereafter she becomes a power.
Correlatively, the object positions switch around. So long as a real
relationship is at issue, the breast - let's take this as an example - can
be made to be as enticing we may wish. Yet as soon as the mother
becomes a power and, as such, real, the child will depend on her in
the most manifest way for access to those objects that hitherto were
purely and simply objects of satisfaction, but which now become
objects that are gifted by this power. And so, in the same way,
though no more than has thus far been the case for the mother, these
objects are liable to enter a presence-absence connotation, but in
dependence on this real object, this power that the maternal power is.
In short, they are objects in the sense we intend here, not metaphori-
cally, but objects that can be clasped and possessed. As for the notion
of #o/ me, of non-ego, it's a matter of observing whether it enters first
via the image of the other or via what can be possessed. What the
child wants to keep beside him are objects that from this moment
forth no longer really need to be objects of satisfaction so much as
objects that are the mark of the value of this power, this power that
may not respond and which is the power of the mother.
In other words, the positions have switched. The mother has become
real and the object has become symbolic. The object now stands above
all as a token of the gift from the matemal power. Thenceforth, the
object possesses its satisfying property in two different realms. It is
doubly a possible object of satisfaction. It satisfies a need, as surely it
did before, but it also symbolises an auspicious power.
This is exceedingly important because one of the most cumbrous
notions in all analytic theory, now that it has become, as one slogan
has it, ge"e/j.c ps)/cfeo¢#cz/}7sz.I, is the notion of the omnipotence of
thought, of all-powerfulness. This has been imputed to everything
that is most foreign to us. Is it conceivable that the child should
have some notion of all-powerfulness? He does perhaps possess the
essential part of it, but this doesn't mean that the all-powerfulness at
issue is his own. That would be absurd. Entertaining as much leads
into dead-ends. The all-powerfulness at issue is the mother's.
At the moment I'm describing for you, that of the mother becom-
ing real, it is she who is all-powerful and not the child. It's a decisive
moment, when the mother passes into reality from an utterly archaic
symbolisation. At that moment, the mother can give anything at all,
but that the child should possess a notion of his all-powerfulness is
quite erroneous and utterly unthinkable. Not only does nothing in
his development indicate that he should possess such a thing, but
indeed practically everything that interests us in this development
and in the mishaps that crop up along the way serve to show us that
this notion of his all-powerfulness and the failures it might meet
do not amount to anything in the question. What counts, as you
will see, are the shortcomings and the disappointments that affect
maternal all-powerfulness.
This investigation might strike you as somewhat theoretical,
but at the very least it has the advantage of introducing essential
distinctions and of making openings that are not those that are
commonly put to use. You are going to see now what this leads us
to and what we can already indicate therein.
Here, then, is the child in the presence of something that he has
made a reality as a power. What hitherto stood on the plane of
the first presence-absence connotation all of a sudden passes over
to something that can refuse, yet which harbours everything the
subject may need. And even if he has no need of it, it becomes sym-
bolic from the moment it depends on this power.
Let's pose the question now from a quite different point of departure.
Freud tells us that in the world of objects there is one that has an
utterly and paradoxically decisive function, namely the phallus. This
object is defined as imaginary. In no case whatsoever is it possible to
conflate it with the penis in its reality. Strictly speaking, it is its form,
its image, in erection. This phallus has such a decisive role that both
its presence and the yearning to which it gives rise, its instantiation
in the imaginary, turn out to be more important - so it seems - for
those members of humanity who lack one, namely women, than for
those who can be sure that they possess the reality thereof, namely
men, and whose entire sexual life is nevertheless subordinated to the
fact that imaginarily they well and truly assume the use of it, and do
so as licit, as permitted.
This is a given. Let's consider now our mother and child, who for
Michael and Alice Balint form but a single totality of needs, just like
Jean Cocteau's Mortimer couple who have but one heart between
them. Nevertheless, here on the blackboard I'm keeping them apart
in two circles that do not intersect.
Freud tells us that among a woman's essential missing objects is
the phallus, and that this bears the closest relation to her relation-
ship with her child. This is for the simple reason that if woman
finds satisfaction in her child, it's precisely insomuch as she finds in
him something, the penis, that more or less succeeds in calming her
need for the phallus, that saturates this need.3 Should we fail to take
this into account we misconstrue not only Freud's teaching but also
something that is manifest in experience from one instant to the next.
So, here we have mother and child in a certain dialectical relation.
The child expects something from his mother and he also receives
something from her. In this dialectic, we cannot avoid introducing
the following. Let's say, roughly speaking, in the way the Balints
word it, that the child wants to be loved for what he is,
The question is this. What happens, to the extent that, for the
mother, the image of the phallus is not fully reducible to the image
of the child? What happens in this double vision, this division of
the so-called primordial desired object? Far from being harmonic,
the mother's relation to the child is doubled, on the one hand by the
need for a certain imaginary saturation and, on the other, by what
is effectively there in terms of real, effective relations with the child
at a primordial, instinctive level, which ultimately remain mythical.
For the mother, there is always something that remains irreducible
in what is at stake. Ultimately, if we follow Freud, the child, as real,
symbolises the image. More precisely, the three terms are here in
the fact that the child, as real, should take on for her the symbolic
function of her imaginary need.
All sorts of variations can emerge here. All sorts of situations
that have already been structured exist between child and mother.
Once the mother has been introduced into the real in the state of
a power, the possibility opens up for the child of an intermediary
object as such, as a gift-object. The question is, at what point, how,
and by what mode of access, can the child be introduced directly to
the symbolic-imaginary-real structure in the way that it has been
produced for the mother? In other words, at what point can the
child enter - and assume in a way that is, as we shall see, loosely
symbolised - the imaginary situation, which is also real on account
of what the phallus is for the mother? At what point can the child
to a certain extent feel himself dispossessed of something that he
demands from the mother in noticing that it is not he who is loved
but something else, a particular image?
There is something that goes further here. The child makes this
phallic image a reality upon his own self, and this is where the nar-
cissistic relation strictly speaking intervenes. When the child grasps
sexual difference, for example, to what extent will this experience
come to be articulated with what is offered him in the presence
of the mother and her actions when this third imaginary term is
recognised, which for the mother is the phallus? Furthermore, the
notion that the mother lacks this phallus, that she herself is desiring
not only of something other than him but desiring /ow/ cowrf, that
is, afflicted in her power, will be more decisive for the subject than
anything else.
Last time I told you about the Observo/I.oH a/a Pfeobj.cz, the phobia
of a young girl. I'm going to tell you right away what interest this
holds.
Given that it was wartime, and that the author is a pupil of Anna
Freud, conditions were such that the child could be observed from
beginning to end, and by a fine observer. She's a fine observer
because she understands nothing. And she understands nothing

because Anna Freud's theory is wrong. Consequently, this brings
her face-to-face with the facts in a state of astonishment that consti-
tutes the fruitfulness of the observation.
So, everything is noted down from one day to the next. The young
girl - at the age of two years, five months - having noticed that
boys have a w.dd/cr, as it is put in the observation on little Hans,
sets to conducting herself throughout a whole period from a posi-
tion of rivalry. She does all she can to be able to do the same as
the little boys do. The child had been separated from her mother,
not just because of the Blitz but because her mother had lost her
husband at the start of the war. Her mother would come to see her,
since contact is not excluded, and the presence-absence was regular.
When she came, the games she played with her child were games
of teasing approach. She would sidle up to her f/ow/); a#d focsz./¢f -
j.#g/};. You can see her function as symbolic mother. Everything was
going very well. The child had the real objects she wanted when her
mother was not there, and when the mother was there she played her
role of symbolic mother. So, the young girl discovers that boys have
a w.c7d/cr. Sure enough, something happens. She wants to imitate
them and to be given a boy's b!.ckj. to urinate with. A fuss ensues, but
which is entirely without consequence.
Now, the observation is presented as an Obscrva/I.o# o/a PAobz.a,
and indeed one night the child was to wake up seized with terror at
the presence of a c7og I.# rfecr bed that wanted to bite her. She asks to
change beds, saying she should be put in another one. This observa-
tion of the phobia carries on for a while.
Does the phobia follow the discovery of the absence of the penis?
Why are we asking this? We ask this question because the dog is
clearly a dog that bites the genitals. We know this insomuch as we are
going to analyse the child, that is, insomuch as we are going to follow
and comprehend what she tells us. Her first sentence of any length
and articulation - this is a child with a slight retardation - is to say,
Doggj.c bj./c #czwgAf}J bo); /cg, and this was at the height of the phobia.
You can see the relationship between the symbolisation and the
object of the phobia. Why is it a dog? We shall speak about this
presently, but what I want to note right away is that the dog is there
as an agent that takes away what initially was more or less accepted
as absent.
Are we going to cut corners and say that what is at issue in the
phobia is merely a passage to the level of Law? That is to say, is this
merely the intervention of an element that, as I was saying earlier, is
endowed with power so as to account for what is absent, and absent
on account of having been bitten off?
The schema that I'm trying to set out for you today motions in
this direction and allows us to get over the hurdle by taking a look
at this item that seems exceedingly cursory. Dr Ernest Jones tells us
very succinctly that, after all, for the child the superego is perhaps
merely an z.7!cJj.rcc/ vc#/, while the anxieties are primordial, primi-
tive and imaginary, and in some sense he there reverts to a sort of
artifice. It's the return for a moral contravention. In other words,
it's culture as a whole with all its prohibitions. It's something fallen
by the wayside that serves only to shield what is most fundamen-
tal, namely the anxieties in their uncontained state which in some
sense find some relief there. There is something accurate in this,
namely the mechanism of phobia. But the mechanism of phobia
is the mechanism of phobia, and to extend it, as does Monsieur
Pasche at the end of the article I was telling you about, to the point
of saying that the mechanism of phobia is something that ultimately
explains the death instinct, for example, or even that dream images
are in a certain respect the subject clothing his anxieties and, as it
were, personalising them, amounts always to reverting to the same
idea, a misrecognition of the symbolic order in the notion that it
is merely a kind of clothing, a kind of praetexta over something
more fundamental. Is this what I want to tell you by drafting in this
Observation of a Phobidi No. it is Trot.
What is interesting in the observation is that it indicates with pre-
cision the mother's absence one month prior to the outbreak of the
phobia. Certainly, the time it took for the phobia to burst forth was
much longer. Four months pass by following her discovery of her
aphallicism, but something else had to happen in this interval. First,
her mother had to go to the hospital for an operation. The rrLother
is no longer the symbolic mother. She has bowed out. She comes
back, and she plays again with her child, and as yet nothing occurs.
Then she comes ba,ck in very poor health . . . leaning on a stick. She
no longer has the same presence, and is not her cheerful self. Nor
can there be any resumption of the relations of approach and with-
drawal that were a sufficient ground for the whole attachment with
the child, and which used to be played out on a weekly basis. And so
it was at that moment, in a third period, much later in time, that the
phobia was to break out.
So, thanks to the observers, we find out that the Oedipus complex
comes not from the aphallicism, from the second break in the alter-
nating of the mother's coming-and-coming-back as such, but that it
also required that the mother should appear as someone who could
lack. Her lack was inscribed in the child's reaction and behaviour,
that is, she was very sad and had to be reassured, but there was no
phobia. It was when she saw her mother again, weak and leaning
on a stick, weary and unwell, that the very next day the dream of
the dog erupted and the phobia set in. Nothing in the observation
is more significant and more paradoxical than this, except for one
point that I shall tell you about now.
We are going to speak again about the way the therapists tackled
the phobia, given what they thought they had understood. I simply
want to point out the question that arises when considering the ante-
cedents to the phobia. From what moment is the phobia necessary,
and why is it sufficient? It is when the mother lacks the phallus that
something is determined that is balanced out in the phobia. This is
another question that we shall look at next time.
There is another point that is no less striking. Later, after the
phobia, the Blitz comes to an end and the mother takes back her
child and remarries. The young girl finds herself with a new father
and a new brother, her stepfather's son.4 The brother she has sud-
denly acquired is older than her, by about five years, and he gives
himself over to all kinds of games, both adoratory and violent,
including the request that they expose themselves to each other
naked. He does something to her that is clearly linked to his inter-
est in the young girl insomuch as she is a-penian. Whereupon the
psychotherapist shows some astonishment - why, this might have
been a fine occasion for a relapse of the phobia!
Indeed, the environmental theory on which Anna Freud's thera-
peutics is founded has it that discord sets in to the extent that the ego
is more or less infomed of reality. Would the presence of the man-
brother, a character who is not only phallic but also penis-bearing,
be an occasion for a relapse? Far from it. There is not a trace of
mental disturbance and she has never been in finer shape.
Moreover, we are told exactly why this is. It's that she is clearly
favoured by her mother over the boy. Nevertheless, the father is
someone who is sufficiently present to introduce a new element,
which we haven't yet spoken about, but which is essentially linked
to the function of the phobia, namely a symbolic element beyond the
relations of the mother's power or powerlessness. This is the father
properly speaking, himself bringing out from his relations with the
mother the notion of power. In short, he is substituted for what
seems to have been saturated by the phobia, namely what is feared
in the castrating animal as such that has proven in all its necessity to
have been the essential element of articulation that enabled the child
to come through the deep crisis she had entered when faced with
maternal powerlessness. The child then finds her need saturated by
the maternal presence and, what is more, by something else.
Does the therapist manage to see this something else with any
clarity? This relationship in which she is already the brother's girl
brings with it all sorts of pathological possibilities. We can glimpse

here, in a different aspect, that she has wholly become something
that is worth more than the brother. She is to become the gz.r/-pfecz//ws
which is spoken about so often. It will be a matter of finding out to
what extent thereafter she might not be implicated in this imaginary
function. But for the time being no essential need is to be filled by
the articulation of the phallic fantasy, because the father is there and
he suffices for this. He suffices to maintain enough distance between
the three terms of the mother<hild-phallus relationship for the
subject not to have to give of her own self. She doesn't have to put
anything of her own into it to maintain this distance.
How is this distance maintained? Along what path? Through
what identification and by what artifice? This is what we shall start
to tackle next time by looking again at this observation, which will
enable us to move into what is most characteristic of preoedipal
object relations, namely the birth of the object as a fetish.
12 December 1956
V
ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING
AND THE CONSEQUENCES
THEREOF
A presupposition about the drive

The essence of the anaclitic relationship
The fetishist solution
Fever pitches of perversion
A phobic subject's transitory perversion
The analytic conception of object relations has already become

something of an historical reality. What I've been trying to show
you takes this up in a sense that is in part different and in part the
same, but the mere fact that here it is being inserted into a different
whole lends it a different signification.
At the point we've reached it is only right to punctuate with some
emphasis how the object relation has been placed at the centre of a
conception of analysis held by a group who have been pushing this
increasingly to the fore. On recently rereading some of their articles
I saw that this formulation, which over the years has been gathering
pace and assurance, has now culminated in something that is being
very assertively voiced.
It so happens that in a few articles I expressed the ironic wish that
someone might truly set out the notion of the object relation in the
way it is being reckoned in a certain orientation. This wish has since
been amply fulfilled by more than one person, and while a formula-
tion has been given by Bouvet, who introduced it in connection with
obsessional neurosis in a way that rather softens it down, others too
have made an effort at precision.
The article by Messrs Pierre Marty and Michel Fain on the

Importance du role de la motricit6 clans la relation d'objet. whilchwas
On Analysis as Bundling 69
published in the January-June 1955 issue of the Rcvwc/rcz#f¢z.sc c7e

ps);cfeancz/ysc, offers us a vivid example of the dominant conception.
I'm going to summarise this work for you, with the forewarning that
when you read the article things will certainly strike you as going
much further than in the few words I can utter here.
The relationship between the one analysing and the one being
analysed is conceived of at the start as a relationship that is estab-
lished between a subject, the patient, and an cxfcr#¢/ oky.ccf , the
analyst. To put it in our vocabulary, the analyst is here conceived of
as real. The whole tension of the analytic situation is conceived of
on the basis of this couple being, in itself alone, a driving element
of the analytic development. Between a subject, whether or not he
is on the couch, and the external object that is the analyst, there
can in principle be established and manifested only what is called
the primitive drive relationship, the relationship that is normally
manifested - this is the presupposition of the development of the
analytic relationship - through motor activity.
It is on the side of faint traces that are carefully observed during
each stage of the subject's motor reaction that, in this article, we find
the last word of what happens at the level of the drive, which is in
some sense to be localised and vividly felt by the analyst. Insomuch
as the subject is forced to contain his movements through the rela-
tionship that is established by the analytic convention, it is at this
level that what is manifested, namely the drive in the course of its
emergence, is localised in the analyst's mind.
The situation is at bottom conceived of as something that can be
exteriorised only in an erotic aggression. This doesn't become mani-
fest, because it has been agreed that it will not become manifest, but
it is desirable that its recep/z.o# should spring up, so to speak, from
one moment to the next. It is precisely to the extent that, within
the analytic convention, due to the fact of the fundamental rule,
the motor manifestation of the drive cannot occur, that we shall be
allowed to perceive what interferes in this situation, a situation that
is considered to be a constituting one. It is very precisely formulated
for us that a relationship with an j.#fcr#cz/ oZ7y.ccj is superposed onto
the relationship with the external object. This is how it is expressed
in the article I've just cited. The subject has a certain relationship
with an internal object, which is invariably considered to be the
person who is present but captured somehow in the subject's pre-
established imaginary mechanisms, thus becoming the object of
a fantasmatic relationship. It is insomuch as discordance is intro-
duced, between this imaginary object and the real object, that the
analyst will be weighed up and gauged from one instant to the next,
and that he in turn will model his interventions. Since according to
this conception no one else comes into play in the analytic situation
besides those who are there, one of the two authors - who in this
respect is followed by all the rest in the ensuing discussion - is led to
highlight the notion of neurotic c7z.s/a#cc that the subject imposes on
the object. The fantasmatic internal object, at least in the suspended
position it holds in the way it is experienced by the subject, will be
reduced to the real distance that is the distance between subject and
analyst. It is to this extent that the subject will make his analyst a
reality as a real presence.
The authors stretch this quite far. I've already alluded several
times to the fact that one of these authors, admittedly during an
aspirant phase of his career, had spoken of the crucial turning point
in one analysis as the moment when the person he was analysing
had been able to smell him. This was no metaphor. It wasn't about
sensing him psychologically. It was the moment when the patient
smelled his odour. I must say that the wafting in of this relationship
of subodoration is one of the mathematical consequences of such a
conception of the analytic relationship. I In this res/rc}j.#ed position,
within which a distance - here conceived of as active and present
in relation to the analyst - has gradually to become real, it is quite
certain that one of the most direct modes of relation is most surely
this remote apprehending that is yielded by subodorating.
I am not merely taking up a single example here. This has been
repeated many times. It seems that within this group they are tending
more and more to give pivotal importance to modes of apprehend-
ing such as these.
Here, then, is how the analytic position is being regarded in this
situation, which is the situation of a real relation between two pro-
tagonists in a closed space, where they are separated by a kind of
conventional barrier and where something has to be made real. I'm
talking about the theoretical formulation of things. We shall see
afterwards what practical consequences this has.
First, it is quite clear that such an exorbitant conception cannot
be pushed to its ultimate consequences. On the other hand, if what
I've been teaching you is true, then even when the practitioner shares
this conception, the situation in which he operates cannot for all
that really become what this conception stipulates. It is not enough,
of course, just to conceive of it as such for it to be so. It will be pulled
out of shape due to how it has been conceived of, but what it really
is nevertheless remains what I've been trying to express for you by
means of my diagram, which makes the symbolic relationship and
the imaginary relationship intervene and crisscross, one serving in
some sense as a filter to the other. The situation is not annulled,
however much it is misconstrued, and this shows quite clearly the
insufficiency of their conception. But conversely, the insufficiency

of this conception can have consequences on the way that the whole
situation is seen through to a successful end.
This is a special example, which I'm going to highlight for you
today, to show what this can effectively lead to, but here already
we have a situation that is conceived of as a real situation, in which
there is an operation of reducing the imaginary to the real. A certain
number of phenomena occur through this operation, which allow for
a situating of the different stages at which the subject has remained
more or less stuck, or fixated, on this imaginary relationship. In
this way the various positions are exhausted, which are essentially
imaginary positions, foremost among them being the pregenital
relation which becomes increasingly essential to what is explored in
the analysis.
There is just one thing that receives no elucidation whatsoever
in this conception of the analytic situation, and this is no small
matter because everything lies therein. This thing can be expressed
as follows. It is not known why, in this situation, nothing is said
of the fact of the function, strictly speaking, of language and of
speech in this position. On no account does this mean that it can
be bypassed. Furthermore, what we shall also see coming to light is
the special value that is given to the simple impulsive verbalisation,
to these sorts of plea to the analyst along the lines of - Wdy wo#'/
};ow cz#swer mc? You will see this being punctuated most precisely in
what the authors say and in the bits of text they quote. A verbalisa-
tion only holds any importance for them in so far as it is impulsive,
that is, in so far as it is a motor manifestation.
In what will this operation culminate, this operation of setting
the distance with regard to the internal object, and with which tech-
nique is expected to comply? Our diagram enables us to form a
conception of this.
®'other
The line cz-cz' concerns the imaginary relationship, which refers

the subject - who is more or less discordant, decomposed, and
exposed to fragmentation - to the unifying image of the little other,
a narcissistic image. On the line S-A, the subject's relationship with

the Other is produced, though this is not yet a solid line because it
needs to be established. This Other is not merely the other party
who is there, but is literally the locus of speech. This is so inasmuch
as, already, structured in the speaking relationship, this big Other
stands beyond the other that you apprehend imaginarily. This sup-
posed Other is the subject as such, the subject in which your speech
is constituted because it is able not only to greet it and to perceive
it, but to respond to it. It is on this line that everything belonging to
the transferential realm is established, with the imaginary playing its
role as a filter, and even as an obstacle. Of course, in every neurosis,
the subject already has, as it were, his own set functioning. His set
functioning in relation to the image serves him when it comes both
to hearing and to not hearing what is there to be heard in the locus
of speech.
Let's say no more than the following. What happens if all our
effort and interest is focused solely on the imaginary relation that
lies here in this transversal position in relation to the advent of
speech? What happens if everything is misrecognised when it comes
to the relationship between the imaginary tension and what has to
be made a reality, what has to be brought to light, with respect to the
unconscious symbolic relation - because here lies precisely the whole
analytic doctrine in a potential state, and because there is something
here that must allow this symbolic relation to be realised as history
as much as an avowal? What happens if we abandon the notion of
the imaginary relationship functioning in relation to this impos-
sibility of symbolic advent that constitutes neurosis, and if we fail
to take them into account constantly in their mutual functioning?
Well, what one can in principle expect to hear is what the authors
who hold this conception speak of in terms of d;.s/o#cc with respect
to this object, which is precisely set to one certain end. Should we
turn our interest to this distance only in order to abolish it, were such
a thing possible, we would come to a certain result that indeed has
already been borne out by subjects who have come into our hands
after having passed through this style of apprehension and test. One
thing is absolutely certain, which is that in at least a certain number
of cases, these being precisely cases of obsessional neurosis, this way
of situating the development of the analytic situation entirely within
a pursuit of the reduction of this notorious distance - a distance they
consider to be typical of the object relation in obsessional neurosis -
leads to what may be called paradoxical perverse reactions.
We are now seeing phenomena that are quite out of the ordinary,
which scarcely existed in the analytic literature before this techni-
cal mode was brought to the fore. I'm thinking for example of the
precipitated outbreak of a homosexual attachment to an object,

one that is in some sense quite paradoxical in the subject's relation-
ship, which even lingers there in the manner of a kind of artefact,
a thing that has crystallised around objects that are lying around
within his reach. This can display for some time a somewhat durable
persistence.
None of this is astonishing if we refer to the imaginary triad.
At the point to which matters were brought last time, you were able
to see a line of research being sketched out concerning the imaginary
triad of motherrfhild-phallus. This was for us to stay at the level of
a prelude to the bringing into play of the symbolic relationship that
will be wrought only with the fourth function, that of the father,
which is introduced through the dimension of the Oedipus complex.
The triangle is itself preoedipal. I stress that this is only being iso-
lated here in an abstract way. It is of interest to us in its development
only to the extent that it is subsequently taken up in the quartet
that is constituted by the paternal function entering the fray, on the
basis of what we may call the child's fundamental disappointment.
This happens when he recognises - we have left open the question
of how - not only that he is not his mother's sole object, but also
that his mother's point of interest is the phallus, in a way that has
greater or lesser accentuation depending on the case. On the basis of
this recognition, he is to realise in a second moment precisely that
she is deprived of this object, that she lacks it. This is the point we
reached last tine.
I showed you this with reference to the case of a transitory phobia
in a very young girl, which is highly favourable to the study of
phobia because it stands on the frontier of the Oedipal relationship.
We were able to see this frontier in the wake of a double disap-
pointment. First, there is an imaginary disappointment, which is
the child's ascertaining the phallus that she lacks. Next, in a second
moment, comes the perception that her mother, who is on the
frontier between the symbolic and the real, also lacks the phallus.
Then comes the child's appeal for this unsustainable relationship
to be sustained. The phobia breaks out with the intervention of
the fantasmatic creature, the dog, which steps in as the one that
is responsible for the whole situation, strictly speaking. It bites. It
castrates. It is owing to the dog that the whole situation is thinkable
and symbolically liveable, at least for a provisional period.
What position is possible when, on this occasion, the yoking of
the three imaginary objects is broken? There is more than one pos-
sible solution, and a solution is always called upon, whether the
situation is normal or abnormal.
What happens in the normal Oedipal situation? It is through
the intermediary of a certain rivalry, punctuated in the subject's
relations with the father, that something will be established that
will mean that the subject will find him- or herself being conferred
this phallic might, in various ways depending on the subject's posi-
tion as a boy or as a girl. For the boy, this is altogether clear.
The conferring of this phallic might happens within certain limits,
which are precisely those that introduced the subject to the symbolic
relationship.
I told you the other day that, for the mother, the child as a real
being is captured as a symbol of her lack of object, of her imaginary
wish for the phallus. The normal outcome of this situation is that
the child receives, symbolically, the phallus he is in need of. But for
him to be in need of it, it was necessary for him first to be threatened
by the castrating agency, which is originatively and essentially the
paternal agency. It is within a constitution on the symbolic plane,
on the plane of a sort of pact of entitlement to the phallus, that this
virile identification is established, which lies at the base of a norma-
tive Oedipal relationship.
I will slip in a side-remark here concerning the originative formu-
lations that come from Freud's pen when introducing the distinction
between the anaclitic relationship and the narcissistic relationship,
They are somewhat peculiar, and even paradoxical.
In the libidinal relationship in adolescents, Freud tells us that
there are two types of love. There is anaclitic love, which bears the
stamp of a primal dependence on the mother, and the narcissistic
love object, which is modelled on the image that is the subject's own
self-image, the narcissistic image. It is this image that we have been
striving to develop here by showing its root in the specular relation
to the other party.
The word cz#czc/z./I.c, even though we owe it to Freud, is ill wrought,
for in Greek it really doesn't have the meaning that Freud gives it,
this being indicated by the German word j4#/cfo#w#g. It's a relation-
ship of prapp!.#g czgczj.#s/. Furthermore, this gives rise to all sorts of
misunderstanding, some having pushed this prappi.#g czgoz.#sJ so far
as to turn it into something that is ultimately a kind of defensive
reaction. But let's leave this aside. In fact, when one reads Freud,
one can see that this is well and truly about the need for a prop and
for something that indeed asks only to open out on the side of a
relationship of dependence.
If we press further, we shall see that there are peculiar contra-
dictions in the two contrasting formulations that Freud provides

for these two modes of relationship, the anaclitic and the narcis-
sistic. Rather curiously, with regard to the anaclitic relationship
he is led to speak of a need to be loved much more than a need to
love. Conversely, and altogether paradoxically, the narcissist all of a
sudden appears in a light that surprises us. Indeed, Freud is drawn to
an element of activity that is inherent to the highly particular behav-
iour of the narcissist. He appears to be active insomuch as he always
misrecognises the other party to a certain degree. Freud adorns him,
in contradistinction to the anaclitic type, with the need to love, and
gives him its attribute, which suddenly and paradoxically turns this
into a sort of natural site for what in another vocabulary we would
call the ob/cz/j.vc, which cannot help but disconcert.
I think we will have to come back to this, but once again, it is in
the misrecognition of the position of intersubjective elements that
these paradoxical perspectives find their origin and, by the same
stroke, their justification.
What is called the anaclitic relationship -there where it is of inter-
est, that is, in its persistence in the adult - is always conceived of as
a sort of pure and simple survival, or prolongation, of what is called
an infantile position. In his article on Ljbj.dj.#a/ 7-);pcs, Freud refers to
this position as neither more nor less than an erotic position, which
shows very well that this is the most open position. Its essence will
be misconstrued if one fails to notice the following. It is precisely in
so far as, in the symbolic relationship, the male subject acquires, is
invested with, the phallus as such, as belonging to him and as being
legitimately wielded by him, that he becomes the bearer of the object
of desire for the object that succeeds the maternal object. This object
that succeeds the maternal object is the re-found object, marked by
the relationship with the primal mother, which in the normal posi-
tion of the Oedipus complex - this is how it is, in principle, from the
first in what Freud expounded - will invariably be the object of the
male subject, namely woman. The position becomes anaclitic in so
far as it is upon him, upon the phallus of which he is now the master,
the representative, the custodian, that woman depends.
The relationship of dependence is established in so far as, identify-
ing with the other party, with the objectal partner, the subject knows
that he is indispensable for this partner. He knows that he is the one
who has satisfied her, and he alone, because in principle he is the
sole custodian of this object that is the mother's object of desire. It is
commensurate with an achievement of the Oedipal position that the
subject finds himself in the stance that, from a certain standpoint,
may be qualified as optimal with respect to the re-found object, the
successor to the primal maternal object, and in relation to whom he
will become the indispensable object, knowing himself to be indis-

pensable. One portion of the erotic life of subjects who partake of
this libidinal aspect is wholly conditioned by the need, once it has
been experienced and assumed, of the Other, of the matemal woman,
in so far she needs to find the object in him, this object being the
phallic object. This is what forms the essence of the anaclitic relation-
ship in contradistinction to the narcissistic relationship.
This is a mere parenthesis designed to show how useful it is always
to bring into play the dialectic of the relationship between these first
three objects and the fourth term that encompasses them and binds
them into the symbolic relationship, namely the father. This term
introduces the symbolic relationship and, with it, the possibility
of transcending the relationship of frustration or lack of object,
thereby shifting up into the relationship of castration which is some-
thing altogether different. That is to say, it introduces this lack of
object into a dialectic, into something that gives and takes, that
instates, invests and confers the dimension of a pact, of an interdic-
tion, of a law, and in particular the incest prohibition.
Let's come back to our topic. What happens when, in the absence
of the symbolic relationship, the imaginary relationship becomes the
ruleandthemeasureoftheentireanacliticrelationship?Well,exactly
the following. When discord, when non-binding or the destruction
of bonds, come about for whatever reason in the progressive devel-
opment of historical incidents in the child's relationship with the
mother in respect of the third-party object - the phallic object that is
both what woman lacks and what the child has uncovered as lacking
for the mother - there are other modes by which this coherence can
be re-established. There are imaginary modes, which are atypical.
For example, there is the child's identification with the mother.
On the basis of an imaginary displacement in relation to the mater-
nal partner, the child will make the phallic choice in her place, will
assume for her the clinamen towards the phallic object as such.
The scheme that I'm giving you here is none other than the scheme
for fetishist perversion. This is one example of a solution, if you like,
but there is a more direct path. In other words, further solutions
exist to access this lack of object. Already, on the imaginary plane,
this lack of object constitutes the human path to a realisation that
cedes man to his existence, that is, to something that can be called
into question. This is already something different from the animal
realm and from all possible animal relationships on the imaginary
plane. This imaginary access to the lack of object is achieved under
certain conditions that will in some sense be punctuated, and which
are extra-historical, which is how the fever pitch of perversion
always presents.
Perversion has the property of bringing about a certain mode

of access to what lies beyond the image of the other that typifies
the human dimension, but it does so only in such moments as are
always produced by the fever pitches of perversion, moments that
are syncopated within the subject's history. There is a kind of con-
vergence or build-up towards such moments, each of which can
be significantly qualified as a possczgc a /'oc/c. During this pczssczgc
d /'czc/c, something is brought about that is both a fusion and a
point of access to what lies beyond, which is strictly speaking the
trams-individual dimension that Freud's anaclitic theory formulated
as such. Freud's theory teaches us to call by the name Eras the
union of two individuals, each of whom is tom away from himself
and, for an instant that is more or less fragile and transitory, even
virtual, finds himself a constituent of this unit. A unity such as this is
brought about at certain moments in perversion, but what is specific
to perversion is precisely that it can only ever be brought about in
these moments that are not ordained symbolically.
In fetishism, the subject finds his object at last, his exclusive
object, and says as much himself. It is all the more exclusive and
perfectly satisfying in that it is inanimate. This way, at least, he will
be calm in the knowledge that it will not disappoint him. To love
a slipper is really to have the object of one's desires in easy reach.
An object that is itself bereft of any subjective, intersubjective, or
even trams-subjective property is more reliable. When it comes to
bringing about the condition of lack as such, the fetishist solution
is incontestably one of the most conceivable conditions within this
perspective, and it is indeed transformed into a reality.
We also know - because what is specific to imaginary relation-
ships is that they are always perfectly reciprocal, since this is a
mirror relation - that in the fetishist we must expect to see arising
from time to time the position, not of identification with the mother,
but of identification with the object. This is effectively what we shall
see being produced in the course of an analysis of a fetishist, for this
position is as such what is invariably non-satisfying in the utmost.
That for a short while the mesmerising illumination of the object
that the maternal object was should be something that satisfies the
subject is not enough for an entire erotic equilibrium to be estab-
lished around it. Moreover, if he identifies with the object for this
brief moment, he will effectively lose his primal object, namely the
mother, and will reckon himself to be a destructive object for her.
This perpetual game, this profound double vision, marks each and
every apprehending of the fetishist manifestation.
This is so visible that someone like Phyllis Greenacre, who
has sought seriously to look into the foundation of the fetishist
relationship, tells us that it seems as though we are in the presence

of a subject who is showing us with excessive speed his own image
in two opposite mirrors. She comes out with it like that, without
her really knowing why. It comes out of the blue, but right away
she has the sense that this is how it is. The fetishist is never where
he is, for the good reason that he has left his place. He has gone
over to a specular relationship between the mother and the phallus,
where he is both one and the other in alternation. This is a position
that does not manage to stabilise unless there is some grasp of this
unique symbol that is privileged yet at the same time impermanent,
this being the precise object of the fetishism, that is to say, this
something that symbolises the phallus.
It is therefore on the plane of relationships that, while they are not
identical, are at the very least analogous, and which we can conceive
of as being essentially perverse in nature, that the results will surely
emerge, at least the transitory results, in the context of a certain way
of handling the analytic relationship. This is what happens when
this relationship is focused entirely on the object relation in so far as
only the imaginary and the real are allowed to intervene, and when
the whole focus of the imaginary relationship is set upon what is
claimed to be real about the presence of the analyst.
This is what we are going to see now.
In my Rome report, I alluded to how this mode of the object rela-

tion is being used in analysis, I compared it to what I called cz for/ o/
bundling taken to the extreme as a psychological test.
This short passage perhaps went unnoticed, but I enlighten the
reader in a footnote that specifies that bundling is a very precise
practice, which still exists in these sorts of cultural islet where old
customs have weathered well. Stendhal speaks of it as a kind of par-
ticularity of Swiss fantasists, also to be found in southern Gemany,
places that are not unimportant from the geographical point of
view.2
This bundling is a conception of love relations. It is a technique,
a pattern of relations between male and female that consists of the
following. Under certain conditions, for instance when an associate
comes into the group in a privileged way, it is allowed, as a show of
hospitality, that someone of the household, generally the daugbter,
may extend to him the offer of sharing her bed, on the condition that
there should be no contact between them. The word b##cJ/!.#g comes
from the fact that more often than not the daughter is wrapped in a
bed sheet, such that all conditions of approach are possible save the
final one. What could pass for a mere blithe and fanciful tradition
that perhaps we might regret that we are not participating in - it
could be amusing - warrants our attention because ultimately there
is nothing artificial in saying that now, seventeen or eighteen years
after Freud's death, the analytic situation has come paradoxically to
be conceived of and formalised in this manner.
Fain and Marty's article reports on one session, noting down all
the patient's movements insomuch as they manifest something of an
oriented impulse that is more or less held back, at greater or lesser
distance, from the analyst who is there, behind her back. There is
something rather striking here. Their text came out after I wrote
my report, which proves I forced nothing in saying that it is to this
end, and to these psychological consequences, that the practice of
analysis was being reduced within one particular conception.
We find these paradoxes in the habits and customs of certain
cultural islets, for example there is a protestant sect of Dutch
origin that someone has studied in depth, which has maintained
very precisely the local customs linked to one religious unit, the
Amish sect. Without doubt all of this emerges today in remnants
that are not understood, but we can find their fully coordi-
nated, deliberated and organised symbolic formulation across a
whole tradition that may be termed religious and even symbolic.
Everything we know about the practice of courtly love and the
whole sphere in which it was localised in the Middle Ages implies
a very rigorous technical elaboration of the approach to love
that entailed a long practice of restraint in the presence of the
loved object, aiming to make a reality of what lies beyond, which
is what is sought in love and is specifically erotic. Once one has
uncovered the key to all these techniques and traditions, one finds
their points of emergence thoroughly formulated in other cultural
spheres, because this is a realm of search in the realisation of love
that has been set out with great deliberation on many occasions in
the history of humanity.
We do not need to pose the question here of what is ordained and
effectively reached. Nor is there any doubt that the fact that this aims
at something that tries to go beyond physiological corner-cutting, if
it may be expressed in this way, should hold a certain interest. This
is not something that is being introduced without a reference that
allows us to locate with precision both this metaphor and, at the
same time, the possibility of integrating across various levels, that is
to say, in a loosely conscious fashion, what they make of this use of
the imaginary relationship as such. This relationship is perhaps itself
employed deliberately. It is a use, as it were, of practices that may
seem perverse to unworldly eyes, but which in reality are no more so

than any other regulating of the approach to love in a defined sphere
of customs and pcz//cr#s, as they say. This is something that deserves
to be indicated as a reference point, so that we may know where to
situate ourselves.
Let's turn now to a case that is set out in the small Bulletin I
mentioned last time, which reports questions posed in all sincerity,
by the members of a particular group, with respect to the object
relation. We have here from the pen of someone who has assumed
a certain rank in the analytic community, Mine Ruth Lebovici, the
observation of what she quite rightly calls a phobic subject.
This phobic subject, whose activity was already fairly restricted,
has come to a state of almost complete inactivity. His most manifest
symptom is the fear of being too tall, and he presents always with an
extremely bent-over posture. Nearly everything has become impos-
sible for him in his professional context. He lives housebound, but
nevertheless has a mistress, fifteen years his senior and who was
purveyed to him by his mother. It is within this constellation that
the analyst takes him on and starts to broach the question with him.
The diagnosis of the subjeet is made with finesse. This diagnosis
of phobia brooks no difficulty, despite the paradoxical fact that the
phobogenic object in its foremost aspect does not seem to lie on
the outside. Nevertheless, it does lie on the outside inasmuch as at
one point we can see a recurring dream appear which is the model
for an exteriorised anxiousness. In this particular case, the object
is discovered only on a second approach. It is a phobic object that
is perfectly recognisable in that it is marvellously illustrated by the
substitute for the paternal image that utterly falls short in this case.
Indeed, after a while, an image is obtained of a man in armour, who
is equipped with a particularly aggressive instrument that is none
other than a Fly-Tox pump sprayer for wiping out phobic objects -
insects. The subject reveals that he harbours a fear of being pursued
and strangled in the dark by this man in armour, and this fear is no
small matter in the overall balance of this phobic structure.
The analyst who has this subject in her charge has published the
observation under the title Pcrversi.o# scxwc//c /ra#sj./oz.re clw cowrs
d'w# /ra!./cmc#f pst;cha#cz/);/!.awe. Therefore, there is no forcing on
my part when I introduce the question of the perverse reaction,
since the author herself accentuates this as the focus of interest in
the observation.
The author is ill at ease, to say the least. Not only is she ill at ease,
but she has seen very clearly that the reaction she calls perverse -
this is a label, of course - arose in precise circumstances in which
she plays a part. The fact that she poses the question in relation to
this moment proves she is aware that this is where the question lies.
What happened? Having finally seen the phobogenic object come
to light - the man in armour - she interprets it as being the phallic
mother. Why the phallic mother when this is absolutely the man in
armour with all his heraldic aspects? Throughout the entire obser-
vation, the questions that the author asks herself are set out with a
fidelity that I believe to be beyond doubt, and in any case they are
carefully underscored. In particular, the author asks herself whether
perhaps one interpretation that she made was not the right one.
Indeed, soon after this interpretation, a perverse reaction becomes
apparent and we are then engaged in nothing less than a three-year
period throughout which the subject developed, stage by stage, a
perverse fantasy. This consisted first in imagining himself being seen
urinating by a woman who, greatly aroused, would then solicit him
for sexual relations. Next, there was a reversal of this position, with
the subject watching - sometimes while he would masturbate, some-
times not -a woman urinating.3 Lastly, at a third stage, this position
was effectively made a reality when the subject found in a cinema a
small box room providentially equipped with a hole through which
he could effectively watch the women in the toilets on the other side
of the partition.
The author herself wonders whether her way of interpreting might
have had a determining value in precipitating what at first assumes
the appearance of a fantasmatic crystallisation of something that
clearly forms part of the subject's composite elements, this being
not the phallic mother but rather the mother in her relation with the
phallus. But the key to this idea that a phallic mother is involved
is given to us by the author when she wonders about the overall
handling of the treatment, and observes that she was far more pro-
fei.bz.fz.vc than his mother had ever been. Everything shows that the
entity of the phallic mother has been produced here by what the
author herself refers to as her own countertransferential positions.
If one follows the analysis closely, there can be absolutely no doubt
about this. Concomitant with the development of this imaginary
relationship, which of course developed from this analytic/cz#x p¢s,
let's see what is involved on the analyst's side.
First, the subject reports a dream in which, finding himself in the
presence of a woman from his past for whom he claims to have had
amorous inclinations, he finds himself impeded by the presence of
another female subject who also played a role in his personal history
in that he had once seen her urinate in front of him.4 This hap-
pened late inbyhis
•rr[terve;nes childhood,
s,ay.+rL8 - Nothat is,you
doubt in his teenage
profer to turnyears. The analyst
your attentions to
a woman by watching her urinate rather than make the effort of going
after another woman who might be to your liking but who happens to
bc marrz.cd. By means of this intervention the analyst thinks she is
reintroducing the truth, but in a somewhat strained manner because
the male character is only indicated in the dream through asso-
ciations. That is to say, the supposed husband of the mother, the
husband who would reintroduce the Oedipus complex, intervenes in
a way that has every character of provocation, especially when we
know that it was the analyst's husband who referred the subject to
her. It is at this precise moment that a change of tack occurs, with
the progressive turnaround of the watching fantasy which shifts
from the sense o[ being watched to that Of watching himseif
Second, as though that were not enough, in response to the sub-
ject's request to space out the frequency of the sessions, the analyst
says -Now you're showing your passive positions, because you know
full well that. whatever happens, you won't get that. Flom this pofut
on, the fantasy crystallises completely, which proves that there is
something more. The subject, who understands a great deal about
his relations of impossibility when it comes to attaining the female
object, ends up developing his fantasies within the treatment itself.
He speaks of his fear of urinating on the couch, and so on. He starts
to have these reactions that show a certain closing of the distance to
the real object, such as peeping at the analyst's legs - which, more-
over, she notes with a certain satisfaction. Indeed, there is something
that lies on the edge of the real situation, as though we were witness-
ing the constitution of the mother who is, not phallic, but aphallic,
If there is one thing that lies at the root of the fetishist position then
it is very precisely that the subject comes to a standstill at a certain
level in his investigation and observation of woman, inasmuch as
she has or has not the organ that is called into question.
This position gradually leads the subject to say, A4.); goocJ#cfs,
there's no solution but to sleep with my analyst. He tel:ls her so.
Realising that this is starting to get somewhat on her nerves,
the alnelyst remalirs, You're amusing yourself by taking fright at
something you know full well will never happen. Then, she wonders
a.rixjiously, Was I right to say that?
Anyone can wonder as to what degree of mastery such an interven-
tion might entail. This somewhat blunt reminder of the conventions
of the analytic situation is utterly in accord with the notion that can
be entertained of the analytic position as a real position. So, things
are here brought to a head. It is immediately after this interven-
tion that the subject makes a definitive pass¢gc d /'czcfc and finds
the perfect location, the choice site in the real, namely the specific
arrangement of a loo in a cinema on the Champs-Elys6es. This time
he really will find himself at the right real distance from the object
of his observation, separated by a wall. This time he can observe the

object not as a phallic mother, but well and truly as aphallic. Here
he suspends for a certain while all his erotic activity, having found
there such satisfaction that he declares that until the time of this
discovery he had lived czs cr# ow/omcrJo#, but that now everything has
changed.
This is what things have come to. In summarising this observation
I wanted simply to allow you to put a finger on how the notion of
distance from the analyst-object as a real object, and the notion of
so-called reference, can be something that is not without effect, and
how, all things considered, these are perhaps not the most desirable
effects.
I won't tell you how the treatment ends. It would have to be
examined meticulously, so richly instructive is its every detail. The
final session is eluded, the subject undergoing surgery on varicose
veins. Everything is laid out here. The tinid attempt to access cas-
tration and a certain liberty that can arise from it is even indicated.
It is deemed that, after this, they've gone far enough. The subject
goes back to his mistress, the same he had at the outset, fifteen
years his senior, and since he no longer speaks about his tallness,
the phobia is thought to have been cured. Unfortunately, now he
thinks only of one matter - his shoe size. Sometimes his shoes are
too big and he loses balance in them, sometimes they are too small
and they pinch his feet. Thus, the change of tack, the transformation
of the phobia, is complete. After all, why not regard this as the end
of the analytic work? Either way, from the experimental standpoint
there is something that is surely not without interest.
The summit of access to the supposedly correct distance from the
real object is provided - seemingly with a sign of recognition among
initiates - when the subject has a perception, in the presence of his
analyst, of the odour of urine. This is deemed to be the moment at
which the distance from the real object -throughout the observation
we are told that this is the point at which any neurotic relationship
fails -is finally accommodated within its exact scope. Of course, this
coincides with the moment when the perversion reaches its height.
This is not strictly speaking a perversion - and the author is
not unwilling to face up to this - but much rather an artefact.
Such things, though they can be permanent or long-lasting, are
nevertheless artefacts that are liable to be broken off or dissolved,
and sometimes fairly abruptly. Thus, in this case, after a while the
subject is cczwg¢/ a); swrpr;.sc b); cf# wsAcre//c. This simple fact of
being surprised by the usherette is enough to make him drop, there
and then, his visits to the especially propitious site that the real had
offered him at just the right moment.
Indeed, the real is always timely in offering everything one needs

when finally one has been set, along the proper paths, at the proper
distance.
19 December 1956
THE PERVERSE WAYS
OF DESIRE
VI
THE PRIMACY OF THE
PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG
HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN
Freud, the girl, and the phallus

The signifier IV!.cdcrkommf
The lies of the unconscious
Serving the lady
Beyond the object
Today we are going to launch ourselves into a problem that, were

we moving forward step by step, we ought normally to be meeting
much further on in our disquisition. This problem is that of perver-
sion, in inverted commas, the most problematic perversion there is
from the perspective of analysis, namely female homosexuality.
Why am I proceeding in this way? Contingency is playing a part
in this. But it is quite certain that we cannot examine the object rela-
tion this year without meeting the female object.
You know that the problem is not so much one of how we meet
the female object in analysis. Analysis provides us with plenty for
our edification when the subject of this encounter is not natural.
I showed you this quite adequately in the first lessons from last
term, reminding you that the female subject is always hailed, when
encountered by a man, to a sort of re-finding that positions her
from the first in this ambiguity between natural relations and sym-
bolic relations. I've been trying to show you how the entire analytic
dimension inheres in this ambiguity.
The problem now is to find out what the female object thinks
about this, because what the female object thinks about it is even
less natural than the way in which the male subject approaches her.
What path does she take, from her earliest approaches to the natural
and primordial object of desire that is the mother's breast? How
does the female object enter this dialectic?
I am not calling the woman ofy.ccf today just for the sake of it. It's
quite clear that this object must at some point start functioning, yet
88 The Perverse Ways of Desire
it assumes this position of object that is so scarcely natural because

it's a position at one remove, which there is no interest in qualifying
as such except in that it's a position that is taken by a subject.
Female homosexuality has been ascribed a particularly exemplary

value in analysis as a whole for what it has revealed in terms of the
stages and the stopping-points that can mark out woman's destiny
on the path she wends.
What is natural or biological at the start is constant in carrying
over to the symbolic plane, where it is a matter of its being taken
on board by the subject who is herself caught in the symbolic chain.
It is precisely here that woman is at issue, to the very extent that she
is to make a choice that, whichever side it may come from, must, as
the analytic experience teaches us, be a compromise between what
is to be attained and what it has not been possible to attain. The
fact that female homosexuality is met whenever the discussion bears
upon the subject of stages, which the woman has to complete in her
symbolic becoming, ought to lead us during this period to read a
certain number of texts exhaustively, in particular those that come
in succession from Freud's hand from 1923 onwards, the date of his
art:Nche on The Irfantile Genital Organisation.
In this text Freud posits as a principle the Pr;.mcrf dcs PAa//ws, the
prinacy of the assumption of the phallus. The phallic phase is the
final stage in the childhood phase of sexuality and is typical for both
boys and girls. The genital organisation is reached by them both,
but in accordance with a type that makes the possession or the non-
possession of the phallus the primordial differential element. At this
level, the genital organisation is contrasted in either sex. Freud tells
us that at this moment there is no realisation of male and female, but
rather of what is endowed with the phallic attribute and what is not,
the latter being deemed equivalent to having been castrated.
I will add, to spell out his thought clearly, that this organisation
is the formula from an essential stage that brings to an end the
first phase of childhood sexuality, which comes to a close with
the entry into the latency period. I will further specify that this
is founded, for one sex as much as for the other, upon a miscar-
riage, a A4z#/z.#gc#.I This miscarriage is in turn founded upon an
unawareness - not misrecognition, but unawareness - of the ferti-
lising role of male semen and, on the other side, of the existence as
such of the female organ.
These are very considerable assertions that require some exegesis
The Primacy of the Phallus 89
if they are to be understood, for here we cannot be in the presence of

something that may be taken at the level of real experience.
Indeed, an objection was raised, and in the deepest confusion,
by authors who went into action in the wake of this assertion from
Freud. A very great number of facts lead to the admission that in
a certain number of experiences there is a revelation of the pres-
ence, perhaps not of the real role of the male in the procreative act,
but certainly of the female organ, at least for girls. It can hardly
be contested that in the early experience of young girls there is
something that corresponds to vaginal localisation, with sensations
and even precocious vaginal masturbation. This is the reality in at
least a certain number of cases. On this basis, people set to wonder-
ing whether the predominance of the phallic phase ought to be
attributed to the existence of the clitoris. They wondered whether
this is due to the fact that libido, as they say - making this term the
synonym of all erogenous experience - is initially focused exclu-
sively on the clitoris or whether this might come about only after
a displacement that must be both long and painful, necessitating a
lengthy detour.
Freud's assertion can certainly not be understood in such terms.
When it is couched in these terms, too many confused facts enable all
sorts of objections to be levelled at it. I will allude to one such objec-
tion issued by Karen Homey, which is dictated by realist premises
deeming that every misrecognition presupposes in the unconscious
a certain acquaintance with the coaptation of the two sexes. This
leads her to say that, in girls, the supervalence of the organ that as
such does not belong to them in their own right can come about
only against the backdrop of a certain denial of the existence of the
vagina, which has to be accounted for. Based on these hypotheses,
accepted as cz prz.orz., she ventures to trace back to a genesis of this
phallic term in the girl. When we go into the details, we will see a
kind of necessity that is borrowed from a certain number of theo-
retical premises, expressed in part by the author herself. She shows
this very clearly through the very uncertainty of the ultimate fact
to which this necessity is referred, for the facts upon which this
primordial experience of the vaginal organ are based are exceed-
ingly discreet and even reticent. What is at issue here is a sort of
reconstruction that is required by theoretical premises that stem
from having taken a wrong path in the understanding of Freud's
assertion.
Freud's assertion is grounded in his experience. While it is
advanced with care, even with a share of incertitude that is so char-
acteristic of his presentation of this discovery, it is asserted none the
less as primordial. It's a fixed point. The paradoxical assertion of
phallicism is the very pivot around which the theoretical interpreta-

tion must be developed. This is what we are going to try to do.
Eight years later, in 1931, he writes something yet more con-
siderable on Fcmcz/c Scxwa/j./j;, which further extends his assertion
of 1923. During the interval, an exceedingly lively discussion has
taken place among his pupils which, such as it is reported by Karen
Homey and by Jones, contains a crop of speculations. Thus, there
is a veritable tangle of approximations here, which I've had to wade
through over the holiday break. I must say that it has struck me as
especially hard to give an account of this discussion without falsify-
ing it, because what characterises it is assuredly how ill-mastered are
the categories that are brought into play.
To give some account of this, and to get something of it across,
there is no other means of proceeding but to master it, and to master
it is already to alter its axis and nature completely. So, to a certain
extent, this will not offer an accurate perspective of what is at issue,
for this ill-mastered character is truly essential to the whole problem.
It is truly correlative to the second goal of our theoretical examina-
tion this year, which is to show, in parallel with our exploration
of the object relation, how analytic practice has been committing
infiexibly to a deviation that cannot be mastered.
To come back to the precise incidence that concerns us today,
it occurred to me this morning that one exemplary image could be
isolated from this heap of doings, plucked from one of these articles.
All of the authors accept that in the young girl's detour in her
development, when she enters the Oedipus complex she starts to
desire a child from the father as a substitute for the missing phallus.
The disappointment of not receiving a child from the father will
play an essential role in making the young girl retreat from the
identification with the father that she established on entering the
Oedipus complex. All the authors accept in principle that this will
lead her to take up once more the feminine position, along the path
of the privation of the child that she desires from the father. So, one
of these authors cites the example of an analysis of a child in order
to show the degree to which this disappointment can come into
play and impact upon the present, precipitating the motion of the
Oedipus complex. This motion is exemplified as being essentially
unconscious, so, in the course of the young girl's analysis, she was
enabled to bring this image to light of day. Finding herself thereby
greater enlightened as to what was going on in her unconscious,
thelcalftel every morning she woke up to ask in a fury -Hasn't the
child come yet?
This instance strikes me as exemplary of what is at issue in this
deviation from analytic practice, which will be attendant through-
out this year's theoretical exploration of the object relation. Here,

we put a finger on how a certain pattern of understanding and
tackling frustrations is in reality something that leads the analyst to
a manner of intervention the effects of which not only appear doubt-
ful, but positively opposed to what plays out through the process of
analytic interpretation. It is plain to see that the notion we may form
of cz cAz./d/ron /fee /a/fear appearing at some point in the develop-
ment as an imaginary object, as a substitute for this missing phallus,
which plays an essential role in the young girl's development, cannot
be brought into play at just any moment and in any old way. It can
only be brought into play later, or else at a contemporary stage on
the condition that ffec c¢j./d, to the extent that the subject does have
dealings with this child, has entered the interplay of a series of sym-
bolic resonances that will concern what the subject has experienced
in the past, at the phallic stage, namely everything that might be
bound for this subject to possessive or destructive reactions at the
moment of the phallic crisis, with all that this entails that is so prob-
lematic in the stage of childhood to which it corresponds. In short,
everything that refers to the supervalence or the predominance of
the phallus at one stage of the child's development only finds its
point of impact retroactively.
The phallus can be brought into play only in so far as it becomes
necessary at one moment or another to symbolise some event that
may occur, whether this is the late arrival of a child for someone
who is in an immediate relation with the child, or else the subject's
question as to the possession of the child, which is to pose the ques-
tion of the subject's own motherhood. But to bring in, at a different
moment, something that does not intervene in the subject's sym-
bolic structuration but rather bears a certain relation of imaginary
substitution, precipitated then and there by speech on the symbolic
plane, and which will be experienced by the child in an utterly dif-
ferent way, is tantamount to acknowledging it as having already
been organised. It is tantamount to introducing it into some sort
of legitimacy that literally acknowledges frustration as such at the
heart of the experience, when in fact this is not how it is legitimately
introduced.
Frustration cannot be legitimately introduced as such in inter-
pretation unless it has effectively passed through at the level of
the unconscious, as the correct theory tells us. This frustration is
but an evanescent moment, which holds importance and a function
only for we analysts, on a purely theoretical plane as an articula-
tion of what has occurred. That it should become a reality for the
subject is excluded by definition, because it is exceedingly unstable.
Frustration only has any importance and interest in so far as it leads
on to something else, to one or other of the two planes that I distin-

guished for you as ccrs/rcr/j.o# and prz.v¢/j.o#. The plane of castration
is nothing less than what establishes, in its true order, the necessity
of this frustration. It transcends it and instates it in a law that lends
it a different value. Furthermore, this is what sanctions the existence
of privation, because the idea of privation is inconceivable on the
plane of the real. The idea of privation is effectively conceivable only
for a being who is articulating something on the symbolic plane.
We can grasp this in those interventions that are in some way
interventions of support, of psychotherapy, like, say, the interven-
tion I mentioned briefly concerning the young girl who was in the
hands of one of Anna Freud's pupils.
You will recall that this young girl presented the beginnings of a
phobia that arose in connection with her experience of effectively
being deprived of something. This privation occurred under condi-
tions that were different from those within which the child found
herself confined. Indeed, I showed you that the mainspring of the
necessary displacement of the phobia on no account lay in this
experience. This mainspring lies not in the fact that she doesn't have
the phallus, but in the fact that her mother couldn't give it to her.
Further still, the mother couldn't give it to her because she didn't
have it herself.
The psychotherapist's intervention consists in telling her - and
she is quite right - that all girls are like that. This might sound like
a reduction to the real, but it is not. The child knows full well that
she doesn't have the phallus. The psychotherapist lets her know that
this is the rule, thereby making it pass over to the symbolic plane of
Law. This way of intervening does indeed remain debatable from
the standpoint of efficacy, because in truth the psychotherapist can
only wonder whether it might have been effective or not in a certain
reduction of the phobia. At that point it is clear that it was effective
only in an extremely fleeting way. The phobia resumes with greater
intensity, and will only subside once the child has been integrated
into a complete family.
Why so? In principle, the child's frustration should seem to her
even greater than before, for now she is confronted with a step-
father, that is to say, a male who enters the family dynamic, her
mother having until then been a widow. And there is now an elder
brother too. But in fact the phobia really does subside, because it
literally no longer needs to make up for this absence of any specifi-
cally phallophore element in the symbolic circuit, that is to say, the
absence of males.
These critical remarks bear above all on use of the tern/rws/r¢-
/z.o». This use is in a certain sense legitimised by the fact that what is
essential in this dialectic is much rather the lack of object than the
object itself. Frustration corresponds very well, in appearance, to a
conceptual notion. But what is at stake concerns the instability of
the very dialectic of frustration.
Frustration is not privation. Why not? Frustration concerns
something you are deprived of by someone else, from whom you
might precisely have hoped to get what you were asking for. Thus,
what is at stake in frustration is something that is less the object than
the love of the one who can bestow this gift upon you, if and when
it is given to you. The object of frustration is less the object than the
gift.
Here we find ourselves at the origin of a dialectic that stands at
one remove from the symbolic, and which itself fades away from
one instant to the next because this gift is a gift that is still bestowed
only as though it were free of charge. It comes from the other. What
lies behind this other, namely the full chain in virtue of which the
gift comes to you, is yet un-glimpsed. It is only afterwards that the
subject will perceive this and notice that the gift is far more complete
than at first appeared, in that it entails the entire human chain in
the symbolic. But at the start of the dialectic of frustration there is
merely the confrontation with the other and the gift that surfaces.
If this gift is bestowed as a gift, it will make the object itself vanish
as an object. In other words, if the request is granted, the object will
pass into the background. If, however, the request is not granted,
the object will, in this case too, vanish and change signification.
What justifies using the word /rwffra/j.o#? There is frustration
only when the subject shifts into rcvc#c7j.ccz/I.o#, into the laying claim
that this term implies, bringing in the object as though it were
something that may be demanded by right. At such a moment, the
object enters what may be called the narcissistic zone of the subject's
appurtenances.
In either case, whichever should occur, the moment of frustration
is an evanescent moment. It leads on to something that projects us
onto a plane that is different from that of pure and simple desire.
The request does indeed have something about it with which human
experience is very familiar, which is that in itself it can never be truly
granted as such. Whether it is granted or not, it will be annihilated,
it will be wiped out, at the next stage, whereupon it projects onto
something else - either onto the articulation of the symbolic chain
of gifts, or onto this closed and absolutely inextinguishable register
that is called narcissism, in virtue of which the object is for the
subject both wfo¢/ j.a fez.in and wAaJ I.s 7co/ fe;.in, with which he can never
be satisfied, precisely in this sense that j.f j.I fej.in and !.a #o! Az.in at the
same time. It is solely insomuch as frustration enters a dialectic,
which by legalising it also situates it by lending it this dimension of

something free of charge, that the symbolised order of the real can
be established whereby the subject is able to instate certain perma-
nent privations, for example, as existent and accepted.
In misconstruing this condition, these various authors usher in
all sorts of ways of reconstructing what is given to us in the experi-
ence as an effect linked to the fundamental lack of object. A whole
series of impasses are thereby introduced, which are always linked
to the idea of wanting to deduce the entire chain of experience on
the basis of desire regarded as a pure element of the individual, with
all that this desire brings with it in terms of repercussions both in
his satisfaction and in his disappointment. Now, this entire chain
of experience can literally be conceived of and elaborated only if we
first posit the principle that nothing is articulated, that nothing can
be layered up in experience, so long as we have not posited before-
hand the fact that nothing can be established and constituted as a
properly analysable conflict until the subject has entered the realm
of the symbol, the legal realm of the symbolic order, the symbolic
chain, which is the order of symbolic indebtedness. It is solely on the
basis of the subject's entry into an order that pre-exists everything
that happens to him, every kind of happening or disappointment,
that everything through which he broaches this - that is to say,
what is called his lived experience, this confused thing that is there
beforehand - takes on an order, an articulation, and assumes its
meaning. And only as such can it be analysed.
Nowhere else can I better enable you to appreciate how well-
founded is this reminder - which ought to be no more than a
reminder - than in a few texts by Freud himself, and by going
through them with fresh eyes.
Yesterday evening some people spoke of an uncertain aspect,

sometimes a paradoxically wild aspect, to some of Freud's texts,
even speaking in terms of chanciness. Yet others spoke in terns of
diplomacy -though I can't see why. This has led me to choose one
of his most brilliant texts, and I would almost say one of the most
disturbing, but it is conceivable that it might appear to you to be
archaic and even outmoded. I'm referring to 7lfoc Ps}jchogc#cs!.s a/cz
Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.
I will remind you of its essential points of articulation.
It concerns a young woman from a Viennese family of good
standing. For such a family in the Vienna of 1920 to send someone
to Freud amounted to taking a fairly large step. To resolve to do so,

something exceedingly peculiar had to have occurred. The daughter
of the household -a beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, from a. very
high social class - has become a cause of concern for her parents
because she has been running around after a woman ten years her
senior, cz cer/czj.# socz.c/); /czdy. It is specified through all sorts of
details provided by the family that this dowc dw mo"dc is perhaps
from a world that could be qualified as a demz.-mo#de - going by
how such things were predominantly classified in the Vienna of the
time2 - and not altogether respectable.
The young woman's attachment to this lady, which as events
unfold is revealed to be truly passionate, puts her in a rather vexed
relationship with her family. We then learn that this vexed relation-
ship was not unrelated to what brought about the situation in the
first place. To spell it right out, this concerns the fact that it throws
her father into a rage, which certainly seems to be a motivating
factor, not for the continuation of the passion itself, but for going
about it in the way she does. I'm referring to the calm defiance
with which she pursues her attentions towards the lady in ques-
tion, waiting for her in the street and making in part a show of her
affair. Without her flaunting it publicly, all of this is enough for her
parents, and especially her father, not to be in the dark about it. We
are also told that the mother is someone who is not exactly easy-
going, having been neurotic. She doesn't take the situation quite so
badly, or at least not so seriously.
They come to Freud to ask him to sort this out. He lays out
altogether pertinently the difficulties of putting in place a treatment
when one has to meet the family's stipulations, and notes quite
rightly that one cannot do analysis on demand. In truth, this leads
onto something yet more extraordinary, which motions in a direc-
tion that will make apparent Freud's considerations on the analysis
itself and which to some will seem altogether out-of-date.
Freud specifies that the analysis was not taken to its end, but that
it did allow him to see a very long way, which is why he is sharing it
with us. He reveals that the analysis certainly did not enable him to
change much in this young woman's destiny, and to explain this he
introduces an idea that is not unfounded, though it may seem old-
fashioned, a schematic idea that ought rather to incite us to return
to certain fundamental givens instead of finding more manageable
ones. This idea is that there are two phases to an analysis, the first
being the procuring of everything there is to know, the second the
bringing down of resistances that still hold strong even though the
subject does by now know a great deal.
The comparison he then introduces is not one of the least
astounding. He compares the first stage to preparing one's luggage

before a .Journey, today so complicated and hard to effect. irnd the
second to setting off and making the journey. Coming from a man
who has a phobia of railways and travel, this reference is all the
same rather spicy.
A yet more considerable matter is that throughout this time he
has the sense that, effectively, nothing is working. He does, however,
see very clearly what has been happening, and throws light on a
certain number of stages.
In the subject's childhood there was something that seems not
to have passed off without a hitch, when she beheld in the elder of
her two brothers the difference that would make of her someone
who does not possess the essentially desirable object, the phallic
object. Nevertheless, Freud says that ffae g!.r/ fe¢d #cvcr bcc7! 7Iew-
rotic, and came to the analysis without even one hysterical symptom.
Nothing in the childhood history is noteworthy from the standpoint
of pathological consequences. This is precisely why it is remarkable,
clinically speaking, to see emerging so belatedly the flaring of an
attitude that strikes everyone as being downright abnormal, that
is to say, the peculiar position that she occupies with respect to the
faintly denigrated lady.
The passionate attachment that she shows towards her culmi-
nates in the outburst that leads her to Freud's consulting room. For
things to have reached such a point that Freud would be involved,
something peculiar had surely occurred.
In her mild flirting with danger, the girl would go strolling with
the lady practically beneath the windows of her own home and,
one day, her father comes out and sees them. Since there are other
people around, he c¢srs a/wrj.ows /oak at them, and goes on his way.
The lady asks the girl who it was, and she replies that it was her
[a;ther. He doesn't look happy. The la.dy becomes incensed at this. It
is noted that hitherto she had always shown a very reserved, even
cold, attitude to the girl. On no account had she encouraged the
girl's attentions, and she was not especially keen on being embroiled
in any complications. So she tells her that, under these conditions -
/fee czjffaj.r mus/ #ow come ro a# c#d. In Vienna there are these little
cuttings for the suburban belt of the railway, and just nearby was
one of those small footbridges that crosses over. From there, the
girl falls, #!.ccJerkommJ. She fractures a couple of bones, but pulls
through.
So, Freud tells us that up until the moment when the attachment
appeared, not only had the girl's development been normal, but
indeed everything suggested that she had been evolving very well.
After all, hadn't she shown at the age of thirteen or fourteen a
deportment that presaged the most congenial bearing in the femi-

nine vocation, that of maternity? She used to dote on a small boy,
even befriending his parents. And yet, all of a sudden, this sort of
motherly love, which seemed to make of her a model mother in
advance, was to come to an abrupt halt, and it was then that she
started to associate with women - for the affair in question is not
the first - whom Freud qualifies as mczfc{re, that is to say, who seem
to be substitute mothers.
Nevertheless, this pattern is not really valid for the last in the
line, for she truly incarnated the dramatic affair around which the
engaging of the analysis was to revolve, along with the problematic
of a declared homosexuality. Indeed, the subject declares to Freud
that she is prepared to give up neither anything of her ambitions nor
her object-choice. She will do all it takes to deceive her family, and
she continues to safeguard her bonds with the person for whom she
is far from having lost the taste, the lady having been sufficiently
touched by this extraordinary mark of devotion to have become far
more amenable since then.
Freud makes three very striking sets of remarks with respect to
this declared and maintained relationship, and gives them the value
of a sanction that is explicative either with regard to what occurred
before the treatment, for example the suicide attempt, or with regard
to his own failure. The first set seems very pertinent. The second too,
though perhaps not altogether as he intends. One of the distinguish-
ing features of Freud's observations is that they always leave us
a great deal of extraordinary clarity, even on items that have in
some sense eluded him. I'm alluding to the Dora observation, which
Freud came to see clearly at a later stage. He intervened in the Dora
case when he was still misconstruing the bearing of her question
towards her own sex, that is to say, her homosexuality. Here we
can observe an analogous misconstruing, but one that is far more
instructive because it runs much deeper.
Then there are other things that he tells us without taking full
advantage of them and which are certainly not the least interest-
ing, about what is at issue in the suicide attempt that crowns the
crisis with an act of significance. It certainly cannot be said that
the subject is not tightly bound to the tension that mounts until the
bursting of the conflict and the catastrophic occurrence.
How does Freud explain this? He says that it is within the register
of a normal orientation of the subject towards the desire to have
focr/a/fecr's cfez./d that the originative crisis has to be understood, the
same that led to her committing herself to something that goes right
in the opposite direction. Indeed, we are told that there is a grcaf
rc>vcrse of position, and Freud attempts to spell this out. This is one
of those cases where being let down by the object of desire gives rise
to a complete swing-over. The subject identifies with this object and,
as Freud lays out with precision in a footnote, this is cqwj.v¢/c#/ /o a
kj.#d a/regrcssz.o# fo #orcz.ssz.sin. When I make the dialectic of narcis-
sism essentially this relationship between ego and little other, I'm
doing absolutely no more than highlighting what is implicit in each
of Freud's ways of expressing himself.
What, then, is this disappointment that brings about the reversal?
When in her fifteenth year the subject was committed to the path of
taking possession of the imaginary object, of the imaginary child
- and she was sufficiently occupied with this child for it to leave its
mark on the patient's history -it so happened that her mother really
did bear a child from the father. In other words, the patient acquires
a third brother. Here, then, is the key point.
This also makes for the apparently exceptional character of
this observation. It is rather unusual that the late arrival of a little
brother should have resulted in such a profound reversal of a sub-
ject's sexual orientation. It is at this moment that the girl changes
position, and so now we shall see how this is best to be interpreted.
Freud tells us that this has to be regarded as a reactional phenom-
enon. The term is not in his text, but it is implied because he supposes
that her resentment towards her father is still being played out. This
linchpin in the situation explains her entire manner of handling the
affair. The girl is distinctly aggressive towards her father, while the
suicide attempt, which follows her being opposed by the counterpart
object of her attachment, is simply the counter-aggressiveness from
the father. Her aggression against the father swings round onto her
own self, combined with something that symbolically satisfies what
is at issue, namely a sort of collapse of the entire situation onto its
primal givens through a precipitation, a reduction, to the level of the
objects that are truly at stake. In short, when the girl falls from the
little bridge she performs a symbolic act, which is none other than
the IVz.cc7erkommc# of a child during childbirth. This is the term used
in German for dropping or whelping.
Thus we are brought back to the ultimate and originary meaning
of the structure of the situation.
In the second set of remarks that Freud makes, he explains how the
situation lay in a cul-de-sac in the treatment.
He tells us that to the extent that the resistance had not been
conquered, everything that was said to the patient was received
with great interest, but without her giving up her latest position.
Nowadays we would say that she held all this on the plane of an
intellectual interest. He employs a metaphor, comparing her reac-
tions to those of a gr¢#c7e c7czmc being shown museum pieces, peering
through her lorgnette and saying, How #z.cc./
Nevertheless, he notes that it cannot be said that there was an
absence of any transference. He indicates with great perspicacity
the presence of the transference in the patient's dreams. Parallel to
her unambiguous declarations of her determination not to change
anything in her deportment towards the lady, her dreams herald a
remarkable re-flowering of this most congenial bearing, the arrival
of some handsome and satisfying husband and the expectant advent
of an object, the fruit of this love. In short, the idyllic and almost
forced character of this spouse announced by the dream appeared
in such conformity with the efforts undertaken together that anyone
else but Freud would have pinned great hopes upon it.
Freud makes no mistake. He spies a transference here. It is the
doubling of the kind of counter-ploy that she was carrying on in
response to the disappointment with the father. Indeed, she had
not been solely aggressive and provocative with him. She also made
him concessions. It was just a matter of showing the father that she
was deceiving him. Freud recognises that something analogous is
going on in these dreams of hers, and that this is their transferential
signification. She is reproducing with him the fundamental stance of
the cruel game she has been carrying on with her father.
We must not fail here to come back to this kind of founding
relativity, which is essential to what is involved in symbolic for-
mation to the extent that there lies the fundamental line of what
for us constitutes the field of the unconscious. This is what Freud
expresses with great accuracy - its only wrong is to be a little over
accen+ua,ted -when he tctls us, beside the intention to mislead me, the
dreams partly expressed the wish to win my favour; they were also an
attempt to gain my interest and my good opinion -perhaps in order to
disappoint me all the more thoroughly later on.
Here appears the leading edge of the intention that is imputed to
the subject, of presently occupying this stance of captivating him
so as then to make him tumble from on high, to make him fall
from an even greater height on account of having been drawn yet
further into the situation. There can be no doubting, when one hears
the accentuation of this sentence, that it harbours what we call a
counter-transferential action. It is correct that the dream is decep-
tive, but Freud does not retain just this. Immediately after, he enters
into a discussion that is quite gripping to find in his writing, on how
the typical manifestation of the unconscious can be deceptive. It is
loo The Perverse Ways of Desire
certainly true that he understands in advance the objections that will

be levofled at him. of the unconscious too can lie, then what are we to
/r%s/? his disciples will ask. He offers them a lengthy explanation of
how this can come about and how in the end it contradicts nothing
in the theory.
This explanation is a little tendentious, but it still remains that
what Freud foregrounds here in 1920 is exactly what is essential in
the unconscious, namely the subject's relation to the Other as such.
This relation implies as its basis the possibility of being brought
about at this level of the lie. We are in the realm of lies and truth.
Freud spots this very well. What seems to escape his notice,
however, is that this is a true transference. It is in the interpretation
of the desire to deceive that the path is opened, instead of taking
this as something that - let's put it somewhat crudely - is directed
against him,
It was enough for him to come out with one sentence more, j.f 's
also an attempt to string me along, to captivate me, to get me to think
Acr so prc//}; - and the young woman must be ravishing - for him
not to be completely free in this business, just as with Dora. What
he wants to avoid is precisely to have to affiml that what he has
coming to him is the worst, that is to say, something in which he is
the one who will be disillusioned. In other words, he is quite pre-
pared to form his own illusions. In putting himself on guard against
these illusions, he has already entered the game. He is making the
imaginary game a reality. He turns it into something real because he
is right in it.
Moreover, this doesn't miss the target because his way of inter-
preting the thing is to say to the young woman that her intention
is precisely to deceive him just as she habitually deceives her father.
This amounts immediately to cutting off short the imaginary
relation that he has made a reality. In a certain respect, his coun-
tertransference could have served him well here, so long as it is #of
a countertransference, that is, so long as he doesn't believe in it, so
long as he doesn't fall into it. To the extent that he has fallen into
it and interprets too early, he brings the girl's desire into the real,
when in fact it was no more than a desire, and not an intention, to
deceive him. He fleshes out this desire. He operates with her just
as the therapist intervened with the little girl, giving the thing a
symbolic status. Here we have what lies at the heart of this slide into
the imaginary that becomes much more than a trap. It becomes a
calamity once it has been established doctrinally.
Here we are seeing a borderline example that is transparent. We
cannot fail to recognise it because it's in the text. With his inter-
pretation, he makes the conflict break out. He fleshes it out, when
in fact what was at issue, as he himself senses, is to point out this

mendacious discourse that is there in the unconscious. He tells her
that all this is being done against him, and in effect the treatment
doesn't go much further. He breaks it off. In wanting to unite, he
has sundered.
But something far more interesting is accentuated by Freud,
without him interpreting it, something of considerable scope, namely
the nature of the young woman's passion for the person in question.
Indeed, it did not escape his notice that this is not a homosexual
relationship like others, although in truth homosexual relationships
display all the variety of heterosexual relationships, and perhaps
even a few extra variations. Freud underscores quite admirably that
this object-choice corresponds to a type that is specifically md.##/I.-
cAc, and explains what he means by this. He spells out in remarkable
depth how this is platonic love in its most exalted aspect.
It's a love that asks for no other satisfaction but to serve the lady.
It's truly a sacred love, so to speak, or courtly love in its most devo-
tional form. He adds a few extra words like Schwdrmcrcz., which
has a very particular meaning in Germany's cultural history.3 It is
this exaltation that lies at the base of the relationship. In short, he
pitches this love relation at the highest degree of symbolised love
relationship, posited as a service, as an institution, as a reference. It
is not merely something that is submitted to, like an attraction or a
need. It's a love that, in itself, doesn't simply make do without satis-
faction, but aims very precisely for this non-satisfaction. It instates
lack in the relationship with the object as the very realm in which an
ideal love can blossom.
Can you not see that there is something here that joins in a kind
of nexus the three tiers of what I've been trying to give you a sense
of in this entire process that goes from frustration to symptom?
Take, if you will, the word s}Jmpfom as equivalent to enigma, since
this is what we have been examining. This is how the problem of this
exceptional situation will come to be articulated. However, it is of
interest only when taken in a register that is its own, which is to say
that it is exceptional because it is particular.
At first we have the reference, which has been lived through,
though in an innocent fashion, to the imaginary object, the child.
Interpretation enables us to conceive of it as a child received from
the father. As we have already been told, contrary to what one
might believe, female homosexuals are subjects who have formed a
staunch paternal fixation.
Why does a real crisis ensue? It is because the real object arises at
this moment. It is indeed a child given by the father, but precisely to
someone else, and to the person who is closest to her.
It is then that a great reversal is produced. Its mechanism is

explained to us. I believe that it is of the utmost importance to
perceive that in this case what was at stake had already been estab-
lished on the symbolic plane. It was on the symbolic plane that the
subject was satisfied by this child as a child that was given to her by
her father, so that the presence of this real object would lead her
back for a moment to the plane of frustration. It no longer has to
do with something that satisfied her in the imaginary, something
that already sustained her in the relation among women, with the
full institution of the paternal presence as such, the father par excel-
lence, the fundamental father, the father who will always be, for her,
any man whomsoever who will give her a child. The presence of the
real child, the fact that the object really is right there, materialised
for a moment by the fact that her mother is the one who has the
child, right beside her, leads her back to the plane of frustration.
What is most important in what happens next? Is it the swing-
over which brings her to identify with the father? It is understood
that this played its part. Is it that she herself becomes this sort of
latent child that will effectively 7?I.cderkommc# when the crisis comes
to a head? Perhaps we might find out how many months it took for
this to happen, if we had the dates as we do for Dora. But this is not
the most important matter. What is most important is that what is
desired is something that lies beyond the beloved woman.
The young woman's love for the lady aims at something else
besides her. This love that lives purely and simply in the realm of
devotion, and which raises the attachment to its supreme degree, the
subject's annihilation in the relationship, is something that Freud
seems to restrict, and not without reason, to the register of male
experience. Indeed, these things can be observed in a sort of institu-
tionalised thriving that is sustained in a highly elaborated cultural
relation. When the fundamental disappointment passes reflexively
onto this level, and the subject finds there her way-out, it raises the
question of what, in this register of love, is loved in the lady beyond
herself, and calls into question all that is truly fundamental in every-
thing that refers back to the attainment of love.
What is desired, strictly speaking, in the beloved woman is pre-
cisely what she lacks. And what she lacks in this instance is the
primordial object, the equivalent of which the subject would find in
the child, the imaginary substitute.
At this extreme, in the most idealised love, what is sought in the
woman is what she lacks. And what is sought beyond her is the
object that is central to the entire libidinal economy - the phallus.
9 January 1957
VII
A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN
AND THE YOUNG
HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN
Intersubjectivity and desubjectivation

The image as the cast of perversion
The symbolic aspect of the gift
Frustration, love and jouissance
Permutational schema of the case
We ended our talk last time by trying to summarise the case of

female homosexuality presented by Freud. At the same time as
sketching out its twists and turns, I adumbrated what might be
called its a/rwcjwrc. Indeed, this case would not hold a great deal
more importance than being merely colourful were we not working
through it on the basis of a structural analysis.
We need to look again at this structural analysis. It is solely
on the condition of pushing such analysis further, and as far as
possible, that it is worthwhile committing oneself to this path in
psychoanalysis.
That the psychoanalytic theory is wanting is something that, so
it seems to me, is there constantly to be seen. Moreover, there is no
harm in reminding you that we are pursuing our effort here in order
to respond to this want.
This want is palpable across the board. I recently beheld it coming
alive in my mind on reading Miss Anna Freud's remarks pitted
against those of Mrs Melanie Klein.
Doubtless Miss Anna Freud has backed down a bit since then,
but she grounded the principles of her child analysis on remarks
such as the following - the child forms no transference, or at least,
/arms #o fro#s/ere#cc-#cc/rosj.I, because children are still within the
situation that creates the neurotic tension. There could be no trans-
ference, in the strict sense, for something that was in the course of
being played out.
Then, in another remark, of the same nature but different, she
says that the fact that children are still relating with their original
objects of attachment calls for a change in position from the analyst,
wAo c#/crs /fee sj.fwcz/j.o# ¢S cI #cw pcrfo#, on the current plane. This is
purported to modify the analyst's technique profoundly.
In this respect, Miss Anna Freud pays homage to something of
an inkling of the importance of the essential function of speech in
the analytic relation. She says that the child will assuredly be in a
different relation from that of the adult to speech, and so should
be approached with the aid of play, which provides the means for
the technique of child analysis. The child is in a position that does
not allow the analyst to offer himself from the position of neutrality
or receptivity, which strives above all to gather speech, to allow it
to thrive, and, when the occasion presents, to echo it. I would say,
therefore, that while it is not developed in this text, nor even con-
ceived of, the analyst's engagement on a path that is different from
the speech relation is nevertheless indicated there.
Mrs Melanie Klein argues, on the contrary, that nothing could
be more congruent with adult analysis than child analysis, and that
already, even at a very early age, what is at issue in the child's uncon-
scious has nothing to do with the actual parents, unlike what Miss
Anna Freud says. Between the ages of two-and-a-half and three,
the situation has already modified to such an extent compared with
what can be observed in the real relation, that what is at stake is a
whole dramatisation that is profoundly alien to the actual situation
of the child's familial relationship. This modification is illustrated
by the example of a child who, being raised as an only child by
an elderly aunt who lived far from his parents, leaving him in an
altogether isolated and dual relation with this one person, none the
less reconstituted a whole family drama with a father, mother, and
even rival brothers and sisters. I'm quoting. It really is, therefore, a
matter of revealing in analysis something that ultimately does not lie
purely and simply in an immediate relation with the real, but rather
is already inscribed in a symbolisation.
Are we to accept what Mrs Melanie Klein asserts? These assertions
are based on her experience, and this experience is communicated to
us in observations that sometimes push things into the realm of
strangeness. One cannot fail to be struck by this kind of witch's
cauldron, or soothsayer's crucible, at the bottom of which a whole
wide imaginary world is bubbling away, the idea of the mother's
body as a container, all the primordial fantasies present from the
very first, in their tendency to become structured into a drama that
seems to come preformed, this entire machine requiring the constant
surfacing of the most aggressive primordial instincts if it is to keep
turning. We cannot fail to be struck by how she vouches for a corre-
A Child is Being Beaten 105
spondence between this entire phantasmagoria and the clinical data

that she handles here, and at the same time wonder just what we
have before us. What can this dramatic symbolisation mean, which
is found to be increasingly more complete the further back we go?
It is as though the closer we get to the point of origin, the more the
Oedipus complex is complete, articulated and ready to spring into
action. This warrants at least the posing of a question.
This question looms up at every turn along the precise path I've
been trying to lead you along, that of perversion.
What is perversion? Within a single psychoanalytic group we have

been hearing the most discordant voices raised on this issue.
Some, thinking they are following Freud, say that we simply have
to come back to the notion of the persistence of a fixation that bears
on a partial drive. This fixation is purported to traverse unscathed
the entire progress through the dialectic that tends to be established
by the Oedipus complex. It is further purported that it does not
undergo the transformations that tend to reduce the other partial
drives into a movement that unifies them, ultimately culminating in
the genital drive, which is the ideal unifying drive. What is at issue
then in perversion is a sort of accident in the development of the
drives. Translating in a classical way Freud's notion that perversion
is the negative of neurosis, these analysts seek to turn perversion
into something where the drive has not been elaborated.
Others, however, who moreover are not for all that the most
discerning or the best, but who have been informed by experience
and by something that truly does impress itself upon analytic prac-
tice, would try to show that, far from being this pure element that
persists, perversion forms part of something that comes about via
all the dramatic crises, fusions and de-fusions of a neurosis, present-
ing the same dimensional richness as a neurosis, along with the
same abundance, the same rhythms and stages. They would then
try to explain how perversion is the negative of neurosis by pushing
forward formulas like the following - perversion is /Ac cro/z.cz.scz-
/z.o# o/cJe/c#ces, just like all these games through which analysis is
pursued as a reduction of defences.
Fine by me. This offers an image. But, in fact, why is it that this
can be eroticised? This is the whole question. Where does this eroti-
cisation come from? Where does the invisible power lie that would
project this colouration that here seems to come as something extra-
neous, a change in quality brought upon the defence, which strictly
speaking should be regarded as a libidinal satisfaction? In truth, this

thing is not unthinkable, but the least that can be said is that it has
not been thought through.
It mustn't be believed that Freud never dared to give us a notion
to be elaborated. I would further say that we have among Freud's
writings an example that proves that his formula that perversion is
the negative of neurosis is certainly not to be taken to mean what
it has long been taken to mean, namely that what is hidden in the
unconscious when we are faced with a case of neurosis is, in perver-
sion, out in the open and, as it were, in a state of freedom. Freud is
proposing something quite different in this formula. Perhaps, after
all, it has to be taken in the same way as what is given to us in all
these compressed formulas to which our analysis has to restore their
true meaning. It is by trying first of all to follow him and to see, for
example, how he conceives of the mechanism of a phenomenon that
may be qualified as perverse, or even a categorical perversion, that
we shall finally be able to perceive what he means when he asserts
that perversion is the negative of neurosis.
Let's look at things a little more closely by taking up the study
that was to gain a certain fame, Ez.# Ki.#d w.rc7 gescfe/czgc#, subtitled,
A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.
It is characteristic of Freud that his attention should here be
focused on a single sentence ~ which he turns into the title of his text
- that is not a mere label but instead a phrase extracted directly from
what patients declare when they broach the theme of their fantasies.
These fantasies may roughly be called sadomasochistic, irrespective
of the role and function they hold in any particular case.
Freud tells us that he is focusing his study on six cases, which
are more or less obsessional neuroses, four women and two men.
Behind this lies his experience of all the cases of which he does not
have such a great understanding himself. So it seems that this is a
sort of summary, an attempt to organise a considerable mass of
experience.
When the subject declares to be bringing into the arena of the
treatment something that is his fantasy, he expresses it in a form
that is remarkable for its imprecision, for the questions that it leaves
hanging and to which he replies only with great difficulty. In truth,
at the start the subject is unable to give a satisfactory answer, for
he can scarcely say a word more about the characteristics of this
fantasy. Furthermore, he only does so with a sort of aversion, even
abashment or shame.
There is something quite remarkable here, which is that whereas
the masturbatory practices that are associated to a greater or lesser
degree with these fantasies do not entail any sense of guilt, when
it comes to wording these fantasies, not only does the subject very
often show great difficulty, but furthermore it provokes in him a
fairly considerable abhorrence, repugnance and culpability. The
discrepancy between the fantasmatic or imaginary use of these fan-
tasies and their spoken articulation is something that ought to make
us prick up our ears. The subject's deportment here is already a
signal that marks out a limit - it is not the same register mentally to
play with the fantasy or to speak about it.
What does the fantasy A cfez./c7 I.s bc!.ng beczje# signify in these
subjects? Freud is going to tell us what his experience has shown
him. We won't get to the end of the article today. I simply want to
throw some light on certain elements that directly concern the path
to which I committed us last week when tackling the problem via
The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman.
According to Freud, the progress of analysis shows that what is at
issue in this fantasy is something that has been substituted through a
series of transformations brought to bear on other fantasies, which
themselves had a fully comprehensible role at precise moments in
the subject's development. It is the structure of these states that I
would like to set out for you, so as to enable you to recognise in
them something that seems to be altogether evident, so long as we
keep our eyes open, at least with regard to the dimension into which
we are trying to advance and which is summed up under the heading
SWZ)y.cc/I.vc s/rwcfwrc. In other words, in order to restore its true posi-
tion to what often presents in our theory as an ambiguity, even as
an impasse and an antinomy, we shall be seeking each time to locate
on which level of subjective structure a given phenomenon occurs.
Freud tells us that the subject's history -to the extent that it opens
up under analytic pressure and allows the origin of these fantasies to
be found again - is punctuated in three stages.
In the first part of his expose, which we shall not be bringing to
the fore right now, he informs us that he will be confining himself
to the women, for reasons that he makes clear afterwards but which
we shall leave aside for today.
The form taken by the first fantasy, which he tells us can be found
when the facts are analysed, is the following -A4'}J/cz/Acr I.I bccz/z.#g
the child whom I hate.
This fantasy is loosely tied to the appearance of a brother or a
sister in the subject's history, a rival who happens to frustrate the
child - through his presence and the care that is lavished on him - of
her parents' affection. Here it is especially the father who is at issue.
Without insisting on this point, we should not omit the fact that this
concerns a young girl who is caught at a moment when the Oedipus
complex has already been constituted and when the relationship
with the father has been instated. The pre-eminence of the father's
person in this altogether primal fantasy cannot be unrelated to the
fact that this concerns a girl. But let's leave the explanation of this
issue for a later date.
What is important is that here at the outset we are touching on an
historical perspective that is retroactive. It is from a current point
in the analysis that the subject formulates and organises a primal
dramatic situation, and she does so in a way that is nevertheless
inscribed in her current speech and her power of symbolisation at
the present time. Thus, we find again, through the progress of the
analysis, what presents as the primal thing, the deepest primordial
organisation.
This entails the evident complexity of accommodating three
characters - there is the agent of the punishment, there is the one
who undergoes it, and there is the subject. The one who is under-
going the punishment is someone other than the subject, namely
a child whom the subject hates and whom she thereby sees being
stripped of the parental preference at stake. She thus feels privileged
by the fact that the other is being stripped of this preference.
A tripartite dimension and tension is here implied. There is the
subject's relation to the two others, whose interrelations are them-
selves dictated by an element that is focused by the subject. To
accentuate things in one direction, it could be said that M}; /¢fAcr
is beating my brother or my sister for fear I might not believe that
J czm ffee/ova"recJ o#c. A causality, or a tension, a reference to the
subject who is captured as a third party in whose favour all of this is
being produced, is something that animates and dictates the action
directed onto the ancillary personage, the one who is undergoing
the beating. The third party, who is the subject, is presentified in the
situation as an onlooker under whose eye this must come to pass
with the intention of making it known to her that something is being
given to her, namely the privilege of preference, of precedence.
So, there is a notion of fear, that is to say, a sort of anticipa-
tion, a temporal dimension, a pre-tension that is introduced into
the heart of this tripartite situation as its motor. And then there is
the reference to the third party qwcz subject, insomuch as the subject
is to believe or infer something from a certain deportment that is
brought to bear on the ancillary object. In this instance, this object
is taken as the instrument of the communication between the two
subjects, which is ultimately a communicating of love, because what
is declared for the central subject, this something that she receives,
comes at the expense of the anciuary object. This something is the
expression of her wish, or her desire, to be favoured and to be loved.
Of course, the formation has itself been dramatised. It is already
reactional in so far as it is the product of a complex situation,

but the situation presupposes the tripartite intersubjective reference
with all that it necessitates and introduces as a temporal punctua-
tion. It presupposes the introduction of the ancillary subject, who is
necessary.
Why so? This ancillary subject is the instrument, the mainspring,
the medium, the means, by which the crossover from one subject
to the other is made. All things considered we find ourselves before
a full intersubjective structure in the sense that it is established in
the culminated crossing-over of speech. The point is not that some-
thing should have been spoken, but rather that the intersubjective
structure itself, in this ternary situation which is established in the
primal fantasy, should carry the mark of the very same intersubjec-
tive structure that constitutes any culminated speech.
Let's shift now to the second stage.
In relation to the first, this second represents a scaled-down situa-
tion. Freud tells us that here is to be found, in a very particular way,
a situation reduced to two characters. I'm following Freud's text,
explaining it as best it can be. He describes this situation, without
weighing it up, as a necessary and reconstructed step that is indis-
pensable when it comes to understanding the full motivation behind
what is produced in the subject's history. The second stage produces
the [auttLsry - I am being beaten by my father .
This situation, scaled-down to two, excludes any other dimension
but that of the relation to the agent who is doing the beating. There
is something here that can give rise to all sorts of interpretations,
but such interpretations will themselves remain marked with the
greatest ambiguity. While the first fantasy harbours an organisation
and a structure that sets out a direction that could be indicated by
a series of arrows, in the second the situation is so ambiguous that
for a brief moment one may wonder as to how far the subject might
be participating with the one who is assaulting her and striking her.
This is the classic sado-masochistic ambiguity.I To resolve it, one
will conclude with Freud that this is linked to something that is
ffee cssc#cc a/mczsochz.sin, but that in this instance the ego is firmly
accentuated in the situation.
The subject finds herself in a reciprocal position, but which is also
exclusive. It's either him or her who is being beaten. And here, it's
her. The fact that it is her indicates something, without resolving it.
In the very act of being beaten, one can see - and the ensuing part of
Freud's discussion shows this -a transposition or a displacement of
an element that perhaps is already marked by eroticism.
The very fact that one can speak on this occasion of /fee es6'e#cc
o/mczsochj.sin is altogether indicative. At the previous stage we were
in a situation that, as exceedingly structured as it was, was in some

sense laden with virtuality. As Freud says, it is IVo/ c/car/}; scxz/a/,
not in itself sadistic, but yet the stuff from which both will later come.
The precipitation in one direction or in the other is marked out at
the second stage, though it will remain ambiguous.
The second stage is a dual one, with the whole problematic that it
raises on the libidinal plane. The subject finds herself included in a
dual relation which is thus ambiguous. We meet the cz./¢er . . . or . . .
that is fundamental in this dual relationship. Freud tells us that we
are almost always forced to reconstruct it, so fleeting is its existence.
This fleetingness is such an essential characteristic that very quickly
the situation is precipitated into the third stage.
In the third stage, the subject is reduced to her most extreme
point. Here the subject is apparently to be found again in a third-
party position in the shape of a pure and simple onlooker, as at
the first stage. After the scaling-down of the first intersubjective
situation, with its temporal tension, and the passage to the second
situation, which was dual and reciprocal, we come to the desubjec-
tivised situation which is that of the final fantasy, namely - j4 chz./d
is being beaten.
Of course, behind this passive voice one can vaguely make out the
paternal function, but generally speaking the father is not recognis-
able. It's a mere substitute. On the other hand, Freud did want to
respect the subject's wording but often it's not a matter of just one
child but of several. The fantasmatic production causes it to burst
apart, multiplying into umpteen specimens, and this shows very well
the character of essential desubjectivation that is produced in the
primordial relationship.
Indeed, there remains an objectivation, in any case a desubjec-
tivation, that is radical and that affects the entire structure at this
level where the subject is no longer there except as reduced to the
state of an onlooker, or merely an eye, that is to say, the very thing
that always characterises any kind of object at the limit, at the point
of final reduction. To behold it, there has to be at least, not always
a subject, but an eye, a screen upon which the subject is established.
How can we translate this into our language, at the precise point
we've reached in our process? In referring to our diagram, the
imaginary relationship, which is more or less fantasised, is inscribed
between the two vertices cz-cz' in a relation that is marked to a greater
or lesser degree by specularity and reciprocity between the ego and
the other party. But here we find ourselves in the presence of some-
thing that takes place on the line S-A, namely unconscious speech,
which had to be uncovered again through the artifices of the analysis
of the transference. This unconscious speech runs as follows - A4')/
father, in beating the child whom I hate, is showing me he loves me.

Or - My father is beating a child for fear I might believe I'm not the
/¢t;owrz./c. Or some quite different wording that in whichever way
highlights one of the accents of this dramatic relationship. What is
excluded, what is not present in the neurosis, yet which will undergo
different developments that will become manifest elsewhere, in
all the constitutive symptoms of the neurosis, is uncovered in this
element of the clinical picture that is the fantasy.
How does this fantasy present? It bears within it, in a still highly
visible manner, the testimony of the signifier-elements of speech that
is articulated at the level of this /ra#s-oZ)y.cc/, so to speak, which is the
big Other. The big Other is the locus at which unconscious speech
is articulated, the Es insomuch as it is speech, history, memory and
articulated structure.
Perversion, or rather, to limit ourselves here, the perverse fantasy,
possesses a property that we can now bring out.2
What is this kind of residue, this symbolic reduction that has
progressively eliminated the entire subjective structure from the
situation, to allow to emerge from it nothing more than something
that is entirely de-subjectivised? Ultimately it is enigmatic because
it conserves the full charge - but this is a charge that is neither
revealed, nor constituted, nor taken on board by the subject - of
what, at the level of the Other, is the articulated structure in which
the subject is engaged. At the level of the perverse fantasy, all the
elements are there, but everything to do with signification has been
lost, namely the intersubjective relationship. These are what we
might call signifiers in their pure state, without the intersubjective
relationship, signifiers shorn of their subject. We have here a sort
of objectivation of the signifiers of the situation as such. What is
indicated here in the sense of a fundamental structuring relationship
in the subject's history at the level of perversion is both preserved
and contained, but in the form of a pure sign.
Is this different from everything that we meet at the level of per-
version? Picture for a moment what you know about the fetish, for
instance. You are told that it is explicable by what lies beyond but
which is never seen, and for good reason, namely the penis of the
phallic mother. More often than not, after a short effort of analysis,
this proves to be linked by the subject, at the very least in those
memories that are still accessible to him, to a precise situation when
he came to a standstill in his observation - this at least is his memory
of it -at the hem of his mother's dress. Here we find ourselves before
a remarkable convergence with the structure that can be called the
scrcc#-mcmor);, that is to say, the moment at which the chain of
memory is arrested. Indeed, it is arrested at the hem of the dress, no
higher than the ankle, and this is why the shoe is met here. This is
also why the shoe can, at least in certain particular but exemplary
cases, assume its function as a substitute for what has not been
seen but which is articulated and formulated as being, here for this
subject, what the mother possesses, namely the phallus. Doubtless
it is an imaginary phallus, but it is essential to her symbolic founda-
tion as a phallic mother.
Here in the beating fantasy we also find ourselves faced with
something that belongs to the same realm, something that freezes
the flow of memory, that reduces it to the instantaneous, by arrest-
ing it at this point that is called a screen-memory. Think of how
cinematographic motion can be speeding along altogether rapidly
and then all of a sudden stop at some point, capturing the characters
in a freeze-frame. This freeze-frame is characteristic of the reduc-
tion of the full signifying scene, articulated from subject to subject,
to something that is immobilised in this fantasy, which remains
charged with all the erotic values that are included in what it has
expressed, and of which it is the testimony and the support, the last
support that remains.
Here we can put a finger on how there comes to be moulded what
might be called the cast of perversion, namely the valorisation of
the image. The image is at stake here to the extent that it remains
the privileged witness of something that, in the unconscious, must
be articulated and brought back into play in the dialectic of the
transference, that is, in this something that must assume its full
dimensions once more within the analytic dialogue.
The value of an imaginary dimension appears, therefore, to be
supervalent whenever a perversion is at issue. This imaginary rela-
tionship stands on the path of what occurs between subject and
Other, or more accurately, of what of the subject remains located in
the Other, precisely insomuch as it is repressed. This is speech that is
indeed the subject's own but, since by its very nature as speech it is a
message that the subject must receive from the Other in an inverted
form, it can equally remain in the Other and there constitute the
repressed and the unconscious, establishing a relationship that is
possible but which does not become a reality.
Possjb/a does not say it all. There has to be some impossibility in
this, without which it would not be repressed. It is precisely because
this impossibility is present in ordinary situations that it requires all
the artifices of the transference to make that which has to be com-
municated from the big Other to the subject both newly passable
and formulable, in so far as the subject's Jcomes into being.
Freud's analysis affords us this indication in the sharpest fashion,
and everything is spelt out at far greater length than what I've been
saying here. He marks out how we must tackle the problem of the
constitution of any perversion through the transformations of the
Oedipus complex, through its advance and its revolution.
It is astounding that people should have dreamed of maintaining
the indication that perversion is the negative of neurosis simply by
translating it, as is commonly being done, to mean that perversion
is a drive that has not been elaborated by the Oedipal and neurotic
mechanism. It is purported to be a pure and simple relic, the persis-
tence of an irreducible partial drive. On the contrary, in this vital
article, and in many further points, Freud indicates well enough that
perverse structuration, however primal we might suppose it to be -in
any case, among those that come to our knowledge as analysts ~ can
be articulated only as a means, a linchpin, an element of something
that ultimately can be conceived of, can be understood, and can be
articulated solely in, by and through the process, the organisation
and the articulation of the Oedipus complex.
Let's try now to inscribe the case from the other day, the case of the
young homosexual woman, onto our diagram of the subject's criss-
cross relationship with the Other.
On the axis that runs S-A, insomuch as it is here that symbolic
signification must come about and be established, lies the entire
genesis of the subject in the present. On the other hand, the imagi-
nary interposition cz-cz' is where the subject finds her status, her
object structure, which she recognises as such, installed in a certain
liaison in relation to these objects, which for her are immediately
attractive and correspond to her desire, in so far as she commits to
imaginary guiderails that form what are called libidinal fixations.
While we cannot push this exercise to its end today, we can try to
sum things up. What can we see? Five temporal phases can be laid
out to describe the major phenomena through which this perversion
is instated. Whether we regard this perversion as fundamental or
acquired matters little. In this instance, we know when it was first
indicated, when it was established, when it was precipitated, we
have its motives and we have its point of departure. It is a perver-
sion that was constituted belatedly, which doesn't mean that it did
not have its premises in quite primordial phenomena. But let's try
to understand what we can see on the level at which Freud himself
cleared the avenues.
There is a state that is essential, when the young woman has
reached puberty, around her thirteenth or fourteenth year. She
treasures an object, a child whom she looks after and to whom she is
bound by ties of affection. She shows herself in everyone's eyes to be
steering particularly well in this direction, precisely on the kinds of
paths that anyone might hope for, as the vocation typical to woman,
that of matemity.
On this basis, something occurs that will produce in her a kind of
reversal that sets in when she starts to take an interest in love objects
who will be marked first of all with the sign of femininity. These
are women who are in a more or less motherly, neo-maternalising,
circumstance.
She will ultimately be led to the passion, which is literally quali-
fied as a co#swmz.#g pczssz.o#, for the person who in the text is called
/fee /czd)/, and there is a good reason for this. The young woman
treats this lady in a highly elaborate style of relation that is chival-
rous and specifically masculine. Her passion for the lady is served,
in a sense, without any requirement, without desire, without even
hope of return, with this character of a gift, the lover projecting even
beyond any kind of show from the beloved. In short, we find here
one of the most highly cultivated forms of love relation.
How are we to conceive of this transformation? I've given you
its first temporal phase and its result. Between the two, something
occurred. Freud tells us what. We are now going to implicate this
transformation in the same terms that served to analyse the position.
Let's begin with the phallic phase of the genital organisation.
What is the meaning of what Freud tells us in this regard? Just
before the latency period, the infantile subject, male or female,
reaches the phallic phase, which indicates the point of realisation
of the genital type. Everything is there, up to and including object-
choice. However, there is one thing that is not there, namely a full
realisation of the genital function insomuch as it would be structured
and organised as a reality. Indeed, there remains this essentially
imaginary and fantasmatic element which is the supervalence of the
phallus, in view of which there are for the subject two types of being
in the world - those who Aczvc the phallus and those who feczvc Ho/,
that is to say, who have been castrated.
This is how Freud formulates it and it's quite clear that there is
something here that truly suggests a problematic from which, in
trutb, the various authors do not manage to extricate themselves
when they seek to justify it in any way by motives that are deter-
mined for the subject in the real. I've already told you that I would
bracket off the extraordinary modes of explanation that this forces
upon these authors. Their general pattern of explanation amounts
pretty much to the following - ¢s cvcr);o#c k#ows, sz.#cc ever);/Aj.#g j.f
already figured out and inscribed in the unconscious drive tendencies,
the subject must already possess, by his very nature, the preforma-
tion that makes one sex correspond to the other in cooperation. So,
this can only be a kind of formation in which the subject already
frods some advantage, and there n"st already be a process of defence
Acre. Actually, this is not inconceivable from one perspective, but
it simply pushes the problem further back. This in turn commits
the authors to a series of constructions that merely place the entire
symbolic dialectic back at the origin, and which become increasingly
unthinkable as one shifts further back towards it.
It is easier for us than for these authors to accept that in this
instance the phallus happens to be the imaginary element - this is
a fact, which has to be taken as a fact - whereby the subject at the
genital level is introduced into the symbolic aspect of the gift.
The symbolic aspect of the gift and genital maturation, which
are two different things, are nevertheless linked by a factor that
is included in the real human situation, namely the rules that are
established by law in the exercise of genital functions, to the extent
that they effectively come into play in inter-human exchange. It is
because things happen on this level that the bond is so tight between
the symbolic aspect of the gift and genital maturation. But this is
something that has no internal, biological or individual coherence
for the subject. On the other hand it emerges that the fantasy of
the phallus, within this symbolic aspect of the gift at the genital
level, does assume its value, and Freud insists on this. The phallus
does not have the same value for he who really possesses it, that is,
the male child, as for the child who does not possess it, that is, the
female child.
For the female child, she will be introduced to the symbolic aspect
of the gift precisely in so far as she does not possess the phallus. It
is in so far as she phallicises the situation - that is to say, in so far
as it's a matter of either fec".ng or #o/ feczvz.#g the phallus - that she
enters the Oedipus complex.3 Meanwhile, what Freud underscores
is that this is not how the boy enters the Oedipus complex. Instead,
this is his way out. At the end of the Oedipus complex he will have
to make the symbolic aspect of the gift a reality on a certain plane.
He will effectively have to make a gift of wA¢/ Ac feczs, whereas the
girl has entered the Oedipus complex in so far as she is to find, in the
complex, what she does not have.
What is meant by wfecz/ sfec docs #o/ foove? Here, we are already on
the plane where an imaginary element enters a symbolic dialectic.
In a symbolic dialectic, what one does not have is merely something
that is just as inexistent as the rest, but it bears the mark of the minus
sign. So, she enters with this minus. To enter here with a minus or
with a plus does not change the fact that what is in play here is the
phallus. There has to be something so that one can assign oneself

with a plus or a minus, a presence or an absence. Freud tells us that
this is the mainspring of the girl's entry into the Oedipus complex.
Within this symbolic aspect of the gift, all sorts of things can
be given in exchange. Indeed, it is because so many things can be
given in exchange that ultimately we find so many equivalents of the
phallus in what effectively occurs in symptoms.
Freud goes still further, and you can find it worded in a rough-
and-ready fashion in 4 Crfej./d I.s Be!.ng Bc¢/c7c. Why do so many
elements from pregenital relations come into play in the Oedipal
dialectic? Why do frustrations from the anal level or the oral level
tend to arise, and to bring about the frustrations, accidents and dra-
matic elements of the Oedipal relation, when going by the premises
this should only come about in the genital elaboration? Freud's
reply is that this is related to something obscure that occurs at the
level of the ego - because of course the child has no experience
of this - in that the objects that form part of the pregenital rela-
t:rous can be more easily apprehended in verbal representations, in
Wortvorstellungen.
Freud goes so far as to say that pregenital objects are brought into
play in the Oedipal dialectic to the extent that they lend themselves
more readily to verbal representations. The child can tell hinself
more easily that what the father gives to the mother on occasion is
his urine, because urine is something that the child is very acquainted
with in use, in its function and existence as an object. It is easier to
symbolise an object -that is, to endow it with a plus sign or a minus
sign -that has taken on a certain reality in the child's imagination,
than this something that in spite of everything remains exceedingly
hard to grasp, and which for the girl is difficult to access.
Freud tells us that the girl's first introduction into the dialectic
of the Oedipus complex hinges on the fact that the penis she desires
will be received from the father in the form of a substitute, namely
a child. But in the example we are looking at, that of the young
homosexual woman, a real child is involved. She has been doting
over a real flesh-and-blood child who is part of the interplay.
imagimry mother , real child
-/---`,-,,I---------r--,,--
imaginary penis symbolic father
EE
On the other hand, what does this child whom she dotes over
satisfy in her? Well, the child is the imaginary phallic substitu-
tion through which, as a subject, she constitutes herself, without
knowing it, as an imaginary mother. She derives satisfaction from
looking after this child because it amounts to an acquisition of the
imaginary penis, which was the object of the fundamental frustra-
tion that resulted from her having placed this imaginary penis at
the level of the minus. I'm doing no more than highlighting what is
characteristic of originary frustration, namely that any object that
is introduced by a frustration that has become a reality can only be
an object that the subject takes up in this ambiguous position of the
body's appurtenances.
I'm underscoring this for you because when people speak about
primordial relationships between mother and child, they put all the
emphasis on the notion of frustration taken passively. We are told
that the child makes the first test of the relation between the pleasure
principle and the reality principle in the frustrations he feels from
his mother, and after that you can see the terms /rws/j.¢fj.o# o/ /foe
ofy.ccf or /ofs a/ /fee /ovc oZ7y.ccf being used indiscriminately. Now, if
there is one thing on which I insisted in the previous lessons then it's
precisely the bipolarity or the highly marked opposition that there
is between the real object, in so far as the child can be deprived of it,
namely the mother's breast, and the mother, in so far as she is in a
position to grant or not to grant this real object.
This distinction between the breast and the mother as a camp/cfc
oky.ccf is made by Mrs Melanie Klein. She distinguishes between, on
the one hand, the partial objects, and on the other, the mother who
is established as a whole object. This is the mother that can create
the famous cJcprcssj.vc posz./I.o# in the child. Indeed, this is one way
of seeing things. But what is passed over in the stance Klein takes is
that these objects are not of the same nature, because irrespective of
whether they are set apart or not, it is still the case that the mother
is established as an agent by the function of the appeal. It is still
the case that already, in her most rudimentary form, she is taken
as an object that is marked and connoted by a possibility of plus or
minus, as presence or absence. It is also the case that the frustration
brought about by anything that refers to the mother as such is a
frustration of love, and that everything that comes from the mother
by way of response to this appeal is a gift, that is to say, something
other than the object. In other words, there is a radical difference
between, on the one hand, the gift as a sign of love, which aims
radically at something else that lies beyond, namely the mother's
love, and on the other hand, whichever object that might arise for
the satisfaction of the child's needs.
The frustration of love and the frustration of jouissance are

two distinct things. The frustration of love is pervaded by all the
intersubjective relationships that can be constituted thereafter.
Meanwhile, the frustration of jouissance is on no account pervaded
by just anything, contrary to what people say.
As Mr Winnicott has understood very sharply, through the usual
confusion to be read in the analytic literature, it is not the frus-
tration of jouissance that generates reality. We cannot ground the
faintest genesis of reality on the fact of whether the child has or
doesn't have the breast. If he doesn't have the breast, he is hungry
and he carries on crying. In other words, what is it that is produced
by the frustration of jouissance? It produces at the very most the
rekindling of desire, but it produces no kind of object constitution
whatsoever. This is ultimately what leads Mr Winnicott to remark
on what is truly there for the grasping in the child's behaviour, and
which allows us to shed light on how there is indeed a progression
that calls for an original explication.
It's not simply because the child is deprived of his mother's breast
that he conjures up his fundamental image of it, nor is it just any
kind of image. It is necessary that the image should in itself be taken
as an original dimension. It's not the breast but the tip of the breast,
the nipple, that is absolutely essential. It is this nipple that will be
replaced by the phallus, which will be superposed onto it. When this
happens, the nipple and the phallus show that what they have in
common is this character of bringing us to a standstill, in so far as
they are constituted as images.
What follows on from the child's frustration of jouissance is
an original dimension that persists in the subject in the state
of an imaginary relationship. This is not simply something that
polarises the kindling of desire in the way that, in animals, there
is always a certain lure that orients. The animal's behaviour
always carries something of significance, in the feathers or in the
fins of its adversary, which turns it into an adversary. One can
always ascertain whatever it is that individualises the image in the
biological realm. This is certainly present in mankind, but it is
accentuated, and in such fashion as to be observable in children's
behaviour where these images are referenced to the fundamental
image that gives the subject his comprehensive status. We find
this complete shape, this form of the other party as such, which
he clings to and which means that he too has this image, around
which subjects may band together or disband, as appurtenances
or non-appurtenances.
All in all, the problem does not concern the more or less large
degree to which narcissism is elaborated - a narcissism which to
begin with is conceived of as a kind of imagined and ideal auto-

eroticism. On the contrary, it's a matter of finding out what the
function of original narcissism is in the constitution of an objectal
world as such. This is why Winnicott pauses over these objects that
he caLlis transitional objects.
Without them, we would have no account of the way in which the
child is able at the start to constitute a world from his frustrations,
because of course he does constitute a world, but don't go telling us
that this has to do with the object of his desires that is the cause of
his frustration at the beginning. He constitutes a world to the extent
that in heading towards something that he desires, he will come up
against something that he bumps into, or which burns him. This is
not an object that is generated in any way whatsoever by the object
of desire. It's not something that can be modelled by the stages of
the development of desire as would be established and organised in
child development, It's something else. In so far as it is generated
by frustration itself, the object leads us to admit the autonomy of
this imaginary figment in its relationship with the body image. This
is an ambiguous object, which lies betwixt and between. One can
speak neither of reality nor of unreality in its regard. This is how Mr
Winnicott puts it, with great pertinence. Instead of presenting this
with all the problems that it raises with respect to the introduction
of this object into the symbolic order, he comes to it despite himself,
because one is obliged to go there once one has committed oneself
to this path.
These half-real, half-unreal objects - the transitional objects that
he designates - are objects to which the child clasps, like the corner
of his blanket or a piece of his bib. This cannot be observed in all
children but is there in most of them. Mr Winnicott spots very
clearly the relationship these objects must have at their terminal
point with the fetish. He is wrong to call them primal fetishes but
they are indeed its point of origin.
He pauses and tells himself that, after all, this object that is neither
real nor unreal is something to which we grant neither a full reality
nor a fully illusory character. The same goes for your philosophical
ideas and your religious system, in the midst of which a good English
citizen lives and knows in advance how he ought to behave. No one
dreams of telling you that you believe in thus-and-such a religious
or philosophical doctrine, nor does anyone dream of trying to pull
you out of it. This is the realm of betwixt and between. Indeed, Mr
Winnicott is not wrong. Life is situated in the midst of all this, How
could the rest be organised were it not for this?
Mr Winnicott also remarks that one ought not to be too exact-
ing. The z.#/crmcdz.a/c f/a/c in which these things are established
is firmly marked by the one thing that no one dreams of - unless

one is forced to impose it on others as an object to which they
must adhere, the authenticity or the unwavering reality of what you
promote as a religious idea or a philosophical illusion -in short, the
well instituted world indicates that everyone has the right to be mad
on the condition that one remain mad separately. Madness begins
when one imposes one's private madness on the entirety of subjects
who are each constituted in a sort of nomadism of the transitional
object.
To end, 1et's come back to the case of the young woman in love,
who has her transitional object, this imaginary penis, due to the fact
of having her child. This is no different from what we are told when
it is asserted that, all in all, she has her imaginary penis from the
moment she starts doting on the child. What does it take for her to
pass to the third phase, that is, the second stage of the five situations
that we shan't manage to see today?
She is homosexual, and Freud tells us that she loves as does a
man, md.##/j.cAc# r}pws, even though the [French] translator has
rendered this as /G"z.#z.#. She is in a virile position. This can be
translated onto our diagram. The father, who at the previous stage
was at the level of the big Other, has now passed to the level of the
ego, to the extent that the girl has taken the male position. At cz',
there is the lady, the love-object who has replaced the child. Then, at
the level of the Other there is the symbolic penis, that is to say, what
stands at its most elaborated point in this love, which stands beyond
the beloved subject. What is loved in love is what lies beyond the
subject. It is literally what the beloved subject does not have. The
lady is loved precisely in so far as she does not have the symbolic
penis, though she has all it takes to get it because she is the chosen
object of the subject's every adoration.
real lady (cz)
imaginary father /------,-/-----,-`,--,/symbolic penis

(ego)
So, a permutation has been produced whereby the symbolic father

has passed over into the imaginary through the subject's identifica-
tion with the function of the father. By the same stroke, the lady has
now appeared up here, on the right, as the love object, precisely by
harbouring what lies beyond, the symbolic penis that at the outset
was on the imaginary level.
What has happened between these two phases?
The distinguishing feature of the observation, which appears in
the second phase and which can be found again in the fourth, is that
at the level of the imaginary relationship the real action of the father
has been introduced, this symbolic father who was previously down
here in the unconscious.
The child that the father will give the girl as a substitute for the
desire for a penis is a child that is either imaginary or real. In the
present case, it's rather troubling that the child is real, but so it was,
The father nevertheless remains unconscious as a progenitor, and all
the more so given that the child is real. Yet here we have the father
really giving a child not to the daughter but to the mother. So, the
real child unconsciously desired by the daughter, and which she
gave to herself in the substitute from which she derived her satisfac-
tion, already shows without a shadow of doubt an accentuation of
need, which lends the situation its dramatic aspect, The subject has
been frustrated in a very particular way by the fact that the real
child from the father qua symbolic father has been given to her own
mother.
This is what amounts to the distinguishing feature of the obser-
vation. When people say that in a case such as this, things have
taken the turn of a perversion, owing surely to some accentuation
of the instincts or the drive tendencies, or of some primal drive, are
they managing to sift out these three elements, which are absolutely
essential so long as one distinguishes between them -the imaginary,
the symbolic and the real?
You can see that the situation has revealed itself to be a rela-
tionship of jealousy, for eminently structural reasons, and that
the imaginary satisfaction to which the girl entrusted herself has
assumed an untenable character because the real has been intro-
duced, a real that has responded to the unconscious situation on the
level of the imaginary plane. Through a sort of interposition, the
father has now become a reality on the plane of the imaginary rela-
tionship. He has effectively come into play as an imaginary father,
and no longer as a symbolic father. Another imaginary relationship
has now been established, which the girl will fill out as best she can.
This relationship is marked, however, by the fact that what was
articulated in a latent fashion at the level of the big Other is starting
to link up in an imaginary fashion, in the fashion of a perversion

and, moreover, it is for this reason, and no other, that this will cul-
minate in a perversion. The girl identifies with her father. She takes
on his role and herself becomes the imaginary father. She also keeps
his penis, and attaches herself to an object to whom necessarily she
must give this something that the object doesn't have.
This necessity of centring her love not on the object but on what
the object doesn't have, brings us to the heart of the love relation-
ship as such and to the heart of the gift. And it is this something that
the object doesn't have that makes the tripartite constellation of the
subject's history a necessity.
This is where we shall pick things up next time. It will allow us to

delve deeper into the dialectic of the gift as it is beheld and expe-
rienced altogether primordially by the subject, and also to see its
other face, the one that earlier we left to one side. I accentuated the
paradoxes of frustration on the side of the object, but I didn't say
what is produced, and what is signified as such, by the frustration
of love.
16 January 1957
VIII
DORA AND THE YOUNG
HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN
The symbolic insistence of transference

Potent father, impotent father
Love, lack and gift
Dora between question and identification
Perverse metonymy, neurotic metaphor
Thislatestinstalment,thesecondissueofthejournalL¢Ps);cfoo#cz/}7fc,
contains some texts that will allow you to see a new foray into logic,
to see it right where it is, in a particularly vivid fashion, that is to say,
in our practice. I'm alluding to our much-touted game of odds-and-
evens, and I'm referring you to the Introduction I have given to my
Lesson on The Purloined Letter.
You can very easily find there the three temporal phases of subjec-
tivity, in so far as subjectivity bears a relation to frustration, and on
the condition that frustration is taken in the sense of a lack of object.
You can find them easily if you reflect on what the baseline of the
problem is, namely the opposition brought about by the institution
of the pure symbol - plus or minus, presence or absence - in which
there is nothing less than a sort of objectifiable positioning of what
is given in the game.
You will easily see there the second temporal moment in the fact
that the declaration you make in saying oc7d or evc# is a sort of bid
whereby you put yourself in the position of being gratified or not by
the response from the other party. However, since he already has
the cubes in his hands, he is quite incapable of doing so. Whether or
not what he has in hands corresponds to your bid is no longer some-
thing that depends on him. So, here you have the second stage in the
dual relation in so far as it sets out this appeal and its response, upon
which the level of frustration is established. At the same time you
will see its utterly evanescent character, which is literally impossible
to accommodate.
If the game possesses something that is of interest to you then

clearly it's because you introduce the third dimension, which gives
it its meaning, the dimension of law, in a form that is always latent
in the playing of the game. From the standpoint of the bidder,
what is at stake? From one moment to the next, the other party is
clearly supposed to be hinting at some regularity, in other words
a law, which at the same time he endeavours to shield from him.
This dimension of a law, of a regularity that is being established,
is conceived of as something possible yet is being shielded from the
bidder by the one who is hinting at it in the hidden part of the game,
even as he hints fleetingly at its emergence. It is at this moment that
what is fundamental to the game is established, thereby lending it
its intersubjective sense, locating it in a dimension that is no longer
dual but ternary, and essentially so.
The value of my introductory text hinges on this, namely on the
fact that for there to be the beginning of an articulation of some-
thing that resembles a law, it is necessary to introduce three terms.
We are going to try to see how the object is introduced into these
three intersubjective phases. By the mere fact that it falls within our
scope, our purview in analytic practice, this object is an object that
has to enter the symbolic chain.
This is the point we reached last time in the unfolding of our case
of female homosexuality.
We reached what I called the third phase, which I am going to sum-

marise for you by starting from the first situation that we are taking
arbitrarily as the point of departure.
Note that this chronological ordering of terms is already a conces-
sion to the progressive point of view, which runs from the past to the
future. We are doing this to facilitate matters by shifting closer to
what is usually done in the dialectic of frustration, while not forget-
ting that in conceiving of it in a perfunctory fashion, that is to say,
without distinguishing between the planes of the real, the imaginary
and the symbolic, one ends up in impasses. The further we go, the
more I hope to give you a sense of these impasses.
For the time being, however, we shall try to set out the principles
behind these relationships between the object and the constitution
of the symbolic chain.
First we have the young woman's position when she is still in her
pubescent phase. The initial symbolic and imaginary structuration
of her position happens in the typical way, as is ordained by the
theory. The equation between inaginary penis and child sets the
subject up as an imaginary mother in relation to what lies beyond,
namely her own father who steps in at this moment as a symbolic
function, that is, as the one who can give the phallus. The potency
of the father is at this moment unconscious. This is after the dissolu-
tion of the Oedipus complex, and so the father qua Ac wfeo c¢# gz.vc
the child is uncor\sctous.
It is at this stage that occurs what might be called the fatal
moment, when the father intervenes in the real, giving a child to
her mother, that is to say, turning the child that was formerly in an
imaginary relationship with the subject into a real child. Something
becomes a reality, and as a result she can no longer sustain it in the
imaginary position where she had set it up. We now find ourselves
in the second phase, where the intervention of the real father at
the level of the child, which is now the object of her frustration,
produces the transformation of the whole equation.
Henceforth, this will be posited with the following terms - the
imaginary father, the lady, and the symbolic penis. Through a
sort of inversion, the subject's relationship with her father, which
was previously in the symbolic realm, veers in the direction of the
imaginary relationship. Or, if you prefer, there is a projection of
the unconscious formula, that of her first equilibrium, into a per-
verse relationship, an imaginary relationship, which is her relation
to the lady. This is the third phase.
real lady (cz)
----,-----,--------/--,,,
imaginary father symbolic penis
(ego)
So, after a first application of our formulae we can briefly pause

over this positioning of the terms in play, which is undoubtedly
enigmatic. None the less, it does need to be stressed that these terms,
whichever they may be, impose a structure. That is to say, were we
to change the position of any one of them, we would have to place
each of the others elsewhere, and not just anywhere. Let's try now
to see what this means. The signification is yielded by the analysis.
What does Freud tell us at the crucial moment of the observation?
Due to a certain conception he has formed of the position at issue,
and due also to an intervention he makes on this basis, he crystallises

the position between himself and the patient in a way that is unsat-
isfactory, since he avouches that this was the moment at which the
analytic relationship was broken off. Either way, whatever Freud
thought about it, he is a long way from laying the full burden of this
on an impasse in the patient's position. His intervention, his concep-
tion, his prejudices about her position, must count for something in
the fact that the situation is broken off.
Let's remind ourselves what this position is and how Freud
formulates it for us. He tells us that the patient's resistances were
insurmountable. How does he substantiate these resistances? What
examples does he provide and what meaning does he give them?
He reads these resistances being expressed in particular in a series
of dreams that might paradoxically have given rise to hopes that
the situation was normalising. These are effectively dreams where
what is at issue is nothing else but union, co77/.wgo, and a fruitful
marriage. In these dreams she is submissive to an ideal husband and
bears his children. In short, this series of dreams indicates a desire
that is steering in the direction of what is most wished for - if not by
Freud then by society as here represented by her family - as the best
outcome for the treatment.
Armed with everything the patient has told him about her posi-
tion and her intentions, far from taking the dream-text at face
value, Freud sees in it no more than what he calls the patient's ruse,
expressly designed to disappoint him, or more precisely to deceive
him and disillusion him at the same time, in the same manner as
the intersubjective guessing-game I mentioned just a moment ago.
It is remarkable that this presupposes, as Freud says it does, that
one may object - W7!¢/.J 7lrfec w#co#scz.owl /oo c¢" /z.c.J Freud dwells
at length on this point. He discusses it and makes sure to reply in a
carefully worded manner.
He takes up a passage from 7lfee J;.ferpre/cz/i.o# a/Dreczms, which
he had also revisited in another observation, the Dora case study,
which we shall be coming to presently. At a congress five years ago,
after Lagache's report on transference I gave a short paper sum-
marising the positions in which I think the Dora case ought to be
appreciated.
Regarding the relations between unconscious desire and pre-
conscious desire, the rr¢wmdewfw#g makes an analogy between the
capitalist and the entrepreneur. Preconscious desire is the entrepre-
neur of the dream, but the dream would have no sufficient outlay to
set itself up as the representative of this something that is called the
unconscious were it not for another desire that provides the funds
for the dream, and this is unconscious desire. Freud distinguishes
very sharply between the two, though he doesn't go quite so far as

to tease out their most far-reaching consequences. Ultimately there
is a distinction between what the subject brings along in his dream,
which is at the level of the unconscious, and the factor of dual rela-
tions, which hinge on his addressing someone when he recounts the
dream in analysis. It is in this sense that I tell you that a dream that
arises in the course of an analysis always bears a certain steering
towards the analyst, and this steering is not always necessarily the
unconscious steering.
The whole question is as to whether or not the stress should be
laid on intention. In the case of the young homosexual woman,
Freud tells us that this intention remains the patient's avowed inten-
tion to play the game of deception with her father. She manages to
formulate this game that consists in feigning to undergo treatment
while maintaining her positions and her fidelity to the lady. But
should this something that is being expressed in the dreams be con-
ceived of purely and simply from the perspective of deception, that
is to say, in its preconscious intentionalisation?
I don't think so, because when we look closely, what can we
see being formulated? This is undoubtedly a dialectic of deception,
but when brought back to the signifier, what is being formulated
is precisely what was deflected at the outset, in the first position,
and which at that stage was in the unconscious just as it is in the
unconscious now at the third stage. What is being formulated comes
from the father. In the way that the subject receives his own message
in an inverted form, in the form of row czrc in); wj/c or row c}re in);
j73czs/er, here the message is row wj.// bcclr in)/ cfej./c7. Upon entering
the Oedipus complex, or so long as the Oedipus complex has not
been resolved, this is the promise on which the girl's entry into the
Oedipus complex is grounded. This is the point of departure for her
position, and if indeed we find in this series of dreams something
that is articulated as a situation that fulfils this promise, then it's
because it is always the same unconscious content that is borne out.
Freud hesitates when faced with this precisely because he hasn't
yet managed to provide a fully pared down formulation of what
transference is. In transference, there is an imaginary element and a
symbolic element, and consequently there is a choice to be made. If
there is a meaning to transference and to what Freud later contrib-
uted with the notion of W':z.cc7erfeo/w#grzwcr#g - on which I made sure
to spend a year, so that you could see what was meant by it - then
it's that there is an insistence that is inherent to the symbolic chain
as such.
By definition, this insistence inherent to the symbolic chain is
not taken on by the subject. None the less, the mere fact that here
it reproduces and survives into the third stage, to be formulated in

a dream - even though this does appear to be a misleading dream
on the imaginary level of the direct relationship with the therapist
- makes it strictly speaking, by itself alone, the representative of the
transference in the proper sense. This is where Freud could have
soundly and boldly placed his confidence, grounded on a less waver-
ing positioning of his notion of transference. He would have been
able to intervene if only he had perceived that transference happens
essentially on the level of symbolic articulation.
When we speak of transference, when something takes on meaning
from the fact that the analyst becomes the locus of the transference,
this is very precisely in so far as symbolic articulation as such is at
issue. Of course, this is before the subject has taken it on board, as
we can see here in this transference dream. Freud notes how there
and then something occurred that belonged to the realm of transfer-
ence, yet he draws from it neither the strict consequence nor the
correct method of intervention.
I'm pointing this out because in truth this is not valid for this par-
ticular case alone. We also have another case in which the problem
arises on the same level and in like fashion, except that Freud makes
the exact opposite mistake. This is the Dora case.
These two cases balance each other out admirably. They criss-
cross, the one with the other, and strictly so, not only because the
conflating of the symbolic position and the imaginary position
occurs in either case in an opposite direction, but still more because
in their overall constellation they are in strict correspondence, with
the sole proviso that they are correlated as positive to negative. I
might say that there is no finer illustration of Freud's formula that
perversion is the negative of neurosis.
This still has to be developed.
Let's quickly review the terms of the Dora case, through their com-
monality with the terms of the constellation that is present in the
case of the young homosexual woman.
In the Dora case we find exactly the same protagonists on centre
stage -the father, a daughter, and also a lady, Frau K. This is all the
more striking in that the whole problem revolves around the lady,
though this is hidden from Freud in the girl's presentation.
Dora is a case of pc/I./c kys/6rz.c and she has been brought to see
Freud because of certain symptoms she has. These symptoms are
undoubtedly mild, but striking all the same. Above all, the situation
has become intolerable following some sort of token of suicidal

intention that ultimately caused her family some alarm. When she is
taken to Freud, the father presents her as ill, and without a shadow
of a doubt this move to consult is an element that in itself denotes a
crisis in the social circle, in which previously the situation had been
maintained with a certain equilibrium. Nevertheless, this peculiar
equilibrium had already been upset two years hence, an equilib-
rium constituted by a positioning that was initially concealed from
Freud, namely that Dora's father had taken Frau K. as his mistress.
This woman was married to a gentleman named Herr K., and they
lived in a sort of foursome relation encompassing the couple formed
by father and daughter. Dora's mother is absent from the situation.
We can already see, as we keep pressing forward, the contrast
with the previous situation. In the case of the young homosexual
woman, the mother is present because she is the one who takes
the father's attention away from the daughter, thereby introducing
the real element of frustration that will be decisive in shaping the
perverse constellation. Furthermore, in the Dora case the father
is the one who brings the lady into the picture and seems to be
keeping her there, while in the other case the daughter is the one
who brings her in.
What is striking in this positioning is that Dora straightaway
emphasises to Freud her exceedingly sharp reproach concerning the
affection from her father, which she says has been stolen from her
by the affair. She shows right away that she has always been privy to
the existence of the affair, to its permanence and its regularity, and
that she has reached a point where she can stand it no longer. Her
entire deportment is indicative of her reproach in this regard.
With a step that is most decisive, possessing as it does the dialec-
tical quality, strictly speaking, of the Freudian experience, Freud
brings Dora to the question - JS j./ #o/ /fee cczfc /feaf wfecz/ }/o# ore
rebelling against, as though it were something out of line, is the very
thing that you yourseif participated in? ALnd, indeed, he proraptly
offers evidence of how, up until a critical moment, this position had
been supported most efficaciously by Dora herself. She had shown
herself to be far more than accepting of this singular situation. She
was truly its kingpin, protecting the private moments of the couple
formed by her father and the lady, even on occasion taking over
the lady's duties, such as looking after her children. On the other
hand, as one moves further into the structure of the case, she is even
to be seen staking out an altogether special bond with the lady,
whose confidante she is. Indeed, it seems that the confidences they
exchanged went very far indeed.
The case bears such wealth of detail that there are still discoveries
to be made in it, and so this quick reminder can on no account

replace an attentive reading. Among other items, let me point out
the lapse of nine months between the scene by the lake and the hys-
terical symptom of her dragging her leg, which Freud believes he has
uncovered because the patient yields it to him in a symbolic fashion,
but if one looks more closely one will notice that in reality it was a
lapse of fifteen months. These fifteen months carry meaning because
/if/ec# crops up throughout the observation, and this element is
useful for our understanding in that it is grounded on number and
on a purely symbolic value.
Today I can do no more than remind you of the terms in which the
whole problem is set out, from beginning to end of the observation.
It's not merely that Freud realises, after the event, that he has failed,
due to the patient's resistance to admitting the love relation that
binds her to Herr K., as Freud suggested to her with all the weight
of his insistence and authority. It's not merely the footnote added,
with hindsight, in which he points out that doubtless there was an
error, namely that he should have understood that the homosexual
attachment to Frau K. was the true signification of both the estab-
lishing of her initial position and her crisis. What is important is not
merely that Freud acknowledges this after the event, but rather that
throughout the observation you can read that Freud remains in the
greatest ambiguity concerning the real object of Dora's desire.
In what terms is the problem to be articulated? Yet again, it's
a matter of how this ambiguity might possibly be fomulated, an
ambiguity that is in some sense unresolved. It's quite clear that Herr
K., in his person, is of overarching importance for Dora and that
something along the lines of a libidinal bond has been established
with him. It is also clear that something that belongs to another
realm, yet which also carries considerable weight, is playing a con-
stant role in Dora's libidinal bond with Frau K. How are they each
to be appreciated in a way that would account both for the further-
ance of the affair and for the moment at which it stops, its crisis
point when the equilibrium is upset?
When I made my first inroad into the observation five years ago,
I pointed out that, in conformity with the hysteric structure, the
hysteric is someone who loves vicariously. You will find this in a
whole host of observations. The hysteric is someone whose object is
homosexual and who approaches this homosexual object by idem-
tifying with someone of the opposite sex. This was a first clinical
approach, as it were, to the patient Dora.
I went further still. Taking as my point of departure the notion of
the narcissistic relationship insomuch as it founds the ego, insomuch
as it is the matrix, the Urbj./cJ, of the constitution of this imaginary
function known as the ego, I showed how this affords trace elements
for the observation. The full g#crc7rj.//c can be understood only to the
extent that Dora's ego - and the ego alone - has identified with a
virile protagonist, who is Herr K., and that for her the men are so
many possible crystallisations of her own ego. In other words, it is
through the intermediary of Herr K., it is in so far as she ;.s Herr K.,
at the imaginary point constituted by the personality of Herr K.,
that she is attached to the personage of Frau K.
I went a little further still. I said that Frau K. is someone of
inportance. Why so? She is not important merely because she has
been chosen among other objects. She is not merely someone of
whom we might say that she is vested by the narcissistic function
that lies at the bottom of any enamoration, any Vcr/i.cbffoej./. No. As
the dreams show -since the essential point of the observation hinges
on the dreams -Frau K. is Dora's question.
Let's try now to transcribe this onto our present formulation,
and to pinpoint what in this foursome comes to be arranged on our
fundamental schematic.
Dora is a hysteric, that is to say, someone who reached the level
of the Oedipal crisis and who was both able and unable to pass
through it. There is a reason for this, which is that her father, unlike
the father of the young homosexual woman, is impotent. The whole
observation leans on this central notion of the father's impotence.
Here, then, is an opportunity to highlight in a particularly exem-
plary fashion what the function of the father might be in relation to
the lack of object that led the girl into the Oedipus complex. What
might the function of the father be qua giver?
This situation hinges on the distinction I made regarding primary
frustration, the frustration that can set in between child and mother.
There is the object of the child's frustration, but after this frustrating
the child's desire persists. Frustration means something only to the
extent that the object is the subject's appurtenance and persists as
such after the frustrating. What is distinct in the mother's interven-
ing belongs to another register, in that she gives, or doesn't give, and
in that this gift is a sign of love.
Now comes the father, who is cut out to be the one who gives,
symbolically, this missing object. Here in the Dora case he doesn't
give it because he hasn't got it. Her father's phallic shortcoming
resounds throughout the entire observation like the root of a chord,
constitutive of the positioning. But yet again, do we find ourselves
on just the one plane? Will the whole crisis be established solely in
relation to this lack? Let's consider what is at stake. What does it
mean to give? Isn't there another dimension that is introduced into
the object relation on the level where it is raised to the symbolic
degree by the fact that the object may or may not be given? In other
words, is it ever the object that is given? This is the question, and
in the Dora observation we can see one of its outcomes, which is
utterly exemplary.
Dora remains very attached to this father from whom she does
not receive, symbolically, the virile gift. She is so attached to him
that her story begins exactly at the age of the dissolution of the
Oedipus complex, with a whole series of hysterical mishaps that are
very clearly linked to shows of love for the father, who at that time
appears more than ever, and decisively so, to be a wounded and
sick father, stricken in his very vital forces. The love she has for this
father is at that time strictly correlative and coextensive with his
diminution.
So, we have a very clear-cut distinction here. What intervenes in
the love relationship, what is asked for as a sign of love, is only ever
something that carries worth merely as a sign. Or, to go yet further,
there is no greater possible gift, no greater sign of love, than the gift
of what one hasn't got. Let's take note, however, that the dimension
of the gift comes into existence only with the introduction of the
Law. As is posited and asserted in sociological thought as a whole,
a gift is something that circulates. The gift you give is always the gift
you have received. But when the giving occurs between two subjects,
the cycle of gifts comes from yet elsewhere, because what establishes
a love relationship is that the gift is given, so to speak, for nothing.
Jzj.c# po#r rz.cH is the principle of exchange. You get nothing for
nothing. This formula, like any formula in which the ambiguous
rj.c# occurs, seems to be the very formula for j.#/crcs/, but it is also
the formula for what is wholly free of charge. Indeed, in the gift of
love there is merely something that is given for nothing, and which
can only be nothing. In other words, a subject gives something for
free in so far as behind what he gives there is everything he lacks.
What constitutes the gift is that the subject sacrifices beyond what
he has. Moreover, this holds true for the primitive gift such as it
effectively used to be practised at the origin of human exchanges in
the form of the potlatch.
Imagine if you will a subject in possession of all the riches poss-
ible, the maximum possible amount of what may be possessed. Well,
a gift from such a subject would literally have no value as a sign of
love. Believers imagine that they love God because He is deemed to
possess within Him this total plenitude and fullness, but it's quite
certain that if this recognition is so much as thinkable, for anything
whatsoever, when it comes to someone who might have gauged
that at the root of any belief there is this Being who is supposed to
be thought of as a Whole, even so, without any doubt He lacks the
foremost thing in Being, that is to say, existence. At the root of any

belief in God as perfectly and totally munificent, there is this./.c #c
5czz.a gctoz. that He forever lacks and which means that, all the same,
it is always supposable that He doesn't exist. There is no reason to
love God save that perhaps He doesn't exist.
What is certain is that this is where Dora is when she loves her
father. She loves him precisely for what he doesn't give her. The
whole situation is unthinkable outside of this initial position, which
is maintained through to the end. It still needs to be seen how this
situation could be tolerated and put up with once the father got
involved in something else, right before Dora's very eyes, and which
she even seems to have induced.
The observation hinges on the following. We have the father,
Dora, and Frau K.
Frau K. Dora Father
The whole situation is established as though Dora had to ask

hersel[ the question. What is it that myfiather loves in Frau K.? Frau
K. is presented as something that her father can love beyond herself.
What Dora latches on to is this something that is loved by her father
in another, in so far as she doesn't know what it is.
This is in full conformity with what is supposed by the whole
theory of the phallic object, namely that the female subject can
enter the dialectic of the symbolic order only through the gift of
the phallus. There is no other way. This supposes that recI/ ;teed,
which is not denied by Freud and which belongs to the female
organ as such, to woman's physiology, is something that never
enters automatically into the establishing of the position of desire.
Desire targets the phallus to the extent that it must be received as
a gift. To this end, the phallus has to be raised to the level of the
gift, which moreover may be absent or present. It is in so far as it
is raised to the dignity of the gift-object that it leads the subject to
enter the dialectic of exchange, which will normalise each of the
subject's positions, up to and including the essential prohibitions
that ground the overall movement of exchange. It is from within
this that recz/ #ccd, the existence of which Freud never dreamed
of denying, and which is linked to the female organ as such, will
fall into its place and be satisfied, as it were, laterally. But it is
never marked out symbolically as something that carries meaning.
It is always essentially problematic unto itself, positioned shy of a
certain symbolic crossing-point.
Indeed, this is precisely what is at stake throughout the unfurling

of these symptoms and the unfurling of the observation. Dora asks
herself, Wfzcz/ z.I a womcz#? And it's in so far as Frau K. embodies
this feminine function as such that for Dora she is the representation
of the very thing into which Dora projects herself, as the question
of femininity. It is to the extent that Dora herself is on the path of
the dual relation with Frau K., or rather that Frau K. is what
is loved beyond Dora, that Dora feels herself to be concerned in
this position. Frau K. is the living incarnation of what Dora can
neither know nor cognise in this situation, where she finds nowhere
to accommodate herself. When it comes to love, someone is loved
over and above what that someone is. Ultimately it's something this
someone is lacking, whoever they are.
Dora places herself somewhere between her father and Frau K.
Insomuch as her father loves Frau K., Dora feels satisfied, but on
the condition, of course, that this positioning should be maintained.
Moreover, this positioning is symbolised in umpteen different ways.
The impotent father compensates by every kind of symbolic gift,
including material gifts, for what he does not embody as a virile
presence. And, in passing, he effectively makes Dora benefit from
this through all sorts of generosity that are shared out equally to
the mistress and to the daughter, thereby having her partake of this
symbolic position.
Yet this is still not enough, and Dora tries to restore access to a
manifest position oriented in the opposite direction. I mean that
it's no longer vis-a-vis the father but vis-a-vis the woman she has in
front of her, Frau K., that she tries to re-establish a triangular situa-
tion. This is where Herr K. comes in, through whom the triangle can
effectively be closed, but in an inverted position.
Herr K.
Frau K. Dora Father
Owing to her interest in the question, Dora will regard Herr K. as

someone who participates in what symbolises the question aspect of
Frau K.'s presence, namely the adoration that is further expressed
by a very patent symbolic association that is given in the observa-
tion, the Sistine Madonna. Frau K. is an object of adoration to

everyone around her, and Dora ultimately positions herself in rela-
tion to her as a participant in this adoration. Herr K. is the means
whereby she makes this position normative by trying to reintegrate
the male element into the circuit.
When does she slap him? Not when he is courting her or making
declarations of love, nor even when he approaches her in a way that
is intolerable for a hysteric. Rather, it's at the moment he tells her,
Jcfe Aczbc #z.cAfs cz# mez.#cr Frczw. The German wording is particularly
telling. It has a particularly vivid sense, if we allow the term #o/fez.#g
to have its full scope. What he says in essence removes him from the
circuit that had been thereby constituted, and which in its ordering
"T7
is set out as follows -
Frau K. Herr K.
the questio with whom Dora identifies
Dora Father
remains the Other par excellence
Dora can readily accept that her father loves in her and through
her what lies beyond, Frau K. But for Herr K. to be tolerable
in this positioning he has to occupy the exact opposite function,
which balances it out, namely, Dora herself has to be loved by him
beyond his wife, but in so far as his wife means something to him.
This something is the same as the #ofA!.#g that must lie beyond,
that is to say, in this instance, Dora. He doesn't say that his wife
means nothing to him. He says that on the side of his wife, there is
nothing. This cz# can be found in countless locutions in German,
for example in the expression Es/crfe// z.Am cz# Ge/d. The particular
wording here in German shows that this cz# is an additional link
into the beyond of what lacks. This is precisely what we meet here.
He means that there is nothing beyond his wife - A4.); wj/c z.s' #o/
included in the circuit .
What is the upshot of this? Dora cannot tolerate that he should be
interested in her, Dora, only in so far as he is interested in her alone.
By the same stroke, the whole situation is broken off. If Herr K. is
only interested in her, then her father is only interested in Frau K.,
and at that point she can no longer tolerate it. Why not?
In Freud's eyes, this nevertheless falls within a typical kind of
situation. As Claude L6vi-Strauss explains in E/cme#/czr}j S/rwc/wres

a/Kz'#sfozp, the exchange of ties of alliance consists in the following
- I have received a wife and I owe a daughter. Yet whife this is the
very principle behind the institution of exchange and of Law, it
turns woman purely and simply into an object of exchange. She is
not integrated into this by anything. In other words, if she has not
renounced something, namely the paternal phallus conceived of as a
gift-object, she can conceive of nothing, subjectively speaking, that
she might receive from others, that is to say, from another man.
To the very extent that she is excluded from this first institution of
the gift and of the Law in the direct relation of the gift of love, she
cannot experience this situation otherwise than by feeling reduced to
the state of a mere object. I
This is indeed what happens at that very moment. Dora rebels
itosofutdy a.nd stalrts to sa,y, My fiather is selling me to someone else.
In effect, this is a clear and excellent assessment of the situation, to
the extent that it has been kept in this half-darkness. As a matter of
fact, from the father's standpoint, allowing Frau K.'s husband to
carry on his courting of Dora over these long years in a sort of veiled
tolerance has been a way of repaying his indulgence.
So, Herr K. has admitted that he has no part in a circuit where
Dora could either identify him with herself or think that she is Herr
K.'s object beyond the woman, through whom she is attached to
him. There is a breaking of these bonds, which are undoubtedly
subtle and ambiguous but which in each case carry a meaning and
are perfectly oriented. She can no longer find her place in the circuit
except in an extremely unstable fashion, but she does find it in some
way, and in a way that is constant. When the bonds break, the situ-
ation loses its balance and Dora finds herself having slid into the
role of a mere object. She then sets about staking a claim to the very
thing she was inclined to consider she had been receiving up to the
present time, though it was through the intermediary of another,
namely her father's love. From this moment forth, she demands it
exclusively, because it has been refused her totally.
So, what difference becomes apparent between these two registers

and these two situations in which Dora and the homosexual woman
are respectively implicated?
To go quickly, so as to end on something that will give you a clear
picture, I will tell you the following, which we shall confirm later.
If it is true that what is maintained in the unconscious of the young
homosexual woman is the father's promise, yow w.// beczr in)/ t.Az./d,
and if what she shows in her exalted love for the lady is, as Freud
says it is, the very model of absolutely selfless love, of love given
for nothing in return, can't you see that it's as though the young
woman wanted to show her father what true love is, this love that
her father has refused her? Undoubtedly the father was implicated
in the subject's unconscious, and no doubt this was because he was
finding further favour from the mother. Indeed, this relationship is
fundamental whenever a child enters the Oedipus complex, namely
the crushing superiority of the adult rival. What she demonstrates
to him is how one can love someone not only for what that person
has, but literally for what the person doesn't have, for the symbolic
penis she knows she will not find in the lady. For she knows full well
where the symbolic penis is to be found. It is with her father who, for
his part, is not impotent.
In other words, what is called pert;ers!.o# is expressed in this case
between the lines, through contrasts and allusions. It's a way of
speaking about something altogether different, but which necessar-
ily implies, through a rigorous sequence of terns that are in play,
its return as what is meant to be heard. You will find here what I
once called, in the widest sense, mc/o#);m};, which consists in getting
something across by speaking about something utterly different. If
you cannot appreciate this fundamental notion of metonymy in its
most comprehensive form, it is quite inconceivable that you should
manage to form any notion whatsoever of what perversion in the
imaginary can mean.
This metonymy is the principle behind everything that may be
called rccz/i.sin in the realm of art and invention. Realism literally
carries no sort of meaning whatsoever. A novel, which is made up
of a heap of tiny lineaments that mean nothing, has no value if
it doesn't make something pulsate harmonically, something that
carries a meaning beyond. Thus, near the beginning of W/ar cz7td
Pccrcc, the theme that emanates from the women's bare shoulders
stands for something else.2 If the great novelists are tolerable, it's
in so far as everything they endeavour to show us finds its meaning
not at all symbolically, nor allegorically, but rather through what
they allow to reverberate at a distance. The same goes for cinema.
When a film is good, it's because of the metonymic function.
And so too, the subject's function of perversion is a metonymic
function.
Is it the same for Dora, who is a neurotic? It's actually quite dif-
ferent. When we look at the diagram, we notice that in perversion we
are dealing with a signifying line of conduct that points to a signifier
that lies further along in the signifying chain, to the extent that it is
linked to it by a necessary signifier. In the Dora case, however, taken

as a subject, Dora places herself at each step of the way beneath a
certain number of signifiers in the chain. She finds in the situation a
sort of perpetual metaphor.
Literally, Frau K. is her metaphor, because Dora can say nothing
of what she is. Dora knows neither where to locate herself, nor
where she is, nor what she is meant for, nor what love is meant for.
She knows simply that love exists, and she finds an historicisation
of this, wherein she finds her place in the form of a question. This
question is focused by the content and the articulation of each of her
dreams - the jewellery box, then Bczfe#feo/, Frz.ec7feo/, yorfeo/- which
signify nothing more than this question. In short, it is in so far as
Dora questions herself about what it means to be a woman that she
expresses herself as she does, through her symptoms. These symp-
toms are signifier-elements, but to the extent that beneath them runs
a perpetually shifting signified, this being the way in which Dora
implicates herself in this and concerns herself with it.
Dora's neurosis takes on its meaning to the extent that it is meta-
phorical, and to the extent that it can be unravelled. And it was
precisely in so far as Freud forced the real element into this meta-
phor, the real element that tends to be reinserted in any metaphor,
by telling her 7lfoz.s I.f wAo );o2t /ovc, that something did, of course,
tend towards a normalisation in the situation when Herr K. entered
the game, but this something remained in a metaphorical state.
Proof of this is the sort of pregnancy that befalls Dora after the
crisis when she breaks off from Herr K., and which Freud perceives
with his prodigious intuitive feeling for signification. It is indeed
an odd sort of signifying still-birth that occurs at term, after nine
months. Freud says #j.#c mo#ffes because Dora herself tells him so.
She thereby confesses to a sort of pregnancy, but it actually happens
after that, after what for Dora would be a normal term pregnancy.
It is of significance that Dora sees in this the final reverberation
of what still binds her to Herr K. We find here, in a certain form,
some equation with a kind of copulation that translates into the
realm of the symbolic in a purely metaphorical fashion. Yet again,
the symptom is but a metaphor here, an attempt to join the Law of
symbolic exchanges to the man with whom one unites or disunites.
In contrast to this, the childbirth that is also to be found at the
end of the observation on the homosexual woman, before she comes
to see Freud, manifests in the following way - she abruptly throws
herself from a little railway bridge when, once again, the real father
steps in, evincing his irritation and wrath, which is in turn acknowl-
edged by the lady who is beside her, The lady tells her that she no
longer wishes to see her, and the young woman then finds herself
stripped utterly of her last resources. Up until that moment, she was
frustrated, since she was without the paternal phallus that was sup-
posed to be given to her, but she had found the means to maintain
desire along the path of the imaginary relationship with the lady.
Now that the lady has rejected her, however, she can no longer
sustain anything. The object is lost once and for all, and this #o/fez.7?g
in which she had set herself up, in order to demonstrate to her father
how to love, has no more reason to be. At that moment, she makes
her suicide attempt.
As Freud underlines for us, this also carries another meaning,
that of a definitive loss of the object. The phallus that has been
firmly refused her has fallen, #j.cderkommc#. This falling away has
the value of a definitive privation, and also mimes a sort of symbolic
childbirth. The metonymic aspect I was telling you about is to be
found here. If Freud can interpret the act of jumping off the railway
bridge at the critical and terminal moment of her relationship with
the lady and the father as a demonstrative way of herself becoming
this child that she has not had, and at the same time of destroying
herself in a final act that signifies the object, this is grounded solely
on the existence of the word 77;.cc7crkomme#.
This word indicates, metonymically, the final term, the term of
suicide, in which is expressed what is at stake in the young homosex-
ual woman, this being the sole mainspring of her entire perversion,
in keeping with what Freud asserted time and again concerning the
pathogenesis of a certain type of female homosexuality, namely a
steady and particularly reinforced love for the father.
23 January 1957
THE FETISH OBJECT
IX
THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL
The symbolic phallus

How lack is actualised
The screen-memory: coming to a halt on the image
Alternation between perverse identifications
The structure of reactional exhibitionism
Pursuing our reflections on the object, today I'm going to be putting

forward what can be gathered from them in connection with a
problem that actualises the question of the object in an especially
keen fashion, namely fetishes and fetishism.
You are going to see from this how the fundamental schema with
which I've been trying to furnish you these last weeks certainly finds
special expression in the following paradoxical assertions - that
what is loved in the object is what the object lacks aind thfut one gives
only what one hasn't got.
The fundamental schema that in any symbolic exchange, irre-
spective of how it may function, implies the permanence of the
constituent character of what lies beyond the object allows us to see
in a new light the perversion that has taken on the role of exemplum
in analytic theory and to establish what I might call its/w#c/czmc#/cz/
cgwczfj.o#s in a different way.
So, this is about fetishism.
Freud makes an inroad into the question of fetishism in two funda-

mental texts, one from 1905 and the other from 1927. While further
texts take up the question later, these two - the paragraph on fetish-
ism in the 7lfercc Ess¢};a o# ffec 7lfeeor}J a/Sc:I:#¢/z./}7 and the article
entitled Fe/I.fAz.sin - are the most precious.
144 The Fetish Object
In his article, Freud tells us at the outset that the fetish is the
symbol of something, but adds that in saying this he sfeo// ccrfczz.#/y
crc¢fc dJ.Jappoz.#fmc#f . A great deal has been said about the fetish
for as long as people have been speaking about analysis, and also
since Freud first spoke about it. The something in question is, once
again, the penis.
Yet immediately after this comment, he stresses that this is 7io/
a#}J cha#cc pc#!.a. The detail seems scarcely to have been exploited
in its structural grounding, in the fundamental suppositions that it
implies on reading it naively for the first time. To spell it right out,
the penis at stake is not the real penis. It's the penis in so far as the
woman has it, that it to say, in so far as she does not have it.
I'm underscoring this point of oscillation, on which we ought
briefly to pause, so as to see what is ordinarily passed over, and
which we must not pass over. For someone who does not make use.
of the keys we possess, all this is merely a matter of misrecognising
the real - it's about the phallus that the woman docs#'/ feczvc, and
which she mws/ fecvc for reasons relating to the child's doubtful rela-
tion to reality. This is the common path, which usually supports all
manner of speculation on the future, the development and the crisis-
points of fetishism, and, as I have been able to confirm through an
extensive reading of all that has been written on fetishism, it leads to
all sorts of impasse.
Here, as always, I have ventured not to expand too far into this
forest of analytic literature. In truth, this is something that, to be
treated effectively, would require not just hours but a more con-
trolled study, for there is nothing more delicate and more fastidious
than to locate the precise point at which some matter shrinks away,
at which the author avoids the crucial point in a discrimination.
So, I will be showing you here, in one part of what I'm about to
expatiate, the more or less settled result of my readings, and I will be
asking you to follow me.
To avoid the aimless wandering into which the authors have grad-
ually been led over the years whenever they avoid this point, and to
restore the proper position to what is at issue, the differential sinew
by which to broach this is that on no account is this a real phallus,
a phallus which, as real, would exist or not exist. It's a symbolic
phallus, in so far as it's in its very nature to present in exchange as
an absence, as an absence that functions as such.
Indeed, everything that can be tralatitious in symbolic exchange
is always something that is as much absence as presence. It is made
in such a way that it has a sort of fundamental alternation, which
means that, having appeared at one point, it disappears then to
reappear at another. In other words, it circulates, leaving behind
The Function of the Veil 145
it the sign of its absence at the point from which it came. In yet
other words, we can immediately recognise that the phallus that is
involved here is a symbolic object.
On the one hand, by means of this object a structural cycle of
imaginary threats is established, which limits the use and wielding
of the real phallus. This is the meaning of the castration complex,
in that this is how the man is caught in it. But there is another use,
which is hidden, so to speak, by the more or less fearsome fantasies
in the man's relation to these prohibitions bearing on the use of the
phauus, and this is the symbolic function of the phallus. I mean that
the fact of whether it is there or not there, and solely in so far as
it is there or not there, is what sets up the symbolic differentiation
between the sexes.
Symbolically, woman does not have the phallus. But not to have
the phallus symbolically is to partake of it in the capacity of absence,
and so to have it in some way. The phallus always lies beyond any
relationship between man and woman. It can on occasion form the
object of a woman's imaginary yearning to the extent that she has
only a very small phallus, yet this phallus that she might feel to be
insufficient is not the only one that functions for her because, in so
far as she is caught in the intersubjective relationship, there lies,
beyond her, for the man, the phallus that she doesn't have, that is to
say, the symbolic phallus that exists qua absence. This is completely
independent of the inferiority she might feel on the imaginary plane,
for as much as she has a real partaking of the phallus.
This symbolic penis, which the other day I positioned in the
diagram for the young homosexual woman, plays an essential role
and function in the girl's entry into symbolic exchange. It is in so
far as she does not have this phallus, that is to say, in so far as, also,
she does have it on the symbolic plane, it is in so far as she enters
the symbolic dialectic of having or not having the phallus, that she
thereby enters the ordered, symbolised relationship of differentia-
tion between the sexes, where the inter-human relationship is taken
on board as something disciplined, typified, ordered, struck with
prohibitions and marked by the fundamental structure of the incest
law. This is what Freud means when he tells us that it is through the
intermediary of what he calls the j.decz of castration in woman -and
which is precisely that she does not have it symbolically, and so
therefore she may have it - that she enters the Oedipus complex,
whereas this is the boy's way out if it.
In this we can see how, structurally speaking, the androcentrism
that marks the elementary structures of kinship in L6vi-Strauss's
schematisationisinacertainwayjustifled.Thewomenareexchanged
between lineages founded on the male line, the one that is chosen
precisely because it is symbolic and improbable. It is a fact that the

women are exchanged as an object between male lineages. They
enter here through an exchange, that of the phallus they receive
symbolically and in exchange for which they give the child that for
them takes on the function of an ersatz, a substitute, an equivalent
for the phallus, and whereby they introduce natural fecundity into
this patricentric symbolic genealogy which in itself is sterile. Yet it
is in so far as they latch onto this sole and central object that is dis-
tinguished by the fact that z./ j.a precz.se/); #of cz# oky.ecf, but an object
that has undergone symbolic valorisation in the most radical way, it
is by the intermediary of their relation to this phallus, that they enter
the chain of symbolic exchange, that they set themselves up within it
and assume their place and value.
Once you have noticed this you can see it finding expression in
umpteen different ways. When we look closely, what is ultimately
expressed in this fundamental theme of the woman giving of herself,
if not precisely the need to affirm the gift? Here we can see the con-
crete psychological experience such as it is given to us, and which
is so paradoxical in this instance because it's quite clear that in
the act of love, the woman receives, for real. She receives far more
than she gives. Everything indicates, and the analytic experience has
accentuated this, that no position is a more capturing one, indeed a
more consuming one, on the imaginary plane, than hers. If this gets
turned around into the contrary assertion, namely that the woman
gives herself, it is to the very extent that symbolically it must be so.
She must give something in exchange for what she receives, that is,
the symbolic phallus.
So - Freud tells us - here we have the fetish, representing the
phallus qua absent, the symbolic phallus. How can we not see here,
right away, that this sort of initial turnaround is indispensable if
we are to understand items that are otherwise utterly paradoxical?
For example, it is invariably boys who are fetishists, and never girls.
If everything lay on the plane of imaginary deficiency, or even of
imaginary inferiority, it might seem on first approach that of the
two sexes fetishism would break out most overtly in the one that is
deprived of the phallus for real. Yet this is hardly the case. Fetishism
is exceedingly rare in women, in the proper and individualised sense
that it is incarnated in an object that we can regard as itself cor-
responding in a symbolic way to the phallus qua absent.
Let's try to see first of all how this singular relation to an object
that is not one can be generated.
Analysis tells us that the fetish is a symbol. In this respect, it is

placed at the outset almost on the same footing as any other neu-
rotic symbol.
When it is not a neurosis that is at issue but rather a perversion,
this is not so palpable. This is how things are classified nosographi-
cally for reasons of clinical resemblance that indubitably harbour
a certain value, but one has to look fairly closely to confirm this in
the structure from the standpoint of analysis. In truth, a good many
authors show hesitation here and go so far as to place fetishism on
the borderline between the perversions and the neuroses, precisely
due to the especially symbolic character of the crucial fantasy.
Having started with the full weight of structure, let's pause for a
moment on this position of interposition, which means that what
is loved in the love-object is something that lies beyond it. This
something is undoubtedly nothing, but it possesses the property of
being there symbolically. Since it is a symbol, not only co# it be this
nothing, but also it mwsJ be. What can materialise for us, as it were,
in the sharpest way this relationship of interposition, which means
that what is aimed at lies beyond what presents itself? Well, some-
thing that is truly one of the most fundamental images of the human
relationship with the world, namely the veil, the curtain.
The veil or curtain that hangs in front of something is still what
best affords an image of this fundamental situation of love. One can
even say that with the presence of the curtain, what lies beyond as
a lack tends to be actualised as an image. The absence is painted
onto the veil. This is nothing less than a curtain's function per se,
whichever it may be. The curtain assumes its value, its being and
its consistence from being precisely that onto which absence is pro-
jected and imagined. The curtain is, so to speak, the idol of absence.
If the veil of Maya is the most commonly used metaphor to express
man's relation to all that captivates him, this is surely due to his
sense of a certain fundamental illusion in all his relations of desire.
It is precisely here that man embodies and idolifies his sense of this
nothing that lies beyond the love-object.
You should hold this fundamental schema in your minds if you
want to locate in the right way the elements that come into play in
the setting up of the fetishistic relationship, at whichever moment
we might consider it.
subject object nothing
curtaln
Here, then, is the subject, and the object, and what lies beyond
is the nothing, or else the symbol, or else the phallus insomuch as
woman lacks it. But once the curtain is in place, something can be
painted onto it that indicates that the object lies beyond. The object
can then take the place of lack, and also, as such, be the support of
love, but in so far as it is precisely not the point to which desire is
tethered. Desire appears in some way as a metaphor for love, but
what tethers it, namely the object, appears as something illusory and
as something that is valorised as illusory.
The notorious splitting of the ego when the fetish is involved is
explained to us by saying that here woman's castration is at once
affirmed yet denied. Since the fetish is there, she has not lost the
phallus, but by the same stroke she can be made to lose it, that is, she
can be castrated. The ambiguity of this relationship to the fetish is
constant and is relentlessly manifested from one moment to the next
in symptoms. This ambiguity, which is borne out in lived experience,
an illusion both sustained and cherished as such, is at the same time
experienced in a fragile balance where at any moment the curtain
could be raised or come tumbling down. This is the relation that is
at issue in the fetishist's relationship with his object.
When we follow Freud's article further, he speaks of Vcr/cwg#w#g
with regard to the fundamental stance of disavowing in the relation-
ship to the fetish. But he also says that it's about making the complex
relationship hold up, cz#/recA/zwfocz//t3#, as though he were speaking
about a stage set. Freud's language, which is so full of imagery,
while being so very precise, employs terms that here assume their
vtL+ue. He says thfut the horror of castration has set up a memorial to
itself in the creation of this substitute. The fedrsh is a, Denkmal. The
word /rapdy doesn't feature, but in truth it is there, doubling up
as thf3 token of triumph, das Zeichen des Triumphes. ALutho[s who
approach the typical phenomenon of the fetish will speak over and
again of the way in which the subject heraldises his relation to sex,t
but Freud is making us take a step further here.
Why does this come about? Why is it necessary? We will be
coming back to this afterwards. As always, people press ahead

too quickly. If one goes straight to the whys and wherefores, one
slides immediately into a kind of pandemonium where all sorts
of leanings come crowding in to explain why the subject can be
more or less remote from the object and feel himself to be arrested,
threatened and in conflict.2 Let's stay for the time being at the level
of structure.
The structure is here in this relation between the veil and what lies
beyond it. An image can be formed on the veil, that is to say, it can
be established as an imaginary capture and as the place of desire.
This relationship with a beyond-zone is fundamental whenever a
symbolic relationship is being set up. It's a matter of descending
onto the imaginary plane of the ternary order of swZ}y.cc/ / oZ)y.cc/ /
beyo7tcz-z'o7!e that is fundamental to the symbolic relationship. In
other words, it's about projecting the intermediary position of the
object into the function of the veil.
Before going any further and examining the subject's requirement
of this veil, we are going to look at another angle from which a
symbolic relation is established in the inaginary.
When last time I was speaking about the perverse structure as
such, I spoke about metonymy, or allusion, or a relation that lies
between the lines, these being the elevated forms of metonymy. Here
Freud puts it in the clearest possible way, though he does not use the
word mefo#)/m};. What constitutes the fetish, the symbolic element
that fixes down the fetish and projects it onto the veil, is taken from
the historical dimension. It's the moment when the image comes to
a standstill.
I recall previously making a comparison with a film that all of a
sudden freezes, just before the moment when what is being sought in
the mother, that is, the phallus that she has and which she does not
have, has to be seen qua prcsc7€ccrdbsc7tcc, qua czbsc#cc-prcsc#cc.
The historical reminiscence is halted and suspended at the moment
just before.
I'm saying Az.sforz.car/ rcmz.#j.sce#cc because there is no other
meaning to be given to the term scrcc#-77tcmor}j, which is so fun-
damental in Freud's conceptualisation and phenomenology. The
screen-memory, the Deckcrz.##c"#g, is not merely a snapshot.
It's an interruption in the subject's history, a moment at which it
becomes halted and frozen, and so by the same token a moment
when it indicates the pursuance of its movement beyond the veil.
The screen-memory is linked to the subject's history by a whole
chain. It is a stopping point in this chain, and it's in this respect
that it is metonymical, because history, by its very nature, goes on.
In coming to a halt there, the chain indicates its ensuing sequence,
which is thenceforth veiled. It indicates its absent sequence, namely

the repression at stake, as Freud says very clearly.
We speak of repression solely in so far as there is a symbolic chain.
If a phenomenon that may pass for an imaginary phenomenon can
be designated as the point of a repression - because the fetish is in
a certain sense an image, and a projected image - it's precisely in so
far as this image is merely the limit point between history insomuch
as it goes on and the moment at which it is interrupted. It is the sign,
the marker, of the point of repression.
If you read Freud's text carefully you will see that this way of
spelling things out is the clearest way of giving his expressions their
full weight.
Once again we can see the distinction between the relationship
with the love object and the relationship of object frustration. These
are two different relationships. On the one hand, love transfers via
metaphor to desire, which latches onto the object as something illu-
sory, while on the other hand the constitution of the object is not
metaphoric but metonymic. The latter is a point in the chain of
history at which history has come to a halt. It's the sign that this
is where the beyond-zone that the subject has constituted begins.
Why so? Why does the subject have to constitute this zone that
lies beyond? Why is the veil more precious to man than reality?
Why does the order of this illusory relationship become an essential
constituent that is necessary for his relation to the object? This is the
question posed by fetishism.
Before going further, from what I've just said you can see all sorts
of things becoming clearer, including for instance the fact that as the
first example of an analysis of a fetishist Freud gives us the wonder-
ful story of a play on words, concerning a gentleman who had been
brought up in England and later became a fetishist in Germany, and
who was forever seeking out a little shine on the nose. Moreover,
he would actually see this shine, this G/cz#z aw/c7er IVczse. It meant
nothing other than a g/cz#ce a/ ffee #osc, the nose itself being, of
course, a symbol. The German expression simply transposed the
English expression of his early years. You can see here the histori-
cal chain coming into play and projecting onto a point on the veil
insomuch as it can even encompass an entire sentence, and indeed a
sentence from a forgotten tongue.
What are the causes behind the setting-up of the fetishistic struc-
ture? The Kleinians won't ascertain anything for you in this matter.
In any case, the various authors have been in a bind for some time
now.
On the one hand, we cannot lose sight of the notion of the essential
articulation that is the relation between the genesis of fetishism and
the castration complex. On the other, it is apparently most certain in
preoedipal relationships, and not elsewhere, that the phallic mother
is the central element and the decisive mainspring. How are the two
to be joined together?
These authors are more or less happy to do so. Just look how
comfortable the members of the English school are - fair to mid-
dling, actually -thanks to Mrs Melanie Klein's system. It structures
the first stages of the oral drive tendencies, and particularly their
most aggressive moment, by introducing the presence of the pater-
nal penis into the very heart of this moment by means of retroactive
projection, that is to say, by retroactivating the Oedipus complex in
the earliest relationships with objects that are introjectable. Clearly,
in this way they have easier access to the material that will allow for
an interpretation of what is at issue. Since I have not yet embarked
on an exhaustive critique of what Melanie Klein's system means,
we shall leave aside for the time being what one or another author
might be able to contribute on this score. To stick to what we have
brought to light here, let's start with the fundamental relationship
between the real child, the symbolic mother and her phallus, which
for her is imaginary.
So, this is a scheme to be handled with caution inasmuch as it is
focused on a single plane, despite corresponding to various planes
and coming to function at successive stages of the story. Indeed, for a
long while the child is not in a position to appropriate for himself the
relationship of imaginary appurtenance that produces the mother's
profound division on her side. We are going to try this year to elu-
cidate this question. We are on the path of seeing how and at what
moment this is taken on board by the child, and how this comes into
play when the child himself enters this relationship with the symbolic
object in so far as the phallus is its main currency. This poses ques-
tions of chronology, temporality, order and succession, which are
questions that we try to broach quite naturally - as is indicated by the
history of psychoanalysis - from the angle of pathology.
What do the observations show us here? When we scrutinise them
carefully they show that it is very exactly around and correlative
to this singular symptom, which places the subject in an elective
relationship with a fetish - the mesmerising object inscribed upon
the veil -that his erotic life gravitates. I'm saying gravz./cz/es because
although it is a mesmerising object, it is understood that the subject
maintains a certain freedom of movement, which can be perceived
when one analyses and doesn't merely make a clinical description.

When we take an observation we can see those elements that I have
been spelling out today, and which Binet himself had already seen,
for instance this gripping point of the screen-memory and the stand-
still at the hem of the mother's dress, even her girdle. We can see
the essentially ambiguous relation of illusion with this fetish being
lived through as such and, moreover, being preferred. We can see
the particularly satisfying function of an object that in itself is inert
and entirely at the mercy of the subject for the handling of his erotic
relationships. All of this can be seen, but it takes analysis to see what
is at stake a little more closely, namely what happens whenever,
for whatever reason, the recourse to the fetish founders, becomes
exhausted and worn out, and simply gives way.
What we can see in the subject's deportment in his love life, and
more simply in his erotic relationship, boils down to a defence. You
can inspect this by reading observations in the J#/er#¢/I.o#cz/ Jowr#¢/,
by Mrs Sylvia Payne in the second issue of volume 20, by Mr W. H.
Gillespie in volume 21 , and by Mr Dugmore Hunter in the third issue
of volume 35, or those by Mrs Greenacre and others in the Ps}7cho-
4#cz/};fj.c S/wd); a//fee Cfez./d. This was also glimpsed by Freud, and
is spelt out in our diagram. Freud tells us that fetishism is a defence
against homosexuality and Mr Gillespie too notes ¢ow #¢rrow m¢);
be /fee mczrgj.# between fetishism and homosexuality. In short, what
we find in the relationships with the love object that organise this
cycle for the fetishist is an alternation of identifications. There is an
identification with the woman confronted with the destructive penis,
the imaginary phallus of the primordial experiences from the oral-
anal period focused on the aggressiveness of the sadistic theory of
coitus, and indeed a good many experiences that are brought to light
by analysis include some observation of the primal scene perceived
as cruel, aggressive, violent and even deadly. And, conversely, there
is the subject's identification with the imaginary phallus, which for
the woman makes it a pure object which she can devour and, at the
furthest limit, destroy.
The child is faced with this oscillation between the two poles of
the imaginary relationship in what might be called a brutal fashion,
not yet established in its Oedipal lawfulness by the introduction of
the father as a subject, as a central point of order and legitimate
ownership. The child is offered up to this bipolar oscillation of the
relationship between two irreconcilable objects which either way
culminate in a destructive and even deadly outcome. This is what is
to be found at the base of love relations whenever they arise in the
subject's life as they assume order and shape. Along a certain path
of understanding analysis, which is precisely the new-fangled path
and which in this respect has forged its own path, the analyst will
intervene to make the subject perceive the alternation between these
positions at the same time as their signification. It might be said that
in a certain way the analyst intervenes to open the symbolic distance
that is necessary for the subject to perceive meaning.
The observations are exceedingly rich and profitable here, when
they show us for example the umpteen forms that the actuality of
the subject's early life can take, the fundamental dis-completion that
means that he is offered up as such to the imaginary relationship,
either along the path of identification with the woman or along the
path of taking the place of the imaginary phallus. That is to say,
either way there is an insufficient symbolisation of the ternary rela-
tionship. For example, the authors say that very often they note the
absence of the father, sometimes repeatedly in the subject's history,
his shortcoming as a presence - he goes on a trip, off to war, and so
forth.
Furthermore, they note a certain type of subjective position that
is sometimes peculiarly reproduced in the fantasies, that of a forced
immobilisation. It is sometimes manifested by the fact of the subject
having actually been tied down. There is a very fine example in
the observation by Sylvia Payne. Following some excessive medical
advice, a child was prevented from walking up until the age of two.
He had to be tied down in his bed, and this was not without conse-
quence, including the fact that he lived in this way closely monitored
in his parents' bedroom. This put him in the exemplary position of
being entirely given over to a purely visual relationship, without
any first signs of muscular activity emerging from their source. His
relationship with his parents was thus lived through in the style of
rage and anger that you can imagine. While such exemplary cases
are rare, some authors have insisted on the fact that certain phobic
mothers who keep their child at a distance from their contact, a
little as though such contact were a source of infection, are certainly
not without consequence on the supervalence accorded the visual
relationship in the constitution of the primal relationship with the
maternal object.
Be that as it may, far more instructive than any such example of
a vitiation of the primary relationship is, as it were, what appears
as a pathological relationship, which presents as the flipside or the
complement to the libidinal adherence to the fetish. Fetishism is a
classification that, nosologically speaking, encompasses all sorts of
things for which our intuition merely gives us an indication of their
affinity or kinship with fetishism.
That a subject like the one Mrs Payne tells us about should be
attached to a mackintosh seems to be of the same nature as being
attached to a shoe. We make no mistake in thinking so. Structurally

speaking, however, this mackintosh contains relations on its own
account and indicates a position that is somewhat different from
that of the shoe or the girdle in so far as strictly speaking they are
themselves directly in the position of the veil between subject and
object. Yet it is quite certain that this mackintosh, like any other
kind of clothing fetish that is more or less enveloping, aside from
the special quality that the rubber entails, possesses a feature that is
very often met and which cannot fail to harbour some final mystery
that would doubtless be clarified psychologically by the sensoriality
of the special contact with the rubber itself. Perhaps it does harbour
something that might, more easily than anything else, be the outer
lining of skin, or else perhaps harbour special insulating capacities,
but whatever the case may be concerning the structure itself of the
relations such as they are delivered up in some centres where the
observation is made analytically, we can see that the mackintosh
plays a role here that is no longer exactly that of the veil. It is
much rather the role of something behind which the subject aligns
himself, not as though he were in front of the veil but as though he
were behind it, that is, in the mother's place, and, more specifically,
adhering to the position of identification with the mother in which
she needs to be protected, right here, by this envelopment.
This is what affords the transition between cases of fetishism and
those of transvestism. The envelopment is not a veil but a protec-
tion. It's an aegis in which the subject identified with the female
personage envelops himself.
Another typical relationship that can be particularly exemplary
is evidenced in outbreaks of an exhibitionism that in some cases
is truly reactional, even sometimes in alternation with fetishism.
It always occurs in connection with some effort the subject makes
to leave his labyrinth, and when the real comes into play in some
way, putting the subject in these positions of unstable equilibrium
that give rise to this type of crystallisation or swing-around of his
position. This is very plainly illustrated by the outline of Freud's
case of female homosexuality, to the extent that we can see that
the introduction of the real element in the shape of the father
leads to an interchange of the terms such that what was located
in the beyond-zone, the symbolic father, takes up a place in the
imaginary relationship in the form of the exemplary homosexual
position that she assumes, and which is demonstrative in relation
to the father.
Similarly, among the observations we have a very fine case in
which we can see a subject who, having attempted in certain condi-
tions to gain access to a full relationship by artificially forcing the
real, expresses what was symbolically latent in the situation by means

of his acting-out, that is to say, on the imaginary plane. Here is the
example. The subject is about to attempt actual intercourse with a
woman for the first time, but he positions himself in the experience
as venturing into it in order to show, as it were, what he is capable
of doing. He manages more or less successfully thanks to the help
of the woman but, within the hour, even though there was nothing
to suggest any possibility of his developing such symptoms, he gives
himself over to a most peculiar and very highly calculated exhibi-
tionism that consists in exposing his organ just as an international
train is passing by. In this way, he could not be caught red-handed.
He was compelled, therefore, to follow-up on something that was
implicit in his position. His exhibitionism was merely the expression
or the projection on the imaginary plane of something of which he
had not understood the symbolic reverberations, namely the act he
had just engaged in, which ultimately was but the act of trying to
show, and merely to show, that he was capable of having normal
intercourse just like anyone else.
We find this sort of reactional exhibitionism time and again in
those observations that are proximate to fetishism, or which are
even quite indisputably fetishism. One has a very clear sense of what
is a,t sta,ke in Delinquent Acts as Perversions and Fetishes by Melitta,
Schmideberg, though at the same time it is very curious to see how
far she manages to avoid the main and essential aspect of the thing.
She depicts a man who married a woman #cczr/); a AcocJ /cz//cr /fecr7! Ae
and of about one and a half times his weight. He wais trTily vietiwirsed
by his wife, becoming her awful punch-bag. One fine day this young
man, who had been doing his best to face up to the situation, is
informed that he is going to be a father. He rushes off to a public
park and starts showing his organ to a group of young women.
Mrs Schmideberg, who certainly sounds a bit too Anna-Freudian
in this, finds all sorts of analogies with the fact that the lad's father
was already something of a victim for his wife, but had one day
managed to get out of the situation by being caught with the maid.
The intermediary of the jealous protest had brought his wife some-
what to heel. This explains nothing. It seems to Mrs Schmideberg
that she has managed to make a sfoor/ cz#cz/};sj.a of a perversion. But
there is no cause for wonder, because it wasn't perversion at all, and
nor has she managed to analyse it in the slightest. She leaves out
of account the fact that, even so, it was through an act of exposing
himself that the subject on this occasion manifested himself. There
is no other way to explain this act of exposing himself than to refer
to the mechanism of triggering whereby what arises in the real as a
surplus that cannot be symbolically assimilated tends to precipitate
what lies at the bottom of the symbolic relationship, namely the

equivalence between phallus and child.
Unable to assume this paternity in any way whatsoever, or even
to believe in it, the intrepid fellow went off to show the equivalent
of the child in the right place, namely the use of his phallus that still
remained to him.
30 January 1957
X
IDENTIFICATION WITH
THE PHALLUS
Transvestism and garment use

Showing oneself I offering oneself to view
Girl = phallus
The object and the ideal in Freud
Frustration of love and satisfaction of need
Last time, I took a step forward in the elucidation of fetishism as an

especially fundamental example of the dynamics of desire.
Desire is of the utmost interest to us for a reason that is twofold.
On the one hand, we deal with this desire in our practice. It's not a
constructed desire but a desire with all its paradoxes, just as we deal
with an object with all its paradoxes. On the other hand, it's quite
clear that Freud's thought took these paradoxes as its starting point.
In particular, as far as desire is concerned, the starting point was
perverse desire. It would be a great shame to lose sight of this in our
attempt at unification or reduction in the face of the most naively
intuitive theories on which psychoanalysis today has been drawing.
Every now and then I get some feedback on how you have received
each fresh little finding that I bring you from one time to the next.
At least this is what I hope for. Now, the little step I took came as a
surprise to some people, who already found the theory of love quite
satisfactory enough in the way I present it to you, in being grounded
on the fact that the subject addresses the lack that is in the object.
This had already given a number of them the opportunity to reflect
in a way that seemed sufiiciently enlightened, though they did have
some trouble realising that there is a beyond-zone and a lack in this
subject-object relation. Last time, I brought in an extra complica-
tion with a term that is situated in front of the object, namely the
veil or curtain, the site of the imaginary projection where something
appears that becomes the figuration of this lack and which as such
can be the support offered to something that finds its name there
-desire, but desire qua perverse. It is upon this veil that the fetish
comes as a figuration of precisely what lacks beyond the object.
This schematisation is designed to set up the successive planes
that should allow you in certain cases to find your bearings more
easily in this sort of perpetual ambivalence and confusion, where yes
is equal to no, where steering in one direction is equal to steering in
exactly the opposite direction, along with everything that analysts
unfortunately make use of to get out of the bind under the name
ambivalence .
Right at the end of what I told you last time regarding fetishism, I
pointed out how a position becomes apparent that is in some sense
complementary. This position is also apparent across the different
phases of the fetishist structure, even in the attempts that the fetishist
makes to join up with the object from which he has been separated
by something that has a mechanism and function which he does
not, of course, understand. This position, which might be called
symmetrical - the corresponding pole that lies opposite fetishism -
is the function of transvestism.
In transvestism the subject identifies with what lies behind the
veil, with the object that lacks something. The authors have spotted
this very well in their analyses and have expressed it in their lan-
guage, saying that the transvestite identifies with the phallic mother
insomuch as, further to this, she veils over the lack of phallus.
This transvestism takes us a long way into the question, because we
didn't have to wait for Freud to tackle the psychology of garments.
In any use of the garment there is something that partakes of the
function of transvestism. While the immediate commonplace view
of the function of the garment is that it conceals the pudendum, the
question has to be slightly more complicated than this in the eyes of
an analyst. All it would take would be for one of these authors who
go on about the phallic mother just to notice the meaning of what
he is saying. Garments are not made solely to conceal what one has,
in the sense of foczw.ng j./ or #o/, but also precisely on account of #o/
A¢w.#g. Both functions are essential. It is not always and essentially
a matter of hiding the object but also of hiding the lack of object.
This is a straightforward application in this case of the imaginary
dialectic of what is too often overlooked, namely the function and
presence of the lack of object.
Conversely, in the sweeping use they make of the scoptophilic
relationship,I they always imply, as though it went without saying,
Identification with the Phallus 159
that the fact of showing oneself is quite straightforward, that it is the

correlative of the activity of viewing in voyeurism. Yet again, one
dimension is being wilfully overlooked.
It is not true that always and in every instance the subject simply
puts himself on view, as though this were the correlative and cor-
responding relation to the activity of viewing. It is not about the
subject's involvement in a couple of visual capture. In scoptophilia
there is also the supplementary dimension of involvement that is
expressed in language by the presence of the reflexive form, a verbal
form that in other languages exists in the middle voice. It is /o o#er
o77esc// /a vz.cw. If you combine these two dimensions, what the
subject offers to view across a whole range of activities that get
mixed up under the heading of voyeurism/exhibitionism is some-
thing other than what he shows. This gets drowned out in what is
s;wedymgiv called the scoptophilic relationship.
Authors like Fenichel - who are very poor theoreticians under
their apparent clarity but who, even so, are not lacking in analytic
experience - saw this very well. While the effort at theorisation
comes to a head in hopeless failure, which is the case in a number of
Fenichel's articles, you can occasionally light upon some very fine
clinical gems in them, and even his good feeling for a whole range
of facts that, through a kind of flair that the analyst has fortunately
drawn from his experience, are grouped together around a theme or
a branch chosen from the analytic articulation of the fundamental
imaginary relationships. Around scoptophilia and around transves-
tism, various factual stems are grouped together which are utterly
distinct from one another but which the author feels more or less
obscurely to share some kinship or commonality.
In particular, while taking in this expansive and bland literature
~ a necessary undertaking if one is to give an account of just how
far analysts have penetrated into an actual articulation of these
facts - I recently turned my attention to an article by Fenichel that
was published in 1949, in the third instalment of the eighteenth
volume of the Ps);cfoo¢#cz/};/z.c gw¢r/er/};. It concerns what he calls
The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus. I:his is not unlctated to the
well-known series of equations /czeccs = cfoz./d = pc#z.s that Freud
himself authorised. Even though we can see a blatant lack of orien-
tation being demonstrated here by Fenichel, which constantly leaves
us wishing for a logic that would be otherwise, a series of facts can
be ascertained which are grouped around these analytic encounters.
From these it can be seen that, in the subject's unconscious, and
especially the unconscious of the female subject, the child may be
held to be equivalent to the phallus. All in all, here lies the phylum
of everything that attaches to the fact that the child is given to the
mother as a sort of substitute for, or even an equivalent to, the

phallus.
However, alongside this there are many further facts, and that
they should be bracketed together with this one is rather surprising.
When I spoke about the child, it was not especially the female child,
but this article sets its sights very specifically on the girl. Certainly
the article has to start with a number of well-known features of
fetishistic or quasi-fetishistic specificity, with certain perversions
that are interpreted as the equivalent of the subject's phallus. It
is part and parcel of analytic data that the girl herself - and even
the child in a more general way - can conceive of herself as being
posited as equivalent to the phallus and can demonstrate this in her
deportment. That it is to say, a woman can experience the sexual
relationship as being what leads her to bring the male partner his
phallus. This is sometimes noticeable even in the details of her pre-
ferred position in love-making, as something that comes to append
to the partner, that nestles into a certain locality of her partner's
body. This is yet another kind of fact that cannot fail to be quite
striking and to catch our attention. Then, in some cases, the male
subject can likewise give himself to the woman as the thing she
lacks, and bring her the phallus in the capacity of what she lacks,
inaginarily speaking.
The full range of facts that are highlighted here might seem to
point in one direction, but it can also be seen that in this way of com-
paring them and bringing them all into a single equation, the facts
that are being gathered together are actually extremely different.
In each of the four different orders of relationship that I have just
sketched out, the subject is absolutely not in the same relation with
the object. Either the subject brings it, or else gives it, or else desires
it, or else replaces it. Once our attention has been drawn to these
registers, we cannot fail to see that the author's grouping together
of these facts into the equivalence that he thereby sets up goes far
beyond a straightforward theoretical requirement.
We also read that the young girl can, for one type of subject, be the
object of a supervalent attachment, and that a mythical function can
emerge both from these perverse mirages and from a whole series
of literary constructions which, depending on their author, we can
place in more or less illustrious groupings. Some have spoken quite
readily of a Mignon type. You are all familiar with Goethe's crea-
tion of Mignon the bohemian, whose bisexual position is very firmly
underscored by the author himself. She lives with a sort of enormous
and brutal protector, who clearly is highly paternal, known as the
Harper. AIl told, he serves as her high servitor, but at the same time
she is of great necessity to him. Goethe says somewhere, ffee H¢rper
whom she needed, and Mignon whom he could not do without.2 We

find here a sort of couple with, on the one hand, what could be called
777z.g4/ in its solid and brutal embodied state, and, on the other, some-
thing without which this might would be stripped of its efficacy,
something that it is missing and which is ultimately the secret of its
true might. This something is nothing less than a lack.
This is the final site where the infamous magic comes to be located,
which is always so confusedly attributed in analytic theory to the
idea of almightiness. As I have told you, the structure of almighti-
ness, contrary to what people believe, lies not in the subject but in
the mother, that is, in the primal Other. The Other is the one who
is almighty. However, behind this almightiness there is indeed an
ultimate lack on which the might of the Other hinges. I mean that
as soon as the subject perceives, in the object whose almightiness
he expects, this lack that renders powerless, the final resource of
almightiness is deferred yet further beyond, to the very site where
something does not exist, and to the utmost degree. It is that which,
in the object, is nothing but the symbolism of lack, nothing but
fragility and smallness. This is where the subject has accentuated the
true and secret mainspring of almightiness, and it's what constitutes
the considerable interest of what today I'm calling the Mignon type,
which in literature has been reproduced in a great many examples.
Three years ago, I nearly announced a lecture on Jacques Cazotte's
Lc Dj.czb/c c}mowrcwx. There are few testimonies that are so exemplary
when it comes to a profound divination of the imaginary dynamic
I've been trying to develop for you, and today especially. My recol-
lection of it is as a major illustration that accentuates and inparts
the meaning of this magical being that lies beyond the object, to
which a whole series of idealising fantasies can become attached.
The tale begins in Naples, in a cave to which the first-person
narrator has taken himself at the beckoning of the devil. In accord-
ance with certain formalities, the devil appears in the guise of a
formidable camel's head with disproportionately large ears. The
camel's head says to him, in the most hollow voice - Crfec vctoz.? IJ'7!cz/
wouldst thou?
I believe that this fundamental questioning is indeed what pro-
vides us in the most gripping way with the function of the superego.
But the interest does not lie in the fact that the image of the superego
has found a gripping illustration, but rather in the creature who
is supposed to transform, no sooner has the pact been concluded,
into a little dog who, through a transition that surprises no one,
becomes a charming young man and, then, a charming young
woman. Furthermore, until the end they intermingle with total
ambiguity. This beloved protagonist, who goes by the significant
name of Biondetta, becomes for a while the stunning source of the

narrator's every happiness, the fulfilment of his every desire, the
properly magical satisfaction of everything he might wish for. Yet
all this is steeped in an atmosphere of fantasy, of dangerous unreal-
ity, of abiding menace that doesn't fail to taint the surroundings.
The situation is resolved at the end by the sudden collapse of this
accelerating and crazy race, and by a catastrophic dissipation of the
mirage, when the subject returns, as is only proper, to his mother's
castle.
Another novel, Henri de Latouche's Frczgo/c/f¢, presents a curious
character who is clearly a transvestite because until the end, and
without anything being brought to light unless by the reader, it has
to do with a girl who is a boy and who plays a role that is function-
ally analogous to the one I've just described as the Mignon type.
After a number of details and refinements, the novel culminates
in a duel in which the protagonist kills Fragoletta. Fragoletta had
presented herself to him as a boy and he had failed to recognise her.
This shows very well the equivalence between a certain female object
of I/cr/I.cb/fecz./ and the other party as a rival, the same other that is at
issue when Hamlet kills the character of Ophelia's brother.
Here we are in the presence of a character that is fetishised or
made fay, these being fundamentally the same word since they both
connect via the Portuguese/cz.J!.fo to the Latin/ac/z./!.ws. Historically
speaking, the word/cf;.sA derives from this and is none other than
the /czc/I./z.acts. The ambiguous feminine creature represents the
subject himself, embodying in some way, beyond the mother, the
phallus that she lacks, and doing so all the better in that he doesn't
possess it himself. Instead, he is fully engaged in its representation,
its frors/e//w#g. We are in the presence of a yet further function of
the love relation on the perverse paths of desire, paths which can be
exemplary for us in clarifying the positions that have to be singled
out when we analyse this desire.
So, we have been led finally to ask the question of what is subja-
cent and constantly put into question by this very critique, namely
the notion of identification.
The notion of identification is present from the first in Freud's

writing in a latent fashion, emerging from one moment to the next
only to disappear again. Implications of identification are already
there in 7lfec J#/erprefcz/j.o# o/ Dreczms. It was to reach its major
point of explication when he wrote A4loL5s Ps)/cho/og}j a#c7 jfec
j47!cz/j;fj.s a//foe Ego, which includes a chapter expressly devoted to

identification.
One feature of this chapter is to show us - as very often this is so,
and the value of Freud's writing is to show us this - the author's
very great perplexity. This is an article where Freud admits that
he is in a bind, and even that he is quite powerless to get out of the
dilemma posed by the constant ambiguity that presents between
the two terms he specifies, namely I.dc#/j#cczfz.o# and oZ7y'cc/-cfeoz.ce.
These two terms appear in a great many cases, one being substituted
for the other with such a disconcerting power of metamorphosis
that the transition itself is not grasped. Nevertheless, it is clearly
necessary to maintain the distinction between the two because, as
Freud says, standing on the side of the object is not the same thing
as standing on the side of the subject. It's quite clear that, should an
object become the object of choice, it is not the same as becoming
the support for the subject's identification.
In itself this is wonderfully instructive. It is no less instructive
to behold the disconcerting ease with which each author seems to
accommodate himself to this and uses one and the other in a way
that is strictly equivalent, whether in his observation or his theorisa-
tion, without asking for more. When one does ask for more, this
produces an article like the one by Gustav Hans Graber, in the 1937
edition of Jm¢go, on two types of mechanism in identification, DI.c
zweierlei Mechanismen der Identiifezierung, which rea.Ily is the most
staggering thing you can imagine because everything seems to be
resolved for him by the distinction between active identification and
passive identification. When one looks more closely it is impossible
not to see, and indeed Graber himself notices this, that the two poles
of active and passive are present in any kind of identification, and so
we really have to come back to Freud and take up his articulation of
the question point by point.
Chapter VIIl o£ Mass Psychology and Analysis Of the Ego, whieh
follows the chapter on identification, opens with a sentence that
shifts right away into the atmosphere of something that in its purity
is quite different from what we usually read - Evc# i.# z./s cczprz.cos
the usage Of language remains true to some V`lirRTrtychrdct1, to some
effective reality .
As a side note, I would like to point out that Freud had made a
first inroad into identification in the previous chapter by speaking
about identification with the father as the example through which
we enter most naturally into this phenomenon. We come to the
second paragraph, and in the German text we read -4/ /Ae sczmc
time as this identification with his father, possibly even earlier, the
boy has begun to undertake a true object-charging of his mother. A;s
an example of the poor translation of Freud's texts in French, cve#

earlier is tra,nsrdted as un peu plus tard, a little later, lea.vine the
reader to wonder whether the identification with the father might
not come first.3
We find another example in the passage I want to come to this
morning, and which I have chosen for you because it is the most
condensed and the most apt to show you Freud's perplexities. It con-
cerns the state of love in its relations with identification. Following
Freud's text, we read that identification is the more primal and
fundamental function in that it entails an object-choice, but one that
still has to be articulated in a way that is itself highly problematic,
because Freud's entire analysis ties it profoundly to narcissism. To
go as far as we can in the direction that Freud spells out perfectly,
we see that this object is a sort of other ego within the subject -
The difference between identification and the condition of being in
love, Vehiebthch, in its highest forms, called fascination or amorous
dependence, Hb[.igk!ch, is now easy to describe. In the former case
the ego has enriched itseif with the qualities Of the object. To use
Ferenczi's expression, it has ìntrojected' the object into itself In the
latter case the ego has become poorer, it has abandoned itself to the
object, setting the object in place of its most important constituent.
In the French translation we read that the ego J'¢ssj.in;./e the object,
but all one has to do is read what Ferenczi wrote to see that it's not
about assimilation but introjection. It's a matter of introjection in
its relations with identification. Then, the French translator gives
s'6tant efface devant lui tor dasselbe an die Stelle seines wichtigsten
Bcs/¢#d/cj./a gcsc/zf. The German has been completely lost in the
French sentence, which on no account translates what is so fully
articulated in Freud's text.
Freud is pausing here on the contrast between, on the one hand,
what the subject introjects and is enriched by, and on the other,
what takes something from him and impoverishes him. Indeed,
Freud had previously dwelt at some length on what occurs in the
state of love, where the subject becomes increasingly dispossessed,
to the benefit of the loved object, of everything that is himself. The
subject is humbled and falls into complete subjection in relation to
the object he has invested in. Freud is spelling out how this object,
for whose benefit the subject has become impoverished, is the very
same that he sets in place of his moLs/ 7.mporfcz7z/ co72J/z./«c7?/, his
wichtigsten Bestandteils.
This is Freud's approach to the problem. He tackles it by tracing
backwards. He doesn't spare us the moves he makes. He moves
forward and sees that it's incomplete, so he retraces his steps and says
- Closer examination shows that this account erects sham opposites
that do not infect exist. We are not talking about impoverishment or

enrichment in economic terms; the condition Of being deeply in love can
also be described as the ego having introjected the object into itself. It
may be that another distinction comes closer to the essence here. In the
case of identification, the object had become lost or been given up.
The French translation, however, tells us that the object se vo/cz-
/j./j.sc cf dz.spczr¢z^f. We are better off consulting the German text,
because this is a reference to the fundamental notion that can be
found consistently in Freud's notion of the formation of the object
from the very start. He says that cZ¢s Oky.ck/ vcr/ore# gego#gc# oc7er
cw/gegebc# worde7g. It is not, therefore, about evaporating or vanish-
ing, because the object does not vanish. On the contrary, the object
is reinstated in the ego, with the ego undergoing a partial change,
modelling itself on the lost object, or, .+n the case Of Verliebtheit, the
object is preserved and is as such òver-charged' by and at the expense
of the ego .
Frond condlr[nes - But in this respect too there is some doubt. If
it is established that identification presupposes the relinquishment of
object-charging, can there be no identification where the object is pre-
served? And bofore we allow ourselves to become involved in debating
this delicate question, it may already have dawned on us that another
question captures the essence of this situation, namely whether the
object is set in the place of the Lch or of the lchideal.
So, in going about things in this way the text leaves us in quite a
pickle. It seems that nothing of any great sharpness emerges from
these movements to-and-fro. The very place that is to be given to
the object in these different back-and-forth movements, in which it
is constituted either as an object of identification or as an object of
loving capture, remains almost entirely in the state of a question. At
least the question is being posed, and this is simply what I wanted
to highlight. It can't be said that this is one of those texts that would
be testamentary, but it's one of those in which Freud reached the
summit of his theoretical elaboration.
Let's try, therefore, to take up the problem on the basis of the
reference points that we have been afforded in the elaboration we
have been trying to undertake here concerning the relations between
frustration and the constitution of the object.
First of all, it's a matter of conceiving of the bond that we commonly

establish, both in our practice and in our parlance, between identi-
fication and introjection. You have seen how this is quite apparent
right from the start of the passage from Freud that I've just read out
to you.
1 propose the [Ofhow.rr\g-the metaphor that underlies introjection is
cz# ore/ mcfapfeor. People speak indiscriminately about introjection
and incorporation, allowing themselves to slide in the most common
way into all the articulations that were produced in the Kleinian
era. They would evoke, for instance, the infamous constitution of
primordial objects that divide in just the right way into good and
bad objects that are alternately introjected. These objects are held to
be something that is simply given in this infamous primitive world
that knows no bounds, where the subject would form a whole from
his being subsumed into the maternal body. From this standpoint,
introjection is held to be a function that is strictly equivalent to
and symmetrical with the function of projection. Furthermore, the
object is constantly in a kind of movement, passing from without
to within only to be pushed back out from the inside when it has
become too much to bear. This leaves introjection and projection in
a perfect symmetry.
What I am about to try to articulate for you now takes a stand
against this excess, which is certainly not a Freudian excess.
I believe that it is strictly impossible to conceive of phenomena
such as manifest oral impulses -and I'm not talking simply in terms
of conceptualisation or something that is shaped in thoughts, but in
terms of clinical practice - of such evocations of the oral drive, cor-
relative with turning points in the symbolic reduction of the object
that we endeavour to bring about from time to time, with more or
less success, if we stick with this vague notion of regression that is
always put at our disposal in such cases. In cases of young children
where this leads to the appearance of bulimic impulses, or at some
such turning point in the treatment of a fetishist, we are told that the
subject is regressing because, of course, that's what he's there for.
Why? Because at the very moment he is progressing in his analysis,
that is to say, trying to take in a full perspective of his fetish, he
regresses. You can always say this and no one will contradict you.
I say, on the contrary, that each time the drive appears in the
analysis, or elsewhere, it should be conceived of in relation to its
economic function, in relation to the unfolding of a particular
defined symbolic relationship. Isn't there something that allows us
to shed light on this in the rough outline I gave you for the dialecti-
cal structure of the gift?
On one side, the child is faced with the mother as the support of
the first love relation, in so far as love is something that is symboli-
cally structured, in so far as she is the object of an appeal, an object
which therefore is as much absent as present. This is the mother
whose gifts are signs of love, and which as such are just that. Ipso
facto, these gifts are cancelled out whenever they are anything else
but signs of love. On the other side, there are the objects of need
that she presents to the child in the form of her breast. Can't you see
that between the two it's a matter of equipoise and compensation?
Whenever there is a frustration of love, this is compensated by the
satisfaction of need. It is in so far as the mother is missing for the
child who calls out to her, that he clings to her breast and turns it
into something more significant than anything else. So long as he
has it in his mouth and derives satisfaction from it, he cannot be
separated from this thing that leaves him nourished, relaxed and
satisfied. Here, the satisfaction of need is both a compensation for
the frustration of love and, I would almost say, the beginning of the
distraction from it.
The supervalence that the object assumes - the breast in this
instance, or the nipple -is grounded precisely on the fact that a real
object assumes its function as a part of the love object. It takes on
its signification qua symbolic and, as a real object, becomes part of
the symbolic object. The drive aims at the real object as a part of the
symbolic object. It is on this basis that any understanding of oral
absorption, of the mechanism of so-called regressive oral absorp-
tion that can intervene in any love relation, becomes possible. Once
a real object that satisfies a real need has become an element of the
symbolic object, any other object that can satisfy a real need can
come in its stead, and first in line is the one that is already symbol-
ised but which is also perfectly materialised, namely speech.
To the extent that oral regression to the primal object of devora-
tion comes to compensate for the frustration of love, this reaction
of incorporation imparts its model, its cast, its yorbj./d, to the kind
of incorporation that is the incorporation of certain words among
others, which lies at the origin of the early shaping of what is known
as the superego. What the subject incorporates under the name of
the superego is something analogous to the object of need, not in the
sense that it would itself be the gift but in that it is the substitute for
the failing of the gift, which is really not the same thing.
It is on this basis, too, that the fact of possessing or not possessing
a penis can take on a double meaning and enter the subject's imagi-
nary economy by two paths that are initially very different. First,
the penis can, at a given moment, locate its object somewhere in the
lineage and the stead of the object that is the breast or the nipple.
It is thus an oral form of the incorporation of the penis that plays
its role in determining certain symptoms and functions. But there
is another way in which the penis enters the imaginary economy.
It can enter not as an object that compensates for the frustration
of love, but as what lies beyond the love object and which the love
object lacks.
Let's call the first one thepci7?I.a. With all it entails, even so, it is an
inaginary function in that it is incorporated imaginarily. The other
one is the pfe¢//ws inasmuch as the mother lacks it and it lies beyond
her and her power of love.
It is with respect to this missing phallus that I've been posing you
the question, since the start of this year's seminar -cz/ wfoczf momc#f
c7ocs /fee sctz7y.ccf dj.scot/cr fAz.s /¢ck? When and how does he make this
discovery in such a way that he can find himself committed to sub-
stituting himself for it, that is to say, to choosing a different path in
the re-finding of the love-object that slips away, by himself bringing
in his own lack?
This distinction is crucial, and it will enable us today to set down
a first sketch of what is more or less requisite for this temporal phase
to come about.
We have symbolic structuration and possible introjection, which
as such is the most characteristic form of primal identification that
Freud posited. It is in a second temporal phase that Vcr/j.cb/fecz./
occurs. This yer/I.cbJAcz./ is absolutely inconceivable, it cannot be
articulated anywhere, except in the register of the narcissistic rela-
tionship, in other words in the specular relationship, such as I have
defined and articulated it.
I remind you that this occurs at a date that can be isolated. Of
necessity, it cannot be before the sixth month. Sometime thereafter,
this relationship with the image of the other comes about, insomuch
as this image affords the subject the matrix around which can be
organised what I called his I.#comp/G/wdc vGcwe, his lived experience
of incompleteness, of the fact that he is wanting. He realises that
he is lacking something in relation to the image that presents itself
as total, not only as fulfilling, but also as a source of jubilation for
him. It is in so far as there is a specific relationship between man
and his image, in so far as the imaginary comes into play, that upon
the foundation of these first two symbolic relationships between the
object and the mother it will become apparent that both he and his
mother lack something imaginarily. It is in the specular relationship
that the subject has had the experience and the apprehension of a
possible lack, the apprehension that something that lies beyond can
exist and that this is a lack.
Therefore, it is only beyond the narcissistic realisation, and to the
extent that these tense and deeply aggressive comings and goings
start to be organised, around which the successive layers of what
will constitute the ego will crystallise and form a kernel, that there
can be an introduction of what leads to the appearance, for the
subject, beyond what he constitutes for the mother as an object,

of the impression that either way the object of love is itself caught,
captured, withheld in something that he, as an object, does not
manage to reach, namely a yearning that bears on the mother's
own lack.
In fact, at the point we've reached, all of this hinges on the effect
of transmission whereby we suppose - because experience forces
this upon us and because Freud adhered to this completely, right
through to the last of his formulations - that no satisfaction by any
real object whatsoever that comes to replace it will ever manage to
fill this lack in the mother. Alongside the relationship with the child,
the lack of the phallus remains as a point of attachment of her inser-
tion in the imaginary. It is only after the second phase of imaginary
specular identification with the body image as such, which lies at the
origin of the ego and which provides its matrix, that the child, the
subject, can gain access to what the mother lacks. But the precondi-
tion for this is the specular experience of the other as forming a
totality in relation to which he is the one who can lack something,
because the subject broaches, beyond the object of love, the lack for
which he can be led to substitute himself. He can propose himself as
the object that will fill this lack.
I have led you today as far as the presentation of a form that you
must simply hold in your minds so that we can pick up from the
same spot next time. To what does this form correspond? What you
can see drawn up here is a new dimension, a new property, of what
is given in the actual state of the subject once he has completed this
process and the functions of superego, Ego-ideal and ego have been
differentiated. It's a matter of knowing, as Freud puts it very well at
the end of his article, what is meant by this object coming to position
itself either in the place of the ego or in the place of the Ego-ideal.
In what I have thus far explained about narcissism I have had to
stress the shaping of the Ego-ideal - I mean, the shaping of the ego
insomuch as it is an ideal shaping and insomuch as it is from the
Ego-ideal that the ego is detached. I have not sufficiently articu-
lated the difference between them. However, if you simply look into
Freud, with his fruitful obscurities and his diagrams that pass from
hand to hand without anyone deigning for an instant to reproduce
them, what do you find in the one that he offers us at the end of this
chapter?
The Fetish Object
External
Object
I:.»
F[oud:s Graphische Darstellung
Here [on the central vertical axis] is where he places the egos of
the different subjects. It's a matter of knowing why different subjects
are in communion with the same ideal. He explains that there is an
identification between the Ego-ideal and all these objects that are
supposed to be the same. Yet when we look at the diagram we notice
that he has taken care to link these three objects, which may be
supposed to be the same, to an external object that lies behind them.
Can you not see that this bears a glaring resemblance to what I've
been trying to explain to you? Regarding the JCAz.c7ccz/, it's not merely
a matter of an object but indeed of something that lies beyond the
object and which comes to be reflected, as Freud says, not purely
and simply in the ego ~ which doubtless feels something of this and
can be impoverished by it - but rather in something that lies in the
ego's very footings, in its first requirements and, to spell it right out,
upon the first veil that is projected in the form of the Ego-ideal.
Next time I will be picking up from where I've left off today, with
the relation between the Ego-ideal, the fetish, and the object qua
missing object, that is to say, the phallus.
6 February 1957
XI
THE PHALLUS AND THE
UNFULFILLED MOTHER
The gift manifests itself on appeal

Substitution of satisfactions
The eroticisation of need
The mirror, from jubilation to depression
The signifying role of the imaginary phallus
I intend today to take up the terms with which I've been trying to
formulate the necessary revision of the notion of frustration. Indeed,
without this revision it is quite possible that the gap will continue to
grow between the dominant theories in psychoanalysis today -what
are called the current proclivities of psychoanalysis - and Freudian
doctrine. As you know, in my view Freud's doctrine constitutes
nothing less than the only accurate conceptual formulation of the
practice that this very same doctrine founded.
What I am going to try to spell out today might be a little more
algebraic than usual, but everything we have done so far has paved
the way for it.
Before we set off again, let's punctuate what has been brought out
by certain terms that we have been led to voice here.
I have tried to locate frustration for you on the three-tier chart

between cczsfroJj.o#, which Freud's doctrine took as its point of
departure, and prj.vcr/z.o#, to which certain authors refer it. Let's say
that they have referred privation to castration in various ways.
Psychoanalysis today has been putting frustration right at the
heart of all these failings that are purportedly marked out in their
analysable consequences, in the symptoms properly speaking that
fall in our remit. We need to understand frustration so that we can
turn it to valid use, because, to be sure, if the problem of analytic

experience has brought it to the forefront of the terms in use, this
cannot be entirely without reason. While its prevalence does not
substantially modify the economy of our thought as a whole in the
presence of neurotic phenomena, it does nevertheless lead it in some
respects into dead-ends. This is indeed what I've been endeavouring
to demonstrate, I hope with success, using a number of examples.
The further you venture into the analytic literature with an open
eye, the more you will see these dead-ends being demonstrated.
Let's posit here at the outset that frustration is not the refusing of
an object of satisfaction in the pure and simple sense. Satisfaction
means the satisfying of a need. I don't have to insist on this point.
On the whole, when one speaks in terms of frustration, one is
using the word without reading more into it. We have frustrating
experiences and we think they leave traces. We simply forget that
for things to be so simple an explanation would have to be found for
how the desire that would supposedly have been frustrated might
correspond to the distinctive property that Freud accentuates so
firmly from the time of his very first writings, namely that desire in
the repressed unconscious is indestructible. I've been indicating to
you how the entire development of his life's work is undertaken to
examine this riddle.
This property is strictly inexplicable within the perspective of
need alone. Any experience we might have of what goes on in an
animal economy shows us this. The frustration of a need must entail
various modifications that are bearable for the organism to a greater
or lesser extent, but certainly if there is one thing that experience
confims, it's that frustration cannot give rise to the maintaining of
desire as such. Either the individual succumbs or the desire alters
or wanes. Either way, no coherence whatsoever is imposed between
frustration and the permanence of desire, even its insistence, to
employ the term I was led to foreground when we were speaking
about 17'lj.cdewho/w#grzwcz7!g, the automatism of repetition.
Furthermore, Freud never speaks of frustration. He speaks of
Vers¢gw#g, which falls more adequately in line with the notion of
reneging, in the sense that one says /a re#egc cr /re¢/);, to withdraw
from an engagement.I This is so true that one can even on occa-
sion place yersczg##g on the opposite side, because the word can
mean both p/edge and ffec break!.ng a/ cz p/cc7ge. Very often this is
so with these words that carry the prefix Vcr-, which is so essential
in German and which has held an eminent place in word-choice in
analytic theory.
Let's come straight out with it. The triad/rwffrcz/j.o# / ¢ggrcssz.o# /
regrcssz.o#, when it is given like this, is far from having the more or
The phallus and the un fulfilled Mother 173
less seductive character of immediately comprehensible signification

that is often read into it. One has only to consider it for a moment
to notice that in itself it is not comprehensible, and that it raises the
question of how comprehensive it is. There is no reason not to offer
some other sequence of terms instead. Quite randomly, I could tell
you -firustration I depression I contrition. I could invent others. For
us, it's a matter of posing the question of the relations between frus-
tration and regression, and this has never been done in a satisfactory
way. I wouldn't say that what has been done is false. Rather, I'm
saying that it's not satisfactory because the notion of regression is
never developed in these efforts.
So, frustration is not the refusing of an object of satisfaction. It
hinges on something else. I'm going to content myself with lining
up a series of formulas that have already been worked through
here, and so I am relatively unburdened from having to prove their
worth, save through veiled references. I want to work through a
chain in such a way that you will be able to retain its chief points of
articulation, so that you can make use of it and see whether these
articulations are helpful to you.
Let's move on to the path that consists in taking things up at the
start. I'm not saying that this is the start of development, because
it doesn't have the character of a development, but rather at the
level of the child's primal relation with his mother. Let's say that,
originatively, frustration - not just any frustration but a frustration
that can be utilised in our dialectic - is thinkable only as the refusing
of a gift, in so far as the gift is itself the symbol of something that is
called love.
In saying this I'm saying nothing that isn't spelt out in black
and white by Freud himself. The fundamental character of the love
relation, with all that it entails in and of itself, elaborated not at one
remove but twice removed, does not imply merely that one is faced
with an object but that one is faced with a being. This is set out by
Freud in a number of different passages as the relation that lies at
the beginning. What does it mean? It doesn't mean that the child has
practised the philosophy of love, that he has made the distinction
between love and desire. It means that he is already steeped in the
implied existence of the symbolic order. We find evidence of this in
his behaviour. Certain things come to pass that are only conceivable
if this order is already present.
Here we are faced with an ambiguity that arises from the fact that
we have a science that is a science of the subject and not a science of
the individual. Yet we succumb to the need to place the subject at
the point of departure, forgetting that the subject qua subject cannot
be identified with the individual. Even if the subject is detached, as
an individual, from the order that concerns him as a subject, this

order exists none the less. In other words, the law of intersubjec-
tive relationships, given how it profoundly governs the very thing
upon which the individual depends, implicates him, whether he is
conscious of this or not, as an individual in this order.
Trying to make the image of the father emerge from the child's
anxieties in the dark is a desperate attempt that can only be under-
taken by pulling strings so conspicuous they fool no one. I'm alluding
to Mallet's articles on phobia. I can qualify their outlook as desper-
ate because the order of paternity exists as such. Whether or not
the child has experienced such childhood dread, it only takes on its
articulated meaning in the intersubjective father/child relationship,
which is deeply organised symbolically and forms the subjective
context in which the child will have to develop his experience. This
experience is taken up from one moment to the next, and retroac-
tively reshaped, by the intersubjective relation in which he engages
himself incrementally, taking the bait piece by piece.
I spoke about the gift. In itself the gift implies the full cycle of
exchange, and the subject enters this as early as you can imagine.
There is a gift only because there is an immense circulation of gifts
that covers the entire intersubjective whole. The gift arises from a
zone that lies beyond the object relation, precisely because it presup-
poses behind it the full order of exchange that the child has entered,
and it can arise from this beyond-zone only with the character that
constitutes it as specifically symbolic. Nothing is a gift unless it
has been constituted by the act that cancelled it out or dismissed it
beforehand. The gift emerges against a backdrop of revocation, and
it is against this backdrop, and as a sign of love that is first annulled
so as then to reappear as a pure presence, that the gift is given or not
On appeal.
I shall say more here. I've said that the appeal lies on the foremost
plane, but recall if you will what I told you when we were dealing
with psychosis. I said that the appeal was essential to speech. I
would be wrong to stick at this level, because the structure of speech
implies in the Other that the subject receives his own message in
an inverted form. Here, we are not yet at this level because what
is at issue is the appeal. However, already, the appeal cannot be
sustained in isolation. Freud's image of the infant with his For//
D¢ shows this very well. Already, at the level of the appeal, it has
to have its contrary diametrically opposed. Let's call it a marker.
It is to the extent that the very thing that is called out for can be
rejected that the appeal is already fundamental and foundational in
the symbolic order. Either way, the appeal is already a fully engaged
introduction into the symbolic order.
When it is not there, the gift manifests itself following the appeal
for wfe¢f z.f, and when it is there, it manifests itself essentially as
the mere sign of the gift, that is to say, as nothing, as no object of
satisfaction. It is there precisely to be pushed away in so far as it
is this nothing. This symbolic interplay therefore has a fundamen-
tally disappointing character. This is the essential articulation on
the basis of which satisfaction itself is situated and takes on its
meaning.
I don't mean that the child does not on such occasions obtain the
satisfaction that is granted to a pure vital rhythm. I'm saying that
any satisfaction that is in question in frustration arises there against
the backdrop of the fundamentally disappointing character of the
symbolic order. Here, satisfaction is a mere substitute, a compensa-
tion. The child quashes, as it were, the disappointing aspect of this
symbolic interplay by orally seizing the object of satisfaction, the
breast in this instance. What sends him to sleep in this satisfaction is
precisely his disappointment, his frustration, the refusal that he has
experienced.
The painful dialectic of the object that is both there and never
there, in which the subject becomes practised, is symbolised for us
in the exercise that is brilliantly seized upon by Freud as the pared-
down interplay of what constitutes the backdrop to the subject's
relationship with the presence-absence couple. Of course, Freud
seizes upon it in its pure state, in its detached form, but he recognises
this interplay insomuch as it is absence that constitutes presence. So,
in his satisfaction, the child quashes the fundamental un fulfilment
of this relationship. He stifles the interplay by grasping the oral
object. He quashes what arises from this fundamentally symbolic
relationship.
From this point forth, there is nothing astonishing for us in
the fact that it is in sleep that the persistence of his desire on the
symbolic plane should manifest itself. I will add here how even
the child's desire in the dream is never tied to a pure and simple
natural satisfaction. You can see this in the dream of the young
Anna Freud, which is claimed to be exceedingly straightforward.
She says - a/w¢wbcwwz.es, pwdde#, etc. These objects are all tran-
scendental objects, They have already entered the symbolic order to
such an extent that they are all forbidden objects. Nothing obliges
us to think that the young Anna was unfulfilled that evening, quite
the contrary. What is maintained in the dream as a desire -certainly
one that is expressed undisguisedly, but with the full transposition
of the symbolic order -is desire of the impossible.
And if you might still be in doubt as to whether speech plays an
essential role here, I will point out to you that had the young Anna
Freud not voiced this in words, we would never have known a thing
about it.
Let's pursue now the dialectic of frustration and ask what happens
when the satisfaction of need comes into play and replaces symbolic
satisfaction.
Due to the very fact that it is substituted for symbolic satisfaction,
this satisfaction of need itself undergoes a transfomation. When the
real object itself becomes a sign in the demand for love, that is to
say, in the symbolic plea, it brings about an immediate transforma-
tion. What is this transformation? Given that I've been telling you
that the real object here takes on the value of a symbol, I could tell
you that it has thereby become a symbol, or almost become one, but
to do so would be a sheer sleight of hand. What takes on a symbolic
accent and value is the activity, the mode of apprehension, that puts
the child in possession of the object.
This is how orality becomes what it is. Being an instinctual mode
of hunger, it is the vehicle of a libido that maintains one's body, but
that's not all it is. Freud wonders about this libido, asking whether it
is the libido of vital preservation or sexual libido. Of course, in itself
it is the former, and this is even what implicates c7es/r"do, but it is
precisely because it has entered this dialectic of substituting satisfac-
tion for the demand for love that it is indeed an eroticised activity. It
is libido in the strict sense, and it is sexual libido.
All this is not merely some nugatory rhetorical articulation,
because it responds to certain objections - and in a different way,
in a way that does not evade them - voiced by people who are
certainly not especially astute, regarding certain analytic remarks on
the eroticisation of the breast. One such objector is Charles Blondel.
In the most recent issue of Lcs E/wdes pAz./o5'apfei.gwcs, dedicated
to the centenary of Freud's birth, Mine Favez-Boutonier quotes
Blondel from one of his articles where he says that he's quite pre-
pared to entertain all of this, but still wonders what analysts make
of those cases where the child is not suckled at his mother's breast
but is instead bottle-fed. What I've just structured for you provides
a reply precisely to this. Once it has entered the dialectic of frustra-
tion, the real object is not in itself irrelevant, but it has no need to
be specific. Even if it is not the mother's breast, it will lose nothing
of the value of its place in the sexual dialectic, from which emanates
the eroticisation of the oral zone. The object is not what plays the
essential role here, but rather the fact that the activity has taken on
The phallus and the unfulfilled Mother 177
this eroticised function on the plane of desire, and which becomes

organised in the symbolic order.
I shall also point out to you in passing that this reaches so far that
it is quite possible for the same role to be played when there is no
real object whatsoever, because what is at issue here is to give rise
to a substitutive satisfaction for symbolic saturation. This and this
alone can explain the true function of symptoms like those of ano-
rexia nervosa. I've already2 told you that anorexia is not a matter of
not eating anything, but of eating nothing. I insist - ±t means to eat
#o/fez.7!g. IVoffez.#g is precisely something that exists on the symbolic
plane. It's not a #!.ch/ csscH, but a 77j.cA/a csse#. This point is indis-
pensable if one is to understand the phenomenology of anorexia.
What is at issue in the detail is that the child eats #offe!.7!g, which is
something other than a negation of activity. From this savoured
absence as such, he makes use of what he has in front of him, namely
the mother on whom he depends. In virtue of this #o/fez.#g, he makes
her dependent on him. If you do not grasp this, you cannot under-
stand anything, not only about anorexia but about other symptoms
besides, and you will make the gravest errors.
So, I have located for you the moment of reversal that brings us
into the symbolic dialectic of oral activity. Other types of activity
are then seized upon in like fashion in the libidinal dialectic. But
this is not all that happens. Conversely, and consequently, at the
same time as the symbolic reversal of the substitutive activity is
introduced into the real, the mother - who hitherto was the subject
of the symbolic demand, the simple locus where presence or absence
could manifest itself, which raises the question of the unreality of
the primary relationship with the mother - becomes a real being.
Since she can endlessly decline, she can literally do anything. As I
said, it is at this level - and not at the level of goodness knows what
hypothesis of some kind of megalomania, which merely projects
onto the child what is in the mind of the analyst - that there appears
for the first time the dimension of almightiness, Wrz.rk/z.cAkc;./, which
in German means what is really and effectively so. The essential
effectiveness initially presents as the almightiness of the real being
upon whom the gift or the non-gift depend, absolutely and with no
recourse.
I'm telling you that the mother is primordially all-powerful, and
that this cannot be eliminated from this dialectic if we are to under-
stand anything worthwhile. It's one of its essential conditions. I'm
not telling you, as does Mrs Melanie Klein, that the mother contains
everything. That is another matter, to which I'm alluding only in
passing. I will note, however, that we are now afforded a glimpse of
how all the prinitive phantasmatic objects can be found gathered
together in the immense container of the maternal body. Mrs Klein

has always shown us quite wonderfully that this is possible, but she
has always been in a great bind when it comes to explaining feow it
is possible, and her opponents have not held back from arguing as
much in order to say that she is surely daydreaming. For sure, she
has been daydreaming, and she has been quite right to, because the
fact is possible only through a retroactive projection of the whole
gamut of imaginary objects into the heart of the matemal body.
But these objects really are there, because the mother constitutes a
virtual field of symbolic annihilation, from which each of the objects
to come will in turn draw their symbolic value. If we simply take
the subject at a slightly more advanced level, for example a child
at around two years of age, it is not surprising in the least that Mrs
Klein should find here objects that are re-projected retroactively.
And one can say in a certain sense that, just like all the others, since
they were ready to appear there one day, they were indeed already
there.
So, we find ourselves before a point at which the child is faced
with the presence of maternal almightiness. Since we are on Mrs
Melanie Klein's level, you will note that if I have just alluded briefly
to what can be called the paranoid position, which is what she
herself terms it, we are already at the level of maternal almightiness
in what is suggested to us as constitutive of the depressive position,
because, faced with this almightiness, we may suspect that there is
something that cannot be unrelated to the relationship to almighti-
ness, this kind of annihilation, this kind of micromania, which,
contrary to megalomania, takes shape, according to what she tells
us, at this stage. Clearly we should not go too quickly, because this
is not given in itself by the mere fact that the mother who emerges as
almighty is real. For the real almightiness to generate a depressive
effect in the subject he still has to be able to reflect upon himself and
upon the contrast with his own powerlessness. Clinical experience
allows us to locate the thereabouts of this point at around the sixth
month, the same that Freud picked out, and when the phenomenon
of the mirror stage is already being produced.
You will object that I taught that when the subject is able to grasp
his own body in its totality, in its specular reflection, this total other
in which he completes himself and presents himself to himself, it is
rather a sense of triumph that he feels. Indeed, this is something that
we reconstructed, and not without experiential confirmation. The
jubilatory character of this encounter was not in doubt. But there
are two things here that we must not conflate.
On the one hand there is the experience of mastery, which will
impart to the child's relation with his own ego an utterly essential
element of splitting, of being distinct from himself, and which will

last until the end. On the other hand there is the encounter with the
reality of the master. Insomuch as the form of mastery is given to
him in the shape of a totality that is alienated from his own self,
though closely bound to him and dependent upon him, there isjubi-
lation, but it's a different matter once this form has been given and
he encounters the reality of the master. This is when the moment
of his triumph bespeaks also his defeat. When he finds himself in
the presence of this totality in the shape of the mother's body, he
is forced to observe that it doesn't obey him. Therefore, it is in so
far as the reflected specular structure of the mirror stage comes into
play that we can conceive of maternal almightiness as being reflected
upon solely from a distinctly depressive position, namely the child's
sense of powerlessness.
It is here that we can insert what I was alluding to earlier in
anorexia. We could go a little quickly and say that the only power
the subject wields against almightiness is to say #o at the level of
action and to bring in the dimension of negativism, which of course
is not unrelated to the moment I'm driving at. Nevertheless, I will
note that experience shows us, and surely not without reason, that
resistance to almightiness in the relationship of dependence does not
develop at the level of action or in the form of negativism, but rather
at the level of the object insomuch as it has appeared to us under
the sign of the nothing. It is at the level of the annulled object qua
symbolic object that the child holds his dependence in check, and
precisely by feeding on #ojfej.#g. It is here that he turns his relation
of dependence around, making himself by this means the master
of the almightiness that is so eager to keep him alive, he who is
initially the dependent one. From this point forward, the almighti-
ness becomes answerable to his desire. It is blown wide open by a
show of his capriciousness and is henceforth at the mercy of his own
almightiness.
So, we do indeed need to be clear in our minds about how the
symbolic order is, as it were, the necessary breeding ground on
which the first imaginary relationship can come into play, on which
the projection of a contrary can be played out in full.
To illustrate this now in psychological terms - but which amount
to no more than a downgrading alongside the expose I've just given
- the intentionality of love constitutes very early on, prior to any
beyond-zone with respect to the object, a fundamental symbolic
structuration that it is impossible to conceive of if we do not posit the
symbolic order itself as already established and present. Experience
shows us this. Quite early on Mrs Susan Isaacs noted that from a
very tender age a child can distinguish between a scolding and an
accidental knock. Even before a word is uttered, the child does not
react to an inadvertent bump in the same way as to a slap.
1'11 leave you to reflect on what this implies. You will tell me that,
curiously enough, it's the same with animals, at least with pets. You
would be raising an objection that I believe can easily be overturned,
but which perhaps could be used as a counterargument. Indeed, this
proves that the animal is able to accede to this sort of sketching out
of a beyond-zone that brings him into highly particular relations
with his master. Yet it is precisely because, unlike mankind, the
animal is not inserted in an order of language with his whole being
that this yields nothing further in the animal. The animal does,
however, manage something as developed as telling the difference
between some unintended whack on the back and being beaten.
Since for the time being it's a matter of sharpening the contours,
you might have seen the journal that came out in December 1956
as the fourth number of volume 37 of the J#Jcr#cz/j.o#a/ Jowr#a/ o/
PrycAocz#¢/);sz.s. It looks as though they told themselves that, after
all, there is something to this thing called language, and it looks
like a few people were solicited to respond to the call. I'm basing
myself on the article by Mr Loewenstein, which betrays a certain
cautious distance, not without competence, that consists in calling
to mind how Ferdinand de Saussure taught that there is a signifier
and signified. In short, Loewenstein shows that he's a little abreast
of what's going on, but this is absolutely devoid of any links with
our experience here, save for underscoring that one ought to think
about what one says. So, remaining at this level of development, I
can forgive him for not citing my teaching, because we've gone a
great deal further.
There is also in the same issue an article by Mr Charles Rycroft,
who on behalf of the Londoners tries to put a bit more into it, that
is, to tell us what we're doing, the analytic theory of the intra-psy-
chical agencies and their articulations one with the other. Perhaps
we ought not to forget, says the author, that communication theory
exists. We are reminded that when a child cries out, this can be
regarded as a total situation that encompasses the mother, the cry,
and the child. Consequently, we find ourselves fully in communica-
tion theory - the child cries out and the mother receives his cry as
a fj.g"-s/I.mw/ws of need. If we could only take this as our point of
departure, says the author, perhaps we might manage to reorganise
our experience.
This is absolutely not how things are in what I have been teaching
you. The cry that is at stake is a cry that already, as is shown by
what Freud highlights in the child's manifestation, is not taken as a
signal. It is already a call inasmuch as it calls for a reply. It calls out,
if I may say so, against the backdrop of a response. The cry is pro-
duced in a state of affairs where not only is language set in place for
the child, but indeed he is steeped in a language-environment and is
capable of seizing upon and voicing his first scraps of language as
an alternating pair.
The For//Dcz is utterly essential. It's a cry, but the cry that is
at issue here, the one that we take into account in frustration, is
inserted into a synchronic world of cries that are organised in a
symbolic system. The cries are already virtually organised in a sym-
bolic system. The human subject is not merely conversant with the
cry as something that on each occasion signals an object. Indeed it
is perverted, deceptive, and wrong to pose the question in terms of
a sign when the symbolic system is at issue, because from the very
first the child issues his cry for someone to take it into account, and
even for someone to have to account for it to someone else. You
need only observe the interest that the child takes in receiving these
moulded and voiced cries that we call language, and the interest he
takes in the system of language for its own sake. The model gift is
precisely the gift of speech, because here the gift is indeed equal in
its principle. From the very first, the child feeds on words as much
a,s on breaLd. A.s the Gospct says, Not that which goeth into the mouth
defileth a man;. but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth
a man.
You have noticed the following - or more precisely, you didn't
notice it but I insist on underscoring it for you so as to bring this to
a close - the term rcgrcss;.o77 can have a repercussion here that is dif-
ferent from how it usually appears. The term regrcssz.o# is applicable
to what happens when the real object, and by the same stroke the
activity that is exerted to secure it, comes to be substituted for the
symbolic demand. When I said that the child quashes his disap-
pointment in his saturation and his un fulfilment by the contact with
the breast, or with whichever other object, what is strictly speaking
at stake is what will enable him to enter the necessity of the mecha-
nism. This means that a symbolic frustration can always be followed
by, can always open the door to, regression.
We need to make a jump now.

It would be quite artificial if we were to make do with the remark
that, based on this opening that has been made for the signifier
by the entry of the imaginary, everything else from here on in is
plain sailing. Indeed, with all the relationships that will now be
established with the subject's own body, through the intermediary

of the specular relationship, you can see very well how the advent
of the signifier can come into play for each of the body's appurte-
nances. That excrement should become the choice object for the
gift during a certain period should certainly come as no surprise to
us because it's quite obvious that the child can on occasion find the
real in a ready state to feed the symbolic in the material that is avail-
able to him in relation to his body. That retention can occasionally
become refusal should not surprise us either. Whatever richness and
refinement the analytic experience has uncovered in the phenomena
of anal symbolism, this doesn't lead us to dwell on it at any length.
If I spoke of making a jump, it's because it's now a matter of
seeing how the phallus is brought into the dialectic of frustration.
Once again, please abstain from pointless demands bearing on
natural genesis. If you want to deduce the fact that the phallus plays
an absolutely supervalent role across the entire genital aspect of the
symbolic from something in the makeup of the genital organs, you
will simply never manage. You will merely surrender to the very
contortions that I hope to be able to show you in detail, those of Dr
Ernest Jones when he tries to offer a satisfactory commentary on the
phallic phase, which Freud had asserted in a rough-and-ready way,
and tries to show us how it is that the phallus that woman doesn't
have can assume such importance for her. It's really very strange to
behold.
In truth, the question absolutely does not lie here. The question
is first and foremost a question of fact. It's a fact. Had we not
uncovered, in the phenomena, this supervalence and pre-eminence
of the phallus across the entire imaginary dialectic that governs the
misadventures, the mishaps, and also the failures and breakdowns
of genital development, there wouldn't be any problem.
There can be no doubting that it's quite needless to tire oneself
out, as many have, observing that the female child must surely have
little sensations in her tummy too, and an experience that is surely
distinct from the boy's. As Freud notes, this is not the question.
Moreover, this is utterly self-evident because if woman, by her own
admission, finds it much harder than the boy to bring the reality of
what happens on the side of the uterus or the vagina into a dialectic
of desire that would satisfy her, it's because she has to pass through
something to which she has a completely different relation from
that of the man, namely the thing she lacks, the phallus. But the
reason why things are like this is certainly not to be gathered, in any
case whatsoever, from anything that originates in any physiological
leaning of either of the two sexes. One has to start with the existence
of an imaSnary phallus.
The imaginary phallus is the pivotal point in a whole series of

facts that require it as a postulate. One has to study this labyrinth in
which the subject generally loses his way, and in which he can even
wind up being devoured. The thread that leads out of it is provided
by the fact that what is to be discovered is that the mother lacks the
phallus, that it is because she lacks it that she desires it, and that it is
only insomuch as something gives it to her that she can be satisfied.
This might appear, quite literally, stupefying. Well, we have to
start with this stupefaction. The first virtue of cognisance is to be
capable of confronting what is not self-evident. All the same, we
have perhaps been somewhat prepared to accept that lack is the
main desire here if we accept that this is also the distinguishing
feature of the symbolic order. In other words, it is in so far as the
imaginary phallus plays a major signifying role that the situation
presents in this way. It's not that each subject invents the signifier in
accordance with his or her sex and his or her leanings or frolickings
at birth. The signifier exists. That the phallus as signifier plays a
subjacent role cannot be doubted. It took analysis to discover it, but
it's absolutely essential.
Let's leave for a moment the terrain of analysis to take up a
question I put to Monsieur L6vi-Strauss, the author of E/c7„e#fczr);
Sfrwc/wrcs o/ Kz.#5fej.p. He sets out the dialectic of the exchange of
women down through the lineages. By means of a sort of postulate
and choice, he sets out how women are exchanged between genera-
{1o"s. I have taken a woman from one line, I owe another woman to
a i;ollowing generation or to another line. ALnd so there is a. momerut
when this must come to a close. If this is done through the law of
exchange and preferential marriages between cross cousins, things
will circulate with great regularity in a circle that will have no reason
to close or break, but if this is done with what are known as parallel
cousins this can give rise to things that are rather awkward because
after a while the exchange starts to converge and to produce cracks
and fragments in the lineages. So, I asked L6vi-Strauss, what if
you were to describe this circle of exchange by turning it around,
to say that the female lineages produce men and exchange them
between one another? For, in the end, we are already aware that the
lack that we have been speaking about in women is not a real lack.
Everyone knows that they can have phalli, and what is more they
produce them. They beget boys, phallophores. As a consequence,
one may describe the exchange down through the generations in a
more straightforward way, in the opposite order. One can imagine a
matriarchy whose law would be -J'vc gz.t;c# a so7!, JSA¢// #ow rcccz.vc
a man .3
L6vi-Strauss's reply is the following. From the standpoint of
formalisation one could doubtless describe things in exactly the

same way, symmetrically, by taking a reference axis, a system of
coordinates founded on women or founded on men, but then a heap
of items would remain inexplicable and in particular the following.
In every case where the political power is androcentric, even in
matriarchal societies, it is represented by men and by male lineages.
Very peculiar anomalies in these exchanges - a modification, an
exception, or a paradox that might appear in the laws of exchange at
the level of the elementary structures of kinship - can be explained
only in relation and reference to something that lies outside the
interplay of kinship, and this is the political context, that is to say,
the order of power, and very precisely the order of the signifier, the
order in which sceptre and phallus merge into one.
It is for reasons that are inscribed into the symbolic order, which
transcends individual development, that the fact of having or not
having the imaginary and symbolised phallus takes on the economic
importance that it holds at the level of the Oedipus complex. This
is what explains both the importance of the castration complex and
the primacy of the infamous fantasies of the phallic mother, which
has been creating the problem you know about for as long as it has
been on the analytic horizon.
Before leading you into how the dialectic of the phallus is articu-
lated, completed and resolved at the level of the Oedipus complex, I
want to show you that I too can remain for a while in the preoedipal
stages, on the sole condition of being led by the guiding thread of the
fundamental role of the symbolic relationship.
What role does the phallus play at the level of its imaginary func-
tion, at the level of the claimed requirement of a phallic mother? I
want to show you once again how absolutely essential this notion
of the lack of object is, just by reading the decent analyst-authors,
among whom I include Karl Abraham.
In an admirable article from 1920 on Mo#I/es/a/!.o#s a//Ae Fcm¢/c
Cczs/r¢Jz.o77 Comp/c;¥, Abraham gives us the example, on page 341, of
a little girl of two.4 After coffee-time, she goes to her father's cigar
box, takes a first cigar and gives it to her father, takes a second
and gives it to her mother, who doesn't smoke, then takes a third
aind plaices ±t between her legs. Her mother put the three cigars back
z.# /fee box. It is not by chance that the girl woz./cd cz /z./f/c wfej./e cz7!d
/Ac# p/¢}7ccJ ffec sczmc game over czg¢z.#. This comes to just the right
place. I regret that the commentary is not spelt out further, because
if we accept that the third move indicates that the young girl lacks
this symbolic object, which is what Abraham implicitly admits, she
thereby manifests this lack and it is no doubt in this capacity that she
first gave it to he who does not lack, thereby showing she who does
lack, namely her mother, what to do with it. The girl marks out very
well how she can desire it, as experience proves, in order to satisfy
the one who lacks it. If you read Freud's article on Fcma/e Se:x:wcz/j.f}J,
you learn that for the young girl it's not simply a matter of lacking
the phallus, but of giving it or its equivalent to her mother, /.ws/ os
the boy wants to.
I'm recalling this vignette simply by way of an introduction to
what you need to represent in your own minds, which is the fact that
nothing is conceivable in the phenomenology of the perversions - I
mean in a direct way - if you don't start with the idea that what
is involved is the phallus. This is a far simpler idea than what is
usually given to you in that kind of obscurity of identifications,
re-entifications, and projections all enmeshed into a labyrinth where
you lose your way. It's a matter of the phallus and of seeing how the
child realises, more or less consciously, that his all-powerful mother
is fundamentally in want of something. The question is always to see
by what path he will give her this object that she is in want of, and
which he himself is forever in want of.
Indeed, let's not forget that the young boy's phallus is not a
great deal more robust than the young girl's. Naturally the finer
authors spotted this, and Dr Jones realised all the same that Mrs
Karen Homey was rather favourable to the one with whom he
was in conflict, in this instance Freud. The fundamentally deficient
character of the little boy's phallus, even the shame that he can feel
about it, his keen sense of insufficiency, is something that she was
able to stress very firmly, not as a way of trying to bridge the gulf of
difference that lies between the young boy and the young girl, but
as a way of clarifying one through the other. In this light, in order
to understand the exact value of the little boy's attempts at seducing
his mother, let's not forget the importance of what he discovers
on his own person. These attempts at seduction, which people are
still speaking about, are deeply marked by narcissistic conflict. This
is always the occasion of the first narcissistic wounds, which are
merely preludes here, and even presuppositions, with regard to the
later effects of castration. They still need to be looked at, though.
Rather than mere sexual drive or aggression, what is ultimately at
issue is the fact that the boy wants to make-believe that he is a male
or a bearer of the phallus, when he is only half way to being one.
In other words, what is involved throughout the whole preoe-
dipal period in which the perversions find their point of origin is
a game that is kept up, a game of hunt-the-ring or find-the-Lady,
or even our game of odds-and-evens, where the phallus is funda-
mental as a signifier in this imaginary of the mother that it's a
question of joining, because the child's ego is reliant on the mother's
almightiness. It's a matter of seeing where it is and where it is not.

It is never truly there where it is, and it is never altogether absent
where it is not. The classification of the perversions as a whole must
encompass this. Irrespective of the worth of some contributions on
identification with the mother and identification with the object, and
so on, what is essential is the relation to the phallus.
Take for example transvestism. In transvestism the subject calls
the phallus into question. People forget that transvestism is not
merely a matter of homosexuality more or less transposed, nor is
it a matter of fetishism particularised, a fetish that is worn by the
subject. As Fenichel shows very well in his article 7lfec Ps};cfeo/og};
a/ rrcz#svcs/I.sin, which came out in 1930 in the eleventh issue of
The International Journal of Psychoanalysis , the worELf ln w.I+h whom
the transvestist identifies himself is conceived of by him as phallic.
However, she has a phallus in so far as it is hidden, and here we can
see that the phallus must always partake of something that veils it.
The essential importance of what I called the veil, the existence of
garments, lies in the fact that it is through them that the object is
materialised. Even when the real object is there, one has to be able to
think that it may not be there. And it always has to be possible that
it is thought to be precisely where it is not.
Likewise, in male homosexuality - to confine ourselves to this
for today - what is at stake for the subject is still his phallus but,
curiously, it is in so far as he will seek out his own phallus in another
Party.
To spell it right out, all the perversions can be placed within this
measure, where they always play from some angle with the signifi-
cant object insomuch as it is, in itself and by its very nature, a true
signifier, that is to say, something that in no case whatsoever can be
taken at face value. And when one does get one's hand on it, when
one finds it and attaches oneself to it definitively, as is the case in the
perversion of all perversions known as fetishism - for this is the one
that shows not only where it truly lies, but also what it is - the object
is tantamount to exactly nothing. It's just a worn-out garment, a
cast-off rag. A part of this fetishism can be seen in transvestism,
where at the end of the day it's just a tatty old shoe.
When it does appear, when it is unveiled for real, it is the fetish.
What does this mean? It's that the crucial stage standsjust before the
Oedipus complex. It stands between the first relationship that was
my point of departure today and which I have grounded for you,
namely the primary relationship of frustration, and the Oedipus
complex. It's the stage at which the child engages in the dialectic
of the lure. To satisfy what cannot be satisfied, namely the moth-
er's desire, which in its very fundament is unfulfillable, the child
commits, by whichever path, to the route of making himself a decep-

tive object. I mean that it's a matter of tricking this desire that
cannot be fulfilled. It is very precisely to the extent that he shows his
mother that fee z.s ;7of , that the whole movement from which the ego
derives its stability is constructed.
The most characteristic stages have now been marked by the fun-
damental ambiguity between subject and object, as Freud showed
in his final article, on splitting. It is to the extent that the child
turns himself into an object meant to trick, that he finds himself
committed to a position vis-a-vis the other where the intersubjec-
tive relationship has been fully constituted. This is not merely a
sort of immediate lure, as can be produced in the animal kingdom
where the one that is decked out in all the colours of display has to
establish the whole situation by parading around. On the contrary,
the subject supposes desire in the other. What has to be satisfied is a
desire at one remove, and since it's a desire that cannot be satisfied,
one can only trick it.
It is always overlooked how human exhibitionism is not an exhi-
bitionism like others, like that of the robin redbreast, for instance. It
involves opening one's trouser fly then closing it again. If there are
no trousers then a dimension of exhibitionism is missing.
We also meet the possibility of regression. The un fulfilled and
unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope
of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other
un fulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, g#czcr-
c#£ gwen c7cvorcf . What the child once found as a means of quashing
the symbolic un fulfilment is what he may possibly find across from
him again as a wide-open maw. We also find this projected image of
the oral situation at the level of imaginary sexual satisfaction. The
gaping hole of the Medusa's head is a devouring figure that the child
encounters as a possible outcome of his search to satisfy his mother.
ro bc c7cvoztrcc7 is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us.
We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path
where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents.
We find it again when we look at the fears of little Hans. The
case now presents with somewhat greater clarification with respect
to one of its conditions. With the support of what I have shown
you today, you will better see the relationships between phobia and
perversion. Furthemore, you will better see what I indicated last
time, namely the function of the Ego-ideal that takes shape against
this backdrop. I shall go so far as to say that you will interpret the
case better than did Freud himself, because there is a wavering in the
observation over how what the child calls /fee bj.g gj.rczjffc and ffec /I.///e
gr.rajrc ought to be identified.
As Monsieur Pievert has put it,
Les grandes girofes sont muettes

Les petites girofes sont rares.
While this is very poorly interpreted in the observation, there is

nevertheless an inroad to what is at stake. Isn't it clear enough from
the simple fact that little Hans crumples the little giraffe and sits on
top of it, in spite of the cries of the big giraffe who is incontestably
the mother?
27 February 1957
MYTHICAL STRUCTURE
IN THE OBSERVATION
ON LITTLE HANS'S
PHOBIA
XII
ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
The equation Penis = Child

The ideal of woman's monogamy
The Other, between mother and phallus
The symbolic father is unthinkable
Male bigamy
agent lack object
castration
frustration
symbolic mother
I
privation
R
Last time, we tried to spell out afresh the notion of castration, or at

the very least how this concept is used in our practice. I
In the second part of the lesson I pinpointed the locus at which
the imaginary comes to interfere in the relationship of frustration
that unites the child to his mother, this relationship being vastly
more complex than the use that has on the whole been made of
it. I told you that it was only in an apparent way, and in keeping
with the requirements of its expounding, that we found ourselves
thereby moving backwards, depicting a sort of succession of stages
that would follow on in a line of development, because, quite to
192 Little Hans's Phobia
the contrary, it's always a matter of grasping what at each stage

intervenes from the outside, retroactively to reorganise what had
been initiated at the previous stage. This is for the simple reason that
the child is not alone. The fact that he is not alone is due not only to
his biological surroundings but also to surroundings that are of far
greater import, namely the lawful environment, the symbolic order.
As I underscored last time, the particularities of the symbolic order
are what impart accentuation and supervalence to the element of the
imaginary known as the phallus.
So, this is the point we reached, and to open the third part of my
expose I set you on the trail of little Hans's anxiety, since from the
first we have been singling out two exemplary objects, the fetish
object and the real object.
It is at the level of little Hans that we are going to try to articulate
today's remarks.
This will not be an attempt to rearticulate the notion of castration,
because goodness knows it was powerfully and insistently articu-
lated by Freud, but simply to speak about it once more because for
as long as people have avoided speaking about it, the use and refer-
ence that can be drawn from it have become increasingly rare in the
observations.
To tackle this notion of castration today, we need only follow the
same line as our disquisition last time.
What is at issue at the end of the preoedipal phase, on the cusp of

the Oedipus complex?
The child has to take the phallus on board as a signifier, and
in a way that turns it into the instrument of the symbolic order
of exchange that presides over the constitution of lineages. All
told, he has to be confronted with the order that, in the Oedipus
complex, will make the function of the father the pivotal point of
the drama.
This is not so straightforward. At the very least, I have thus far
told you enough about it for it to strike a chord with you when I
tell you that it's not so straightforward. The function of existence
on the symbolic plane in the signifier Fczffecr, with everything that
this term entails that is so deeply problematic, raises the question
of the way in which it has come to the centre of the symbolic
organisation.
This gives us to think that we shall have a few questions to ask
ourselves regarding the three aspects of the paternal function.
On the Oedipus Complex 193
During the first year of our seminars, when the second semester was
dedicated to the study of the Wolf Man, we learnt to single out the
paternal repercussions in the conflict under the threefold heading of
thf3 symbolic father ` thf3 imaginary father tmd the real father . W e salw
that it was impossible to orient oneself in the Wolf-Man case if one
doesn't draw this essential distinction.
Let's try to tackle the point we reached, namely the introduction
into the Oedipus complex that arises for the child, in chronological
order.
All in all, we saw the child in the luring position that he takes up
vis-a-vis his mother. I told you that this is not a lure in which he
would be fully implicated. It's not the simple lure of the game of
sexual parade, in the ethological sense, where we on the outside can
perceive the imaginary elements that captivate one of the partners in
virtue of the appearances of the other. In this case, we don't know to
what extent the subjects themselves act as a lure, though we do know
that we can do so on occasion, presenting a mere coat-of-arms to the
desire of the adversary. Here, the lure that is at issue is very sharply
delineated in the very actions and activities that we can observe in
the young boy. For example, in his seducing of his mother, when he
exhibits himself, this is no mere showing. It is the showing a/himself
b)/ hinself to the mother that exists as a third party. And behind the
mother looms something that is tantamount to good faith, in which
she can be caught, so to speak. This is already an entire intersubjec-
tive trinity, even a quaternary, that is taking shape.
What ultimately is at stake in this entry into the Oedipus complex?
Well, it's about the subject himself having to be caught in this lure in
such a way that he finds himself committed to an existent order, an
order that is different from the psychological lure through which he
came into it. This is where we left him last time,
While analytic theory ascribes a normalising function to the
Oedipus complex, we should recall that our experience teaches us
that this normalising function is not enough to culminate in the fact
of the subject making an object-choice. Just as we know that for
there to be heterosexual object-choice it is not enough to play by the
rules of being heterosexual, so do we know that there are all shapes
and sizes of apparent heterosexuality. Sometimes the candidly het-
erosexual relationship can harbour an atypical positioning that will
come to light through analytic investigation as being derived from a
clearly homosexualised position, for instance. So, after the Oedipus
complex, the subject, boy or girl, must not only arrive at heterosexu-
ality but also reach it in such a way as to situate him- or herself in the
proper manner in relation to the function of the Father. This lies at
the heart of the whole Oedipal problematic.
We indicated on our inroad into object relations, and Freud

spells it out expressly in his 1931 article on Fcmcz/c Sexw¢/j./}7,
that taken from this angle, and from the preoedipal angle, the
woman's problematic I.I mwcfe fz.mp/er.2 While it can appear far
more complicated in Freud's writings, this is consistent with the
order of discovery. He discovered the Oedipus complex before he
uncovered what is preoedipal, and indeed how could he have done
otherwise? If there is something that is preoedipal, it's because
first of all the Oedipus complex has been posited. We can speak of
this greater simplicity of the female position on the developmental
level that we qualify as preoedipal only because we first know that
we are going to arrive at the complex structure of the Oedipus
complex.
That said, we are also able to say that, for the woman, the
phallus that she has more or less situated and approached in the
imaginary -which is where it is to be found, beyond the mother, in
the progressive uncovering of the fundamental dissatisfaction that
the mother feels in the mother/child relationship - slides into the
real. There is a sliding of the phallus from the imaginary to the real.
This is what Freud explains when he tells us that in the yearning
for the originary phallus, at the imaginary level where it starts to
emerge for the young girl in the specular reference to her semblable
- another little girl or a little boy - the child will be the substitute
for the phallus.
This is actually a somewhat summary way of grasping what occurs
in the phenomenon under observation. If you look at the position
such as I have drawn it out - here is the imaginary, that is, the
mother's desire for the phallus, and here the child, our centre, who
has to discover this beyond-zone, this lack in the maternal object -
in one of the possible outcomes, from the moment the child becomes
the pivotal point of the situation and finds himself saturating it, he
gets out of it by conceiving of the possibility of this way out.
What effectively do we find in the young girl's fantasy, and also
in the young boy's?
To the extent that the situation pivots around the child, the young
girl then finds the real penis right where it is, beyond the child
herself, with the one who can give her the child, says Freud, with the
father. It is precisely in so far as she does not have it as an appurte-
nance, and even in so far as she sharply renounces it on this plane,
that she will be able to have it as a gift from the father. This is why
it is through the relation to the phallus that, as Freud tells us, the
young girl enters the Oedipus complex in a straightforward way, as
you can see. Thereafter, the phallus will just have to slide from the
imaginary to the real by means of a sort of equation. G/cz.cAwng is
the term that Freud uses in his 1925 article on Some Co#scgwc#ces
of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes. He writes, Nun
aber gleitet die Libido des Mddchens -man kann nur sagen: ldngs der
vorgezeichneten symbolischen Gleichung Penis = Kind - in eine neue
Pofz.J;.o#. The young girl will have been sufficiently introduced into
the Oedipus complex to make this a reality.
I'm not saying that there is not to be a great deal more, including
thereafter all the anomalies in the development of female sexuality,
but here there is already the fixation upon the father as the bearer
of the real penis, as he who can give the child for real. For her this
is already of suflicient consistence for it to be said that ultimately
the Oedipus complex, as the pathway to integration into the typical
heterosexual position, is far more straightforward for the woman,
even though it does usher in all sorts of complications and impasses
in the development of female sexuality.
Obviously this should not astonish us, insomuch as the Oedipus
complex is essentially androcentric or patricentric. This asymmetry
calls upon all kinds of particular quasi-historical considerations to
make us perceive the supervalence on the sociological and ethno-
graphic plane of the individual experience that Freud's discovery
allows us to analyse. Conversely, since I spoke of an ordering, of
a symbolic order or a subordinated ordination, it's quite clear that
the object of woman's love is the object of the sentiment that is
addressed, strictly speaking, to the element of lack in the object.
In so far as she has been led to this object, the father, along the
path of lack, he becomes the one who gives the object of satisfac-
tion, the object of the natural relationship of childbirth. From this
point forward, all it takes is a little patience for the father to be
replaced by he who will play exactly the same role, the father's
role.
This brings with it a feature that we will be coming back to,
and which lends its particular style to the development of the
female superego. There is a kind of balance between the renun-
ciation of the phallus and what has quite rightly been called the
supervalence of the narcissistic relationship in women's devel-
opment. Hanns Sachs saw the importance of this very clearly.3
Indeed, once this renunciation has been made, the phallus is given
up as an appurtenance and becomes the appurtenance of the one
to whom she now attaches her love, the father from whom she
effectively awaits a child. This expectation of what henceforth is
for her no less than her due places her in a very peculiar depend-
ence that paradoxically gives rise at one point to specifically
narcissistic fixations, as the various authors have noted. Indeed
she is the being who is most intolerant of a particular frustration.
We might come back to this later, when we speak about the ideal
of monogamy in women.
Furthermore, it is with this simple reduction of the situation,
which identifies the object of love with the object that gives satisfac-
tion, that the especially fixed aspect of women's development, and
even its precociously arrested aspect, is located in a development
that may be qualified as normal. At certain junctures in his writings
Freud assumes a peculiarly misogynistic tone, complaining bitterly
of how very difficult it is, at least with some female subjects, to get
them to shi+St away [rom the logic of soup, with dumplings for argu-
mc#ts, from something so imperiously requisite in the satisfaction
that they must derive, for example, from their analysis.
I'm doing no more than indicating a certain number of begin-
nings. We will have to come back to the development that Freud
contributed on female sexuality. Today we are going to focus on
the boy.
In the case of the boy, the Oedipus complex appears to be far
more clearly destined to allow him to identify with his own sex. All
in all, it arises in the ideal relationship, in the imaginary relationship
with the father. Conversely, the true aim of the Oedipus complex,
which is to situate the subject in the right way in relation to the func-
tion of the father, that is to say, for him one day to gain access to the
altogether paradoxical and problematic position of being a father,
presents a mountain of difficulties.
People have not been taking less and less interest in the
Oedipus complex because they've failed to see this mountain. It's
precisely because they have seen it, and they prefer to turn their
backs on it.
Let's not forget that Freud's questioning as a whole, not only
in the doctrine but in his very experience, which we find traced
out for us in the confidences he shares - his dreams, the progress
of his thought, everything that we now know of his life, his habits
and even his attitudes at home with his family, which Dr Jones has
reported in a way that is fairly thoroughgoing, but of which we may
be sure - boils down to the question of what it means to be a father.
This was the central problem for Freud, the productive point
from which all his research took its true orientation.
Observe too that while this is a problem for every neurotic, it's
also a problem for every non-neurotic in the course of his childhood
experience. What is a father? This question is one way of tackling the
problem of the signifier of the father, but let's not overlook the fact
that in the end they do become fathers. To pose the question W7!czf
j.J cz/¢ffocr? is something different from being a father oneself, from
acceding to the paternal position. Let's look at this more closely.
Even if acceding to this position is an article of faith, a quest, it's

not unthinkable to say that, in the end, no one has ever truly been a
father through and through.
In this dialectic, we suppose - and this supposition has to be the
starting point - that somewhere there is someone who can fully take
on the position of the father, someone who can respond, J czm fAe
/cz/focr. This is a supposition that is essential to the whole furtherance
of the Oedipal dialectic, but in no way does this settle the question of
the particular intersubjective position of the one that fulfils this role
for the others, and especially for the child.
So, let's start again with little Hans.
The observation on little Hans is a whole world unto itself. Among

the collection of five of Freud's case studies,4 this is the one I have
left until last in the labour of commentary I have been pursuing, and
with good reason.
Last time, I left you with the material from the first few pages of
the text, and Freud is well justified in presenting things in this order.
The question is that of the Wj.wz.773ocAer, which has been translated
[into English] as wz.dd/cr. When we follow Freud to the letter, the
questions that little Hans poses concern not only his widdler but
also the widdlers of all living creatures, and especially of those that
are bigger than himself.
You have seen the pertinent remarks concerning the sequence in
which the child poses his questions. In sequence, he first asks his
mother, Hczvc );ow gof cr w.c}d/cr /oo? We will speak later about what
his mother replies, and whereupon Hans utters, J w¢s o#/);/."s/ /fez.#k-
j.#g. That is to say, he has been mulling over a good many things.
Next he puts the question to bis father. Then he delights in seeing
the lion's widdler, which is not altogether by chance. And back at
this time, that is, prior to the appearance of the phobia, he clearly
indicates that if his mother has a widdler, as she asserts to him that
she has - not, in my opinion, without impudence - then it ought to
be visible. One evening, not long after this questioning, he watches
her undressing and remarks J jAo#gA/ };o# wcrc so bj.g );ow'c7 foczve a
widdler like a horse.
The word ycrg/cj.cfow#g has been translated [into English] as
compczrz.Jo#. We could almost say that the word egw¢/I.sa/j.o# would
be better in this instance, at the very least in economic terms if not
by strict tradition. From the imaginary phallicist perspective, in
which we left the subject last time, there is an effort of equalisation
between a sort of absolute object, the phallus, and the fact of putting
it to the test of the real. It's not a matter of all or nothing, as it was
in the game of find-the-Lady or in the game of hide-and-seek where
it is never where one is looking and never where it was found. It's a
matter now of finding out where it truly is.
Up to this point the child was the one who was affecting a sem-
blance, or who was playing at affecting a semblance. It's not for
nothing that, a little further on in the observation, little Hans has
a dream -Az.a/rs/ ¢ccow#f a/a drc¢m, we are told by Freud and his
parents - in which an element of distortion, a displacement, arises,
precisely through the intermediary of a game of forfeits. Moreover,
when you follow the whole imaginary dialectic ~ if you remember
how I approached it in the previous lessons - you will be struck by
how it is being played out here on the surface at this pre-phobic
stage in Hans's development. It's all there, up to and including the
fantasmatic children. All of a sudden, after the birth of his little
sister, he adopts a bevy of imaginary little girls to whom he does
everything that can be done to children. The imaginary game is out
in force, almost without intention. It's a matter of bridging the full
distance that lies between the one who affects a semblance and the
one who knows that he has the power.
What affords us a first approach to the Oedipal relationship?
When we look at what is being played out on the plane of this act
of comparing, we could conceive of it as the continuation of the
game on the plane of the lure, on the imaginary plane, with the
child merely subjoining the maternal model to his own dimensions.
The image is larger, but essentially homogenous. Yet it still remains
that if this is how the dialectic of the Oedipus complex gets under
way, then ultimately he will only ever be dealing with a double of
himself, an enlarged double. In this introduction, which is perfectly
conceivable, of the maternal image in the form of the Ego-ideal, we
remain in the imaginary dialectic, in the specular dialectic of the
subject's relation to the little other. The inevitable consequence of
this does not allow us to get out of the cj./Acr/or, of the cz.ffecr ¢j.in
or mc, that remains bound to the first symbolic dialectic, that of
presence or absence. We do not get out of the game of odds-and-
evens. We do not leave behind the plane of the lure. What results
from this?
We know the answer from the side that is as much theoretical
as it is exemplary. The only thing we see coming out of this is the
symptom, the manifestation of anxiety. So Freud tells us.
Freud underscores near the start of the observation that, when
it comes to anxiety and phobia, ffecrc ;.a good rc¢so7t /or kccpz.ng
/fee /wo scp¢ra/c. They are two things that come in succession. One
comes to the aid of the other. The phobic object fulfils a function
against the backdrop of anxiety. On the imaginary plane, however,
nothing enables us to envisage the jump that makes the child shift
away from the luring game with his mother. As someone who is all
or nothing, the one who suffices or the one who does not suffice, she
surely remains on the plane of fundamental insufficiency in virtue of
the sole fact that the question has been posed.
This is the first outline of the notion of the entry into the Oedipus
complex - the almost fraternal rivalry with the father. We are being
led to nuance this far more than in how it is commonly put together.
Indeed, the aggressiveness at issue there is an aggressiveness of the
type that comes into play in the specular relationship, in the j./'J
cz./foer fe!.in or mc that is always being defined as the fundamental
mainspring. On the other hand, the fixation remains wholly attached
to she who, after the first frustrations, has become the real object,
that is to say, the mother. It is due to this stage, or more precisely to
this essential and central Oedipal experience on the imaginary plane,
that the Oedipus complex reaches out with all its neurosis-inducing
consequences, which can be found in countless aspects of analytic
reality.
In particular, it is here that we can see one of the first terms of
the Freudian experience making its entry, the debasement in the
sphere of love to which Freud devoted a special study. In virtue of
the subject's permanent attachment to this real primal object that
is the mother qua frustrating mother, any female object will there-
after be no more for him than a depreciated object, a substitute, a
broken, refracted and forever partial mode in comparison with the
first maternal object. We will be seeing shortly what we ought to
think of this.
However, don't forget that while the Oedipus complex can have
perdurable consequences with respect to the imaginary mainspring
that it causes to intervene, this is not the whole story. As a rule,
and from the very first in Freud's doctrine, it is in the nature of the
Oedipus complex to resolve itself. When Freud speaks about it, he
tells us that surely what we can appreciate concerning the pushing
into the background of the hostility against the father is something
that we can legitimately link to a repression. But in the same breath,
he makes sure to underscore that this is one more opportunity to
note that repression is applied always to a particular articulation
of the subject's history, and not to a permanent relationship. He
says. I see no reason for denying the name of a `repression' ,but at this
age, between five and five-and-a-half years when the dissolution of
the Oedipus complex occurs, it is as a rule equivalent fo a desfr#c-
/z.o# czjtd cz# czbo/I.fz.o7! o/ ffec comp/cx. Thus, there is something more
in relation to what we have thus far described, and which would

in some way be the effacement, the imaginary attenuation, of a
relationship that in itself is fundamentally perdurable. There is a
veritable crisis, a revolution. There truly is something that leaves a
result, this being the shaping of the superego, which is both highly
particular and precisely datable in the unconscious.
It is here that we come face-to-face with the necessity of bringing
out something new and original, and which has its specific solution
in the Oedipal relationship. To see this, we need only turn to our
usual scheme.
At the point we reached last time, the child was offering the
mother the imaginary object of the phallus in order to give her
complete satisfaction, and was doing so in the form of a lure, that
is to say, by bringing in the Other that is in some way the witness,
the one who can behold the situation as a whole. The young boy's
exhibitionism to his mother is meaningless without this term. It is
implicated by the mere fact that what we describe in the presenta-
tion, even in the offering, that the little boy makes to his mother,
plainly arises at the level of this Other. This term must be produced
at this level for the Oedipus complex to exist. It requires the pres-
ence of a term that hitherto was not in the game, the presence of
someone who always and in any circumstance is poised to play and
to win.
Mother
Phallus
The scheme of the forfeits game is there to show us this, among

countless other hints that are there to be read in the observations
and which one can see being played out in the child's very activity at
this stage. We meet it in umpteen different forms in the case of little
Hans, for example in his way of suddenly taking himself off to the
wood-cupboard and standing in the darkness. It is fez.a W. C. , where
previously he was using the family W.C. There is a moment when
everything oscillates around this game-playing, with the notion of
something that adds the dimension that was to be expected on the
planeofthesymbolicrelationship.Whatpreviously,inthebroaching
of the symbolic relationship, was no more than the calling and the
calling back that I spoke about last time, and which characterises
the symbolic mother, now becomes the notion that at the level of
the big Other there is someone who can respond come what may,
and who in every case answers that he is the one who's got the true
phallus, the real penis. He is the one who holds the trump card, and
who knows it. The introduction of this real element in the symbolic
order is the inverse of the first position of the mother that is symbol-
ised in the real by her presence and her absence.
Until then, the object both was and wasn't there. It was with this
point that the subject began in relation to any object, namely that an
object is both present and absent, and that one can always play with
the presence or the absence of an object. After the turning point,
however, the object is no longer the imaginary object that he can
use in his luring but an object the power of which is always in the
hands of an Other, who can show that the subject does not have it or
that he has it insufficiently. Castration plays its absolutely essential
role throughout his ensuing development solely on the basis of the
fact that, in having to take on board the maternal phallus as an
essentially symbolic object, in the essential Oedipal experience the
child can conceive that this same symbolic object will be given to
him one day by the one who has it, who knows that he has it in every
instance.
In other words, taking on board the very sign of the virile position,
of male heterosexuality, implies castration at its point of departure.
This is what Freud's Oedipal notion teaches us. Precisely because
the male, contrary to the female position, is already in perfect pos-
session of a natural appendage, he has to have this appurtenance
from someone else, in this relationship to something that is real in
the symbolic - the one who truly is the father. And in the end no
one can say what it means to be the father for real, except that it's
something that is already to be found in the game. It's in relation
to this game played with the father, this game of loser wins, as it
were, that the child can win the faith that leaves him with this first
inscription of Law.
What becomes of the subject in this drama?

As it is described for us in the Freudian dialectic, he is a little
criminal. It is by the path of the imaginary crime that he enters the
realm of Law. But he can enter this realm of Law only if he has had,
at least for an instant, a real partner across from him, someone who
has effectively brought to this level something that is not merely
calling and calling back, that is not merely a pairing of presence and
absence, the fundamentally annihilating element of the symbolic,

but rather someone who responds to him.
Now, while things may be expressed in this way on the plane of
the imaginary drama, it is on the level of the inaginary game that
this must be experienced. It is not without reason that no particular
dialogue is generated by this requirement of a dimension of abso-
lute alterity, by the one who simply possesses the power and who
answers for it. This dimension is incarnated by real protagonists,
but they themselves are always dependent upon something that ulti-
mately presents as an eternal alibi. The only one who might respond
absolutely from this position of the father qua symbolic father is the
one who could say, like the monotheistic God, J 4A4 rfJ4 I J 4jl4.
But this is a thing that, aside from the sacred text in which we find it,
can literally be uttered by no one.
You will tell me then, row A¢vc /czwgfo/ ws fA¢/ ffoc 77tcsfczgc we
receive is our own in an inverted form, and so everything will be
resolved by - THOU AR:I THAT THOU AR:I. Do"'t b€rfueNe it`
because wrfeo ¢m J fo scz}; jAcz/ /o ¢#)/o#c c/sc? In other words, what I
want to indicate here is that the symbolic father is strictly speaking
unthinkable.
The symbolic father is nowhere. He intervenes nowhere.
The proof of this is laid out in Freud's work. It took a mind as
bound to the requirements of positivist and scientific thought as was
the mind of Freud to produce the construction that Jones reveals
he esteemed above all the rest of his life's work. He didn't put it
in the front line, because his major work, and the only one -as he
affirmed in writing and never went back on -was 7lfec J#/erprc/cz/I.o#
o/Drcczms, but the one he held most dear, as an achievement that in
his eyes was a feat, is rofcm cz#c7 r¢boo. rofe77i ¢#d rczboo is no less
than a modern myth, a myth constructed to explain what remained
as a gaping hole in his doctrine, namely, W7!crc I.s /fee/czfAer?
You need only read ro/cm cz7Id rclboo with an open eye to realise
that if it is not what I say it is - a myth - then it's quite absurd.
However, if ro/cm o#d r¢boo is designed to tell us that there are such
things as fathers who linger on, then the true father, the only father,
the one and only father from before the dawn of history, has to be
the dead father. Further still, this father has to have been killed. And
truly, how could this even be thinkable beyond its strictly mythical
value, because as far as I know, the father at issue is not conceived
of by Freud, nor by anyone, as an immortal being? Why is it that
the sons should have in some way hastened him to an untimely end?
Why go to such lengths when ultimately they forbade themselves
what it was a matter of stealing from him? That is to say, they killed
him only to show that he cannot be killed.
The essence of what Freud introduces in relation to a major

drama hinges on a notion that is strictly mythical in so far as it
is the very categorisation of a form of the impossible, even of the
unthinkable, namely the eternalisation of a one and only Father at
the origin, whose characteristics amount to his having been killed.
And why so, if not to maintain him? I point out to you incidentally
that in French, and a few other tongues, in German in particular,
/wcr comes from the Latin /#/c-I-re, which means fo gwczrcJ.
This mythical father who shows us what kinds of difficulties Freud
was facing also shows us on what he was well and truly setting his
sights in the notion of the father. It has to do with something that
does not intervene at any moment of the dialectic unless through the
intervention of the real father who at any given moment comes to
fulfil the role and function thereof, and who allows the imaginary
relationship to be invigorated and afforded a new dimension. The
real father does not bring in the pure specular interplay of e/./foer
mc or /fee offeer, but rather affords an embodiment to the unutter-
at>le sentence, rfrou 4Rr rfJ4r rHOU j4Rr, which just now
we said cannot be uttered by someone who is not so himself. If you
will allow me to play on the words and the ambiguity that I made
use of when we were studying the paranoiac structure of Prasident
Schreber, it's not /zj es cc/wj. qwc /w cs, but rather /w cs cc/wz. qztz. /"czj.f,
thou art the one that hath killed.
The end of the Oedipus complex is correlative with the establish-
ing of the Law as repressed, but permanent, in the unconscious. It is
to this extent that there is something that responds in the symbolic.
The Law is not simply this thing about which we ask ourselves why
the whole community of man has been introduced into it and is
implicated in it, but also something that has passed into the real in
the form of the kernel left by the Oedipus complex, in the form of
something that analysis has shown, once and for all, to be the real
form that is the superego. This is the form that the philosophers
had latched on to, to show us with greater or lesser ambiguity the
density, the permanent kernel, of moral conscience. We know that
in each individual this is very precisely incarnated in a superego that
can take multiple forms, that comes in every shape and size, the
most twisted and the most contorted.
It takes this form because its introduction at the level of the Es,
as an element that is homogenous with the other libidinal elements,
always partakes of some accident. One does not necessarily know at
what point in the imaginary game the passage has been made, nor
who was there momentarily to respond.
This tyrannical superego, in itself fundamentally paradoxical
and contingent, represents in itself alone, even in non-neurotics, the
signifier that leaves its mark and its imprint on man, that seals his
relationship with the signifier. There is in man a signifier that marks
his relationship with the signifier, and this is called the superego.
There are even many more than one, and they are called symptoms.
It is with this key, and with this key alone, that you may under-
stand what is at issue when little Hans is fomenting his phobia.
What is distinctive, and I think I can demonstrate this for you in this
observation, is precisely how in spite of all the father's love, all his
kindness, all his intelligence, in virtue of which we have this observa-
tion, there is no real father.
The ensuing part of the game is played out in the luring in the
relationship between little Hans and his mother, which in the end
is unbearable, anguishing and intolerable, in that it is cj./fecr fez.in
or fecr. It is one or the other, without ever knowing which, he the
phallophore or she the phallophore, the little giraffe or the big
giraffe. Despite the ambiguities in the ways the various authors have
appraised the observation, it's quite clear that the little giraffe is
precisely this matemal appurtenance around which the matter of
knowing who has it and who will have it plays out. Hans is in a kind
of waking dream, which for a moment makes him - to a chorus of
cries from his mother, and in spite of this calling out - the possessor
of the main stake. Indeed, it is there to underscore for us this very
mechanism in the most vivid fashion.
To this I would like to add a few considerations that will allow
you to familiarise yourselves with the strict handling of the category
of castration that I have been trying to spell out for you.
The perspective that I've laid out for you allows both the imagi-
nary game of the Ego-ideal and the sanctioning intervention of
castration ~ in virtue of which these imaginary elements take on
stability and a fixed constellation in the symbolic - to be located
in their reciprocal relationships, each on their own plane. Let's try
to see whether it really is necessary, from this perspective and with
this distinction in mind, to deign to articulate something that would
stem directly from the notion of an object relation conceived of in
advance as harmonious and uniform, as though by some happy con-
vergence of Nature and Law each Jack should come to find his Jill,
ideally and constantly, to the couple's greatest satisfaction, without
so much as a moment's pause to find out what the community as a
whole happens to think about this.
If, on the contrary, we know how to distinguish the order of Law
from imaginary harmonies, indeed from the very position of the
love relationship, and if it is true that castration is the essential crisis
in which each and every subject becomes authorised, as it were, to
be rightfully Oedipalised, we shall gather from this that it is quite
natural ~ even at the level of complex structures, indeed structures

that are altogether free of kinship, like those we live with at our
level, and not only in elementary structures - to posit, at least at a
push, the [orrrLula, that any woman who is not permitted is fiorbidden
b); £czw. This formula allows us to appreciate the very sharp echo of
castration that all marriage bears within it, and not simply for neu-
rotics. While the particular civilisation we are living in, which has
produced marriage symbolically as the fruit of mutual consent, will
explain to you that the ideal conflation of love and co#/.wgo has been
able to flourish as an ideal, it is nevertheless quite clear that this is so
to the extent that it has thrust the fact of mutual consent to the fore,
that is to say, it has pushed the freedom to unite as far as it possibly
can, so far indeed that it is always verging on incest.
Besides, you need only dwell a little on the very function of the
primitive laws of alliance and kinship to realise that any conjoining
whatsoever, even an instantaneous conjoining, arising from indi-
vidual choice within the bounds of the law, any conjoining of love
and law, even when it is desirable, even when it is a kind of necessary
crossing point of union between beings, is something that partakes
of incest. It ultimately follows from this that, if Freudian doctrine
ascribes the failures and indeed the debasements in the sphere of
love to the lasting fixation to the mother as a permanent constancy
of goodness knows what that strikes the ideal of monogamous
union with an originary flaw, it should not be believed that there
might be something else here. It should not be believed that there is
a new form of cz./Aer/or that would show us how, if incest does not
arise where we wish it to, in actuality or in perfect marriages, as they
say, this is precisely because it arose elsewhere. Rather, incest is very
much at issue in both cases. In other words, there is something here
that bears its limit within it, that entails a fundamental duplicity, an
ambiguity that is always ready to rise again.
This is what allows us to affirm, in keeping with experience but
with the sole advantage of coming as no surprise, that while the ideal
of conjugal conjunction is monogamous in women, for the reasons
we stated at the outset, there is no cause for astonishment when we
realise that what always tends to be reproduced on the man's side
is the split that makes him fundamentally bigamous. One has only
to refer to the initial scheme of the child's relation to his mother.
To the extent that the typical, normative and lawful union is always
marked by castration, this division tends to be reproduced in men.
I'm not saying that it makes him polygamous, contrary to what
people think, though of course once the twain has been introduced
there is no longer any reason to stem the play in this mirror palace.
Fundamentally, however, while the real father authorises the one
who has entered the Oedipal dialectic to fix down his choice, what is
always targeted in love lies beyond this choice, and it is neither the
lawful object nor the object of satisfaction, but Being, that is to say,
the object that is grasped in precisely what is wanting.
It is for this, that whether in an institutionalised or anarchic
fashion, we can see how love and consecrated union are never
conflated. I repeat - either this is produced in an institutionalised
fashion, as numerous evolved civilisations have had no hesitation in
asserting in doctrine and in putting into practice, or, when one is in
a civilisation like ours, where no one knows how to make anything
hang together, everything happens almost by accident. It happens
because one is more or less an ego that is more or less weak, more or
less strong, and because one is more or less tied to some such archaic
or even ancestral fixation.
It is in the primary imaginary relationship, the one in which the
child has already been introduced to what lies beyond the mother,
that, through his mother, he can already behold, touch upon
and experience how the human being is a deprived being and an
abandoned being. The very structure that imposes the distinction
between this imaginary experience and the symbolic experience that
normalises it - though solely through the intervention and the inter-
mediary of Law - implies that many things are maintained that
on no account allow us to speak of the sphere of love as though it
were merely an object relation, even the most ideal one, one that
is motivated by choice and by the deepest affinities. This structure
leaves entirely open a problematic that is inherent to the love life of
each and every subject.
Freud's experience, and our day-to-day experience, are there to
bring us up against this and by the same stroke to confirm it.
6 March 1957
XIII
ON THE CASTRATION
COMPLEX
Critique of aphanisis
The imaginary father and the real father
Being loved
Anxiety, from the lure to the stirring penis
The animals in phobias
agent lack object
real father symbolic castration imaginary phallus
symbolic mother imaginary frustration real breast
imaginary father real privation symbolic phallus
Today we are going to try to speak about castration.

Castration runs throughout Freud's writings, as does the Oedipus
complex, yet they are treated differently.
It was only late in the day, in a 1931 article dedicated to some-
thing entirely new, that Freud tried to spell out in full the formula of
the Oedipus complex, despite its having been present in his thinking
from the first. Indeed, it may be reckoned that here lies the chief per-
sonal issue that was his point of departure - JJlrfeo/ i.s cr/¢fAcr? There
can be no doubt about this because we know from his biography -
and the letters to Fliess are confirmatory ~ that he was preoccupied
by the presence of the Oedipus complex from the outset. It was only
much later that he explained himself on this matter.
As for castration, nowhere is there anything of the sort. Not once
did Freud spell out in full the precise meaning, the precise psychical
impact, of this fear, or this threat, or this instance, or this dramatic

moment. Each of these words may equally be posited, with a ques-
tion mark, in regard to castration.
When I started to tackle the issue last tine through the emergence
of castration at a lower level than frustration and the imaginary
phallic game with the mother, many of you, even when you had
grasped the role I was ascribing to the father's intervention - his
symbolic personage being purely the symbolic personage of dreams
~ were still wondering what this castration is. What does it mean
that, for the subject to come to genital maturity, he has to have been
castrated?
We are going to see how to respond to this.
If you take things at the simple level of reading, it may be said that
castration is the sign of the Oedipal drama, just as it is its implicit
fulcrum.
Even though it is not spelt out like this anywhere, it is literally
implied throughout Freud's writings.
People may seek to sidestep this, and it can be taken as a sort of
make-believe, which is what keeps cropping up when you listen to
current-day analytic discourse. However, once you allow the text
to bring you to dwell on this, as I am doing right now, so that
the abruptness of this assertion can become apparent as something
problematic, which indeed it is, you can take this formula as the
point of departure, however paradoxical it may be.
What, then, is meant by this formulation? What does it presup-
pose? Moreover, this is precisely what the authors have latched on
to because, even so, there are some who have not failed to pause
over the singularity of such a consequence. Foremost among them
is Ernest Jones.
You will notice this if you read his collected papers. He never
managed to overcome the difficulty of how to handle the castration
complex as such. He tried to formulate a term which is peculiar
to him, though of course like everything that has been introduced
into the analytic community it has wended its way and borne echo,
having been cited chiefly among the British authors. The term is
aphanisis . The Greek term dqidricli€ mea.ns disappearance .
The solution that Jones tried to offer to the pattern of insistence
behind the psychical drama of castration in the subject's history
runs as follows. First, the dread of castration cannot, at least from
his perspective, be made to hang on the accidental occurrence, on
On the Castration Complex 209
the contingency, of threats, which nevertheless are always so singu-

larly reproduced in subjects' histories, expressed in the well-known
parental threat of Jyc fAcz// se#d/or someo#c /a cw/ j./ a:#: The para-
doxically motivated aspect of the threat, which is un-rooted, in a
sort of necessary constant of the inter-individual relationship, is not
the only aspect that has given the authors pause for thought. So,
the question and difficulty concerns how castration is to be handled
when it comes to integrating such a singular thing in its positive
form, which Freud nevertheless spells out clearly as something that
threatens the penis, the phallus. This is what pushed Jones, when he
was starting to broach the problem of establishing the mechanism
of development around which the superego must be constituted,
to foreground the notion of aphanisis. I think I need only spell it
out for you myself for you to see to what extent it cannot help but
present great difliculty.
Aphanisis is indeed disappearance, but the disappearance of
what? For Jones, it is the disappearance of desire. The castration
complex qua aphanisis, substituted for castration, is the subject's
fear of seeing his desire extinguished.
I think you cannot fail to see how such a notion in itself amounts
to a relationship that has been highly subjectified. It may indeed
be conceivable that this is the source of some primordial anxiety,
but this is certainly an anxiety that has been reflected on in a very
peculiar manner. One really has to make a leap of understanding
that leaves an immense gulf gaping wide, all the while assuming it to
have been bridged, if one is to suppose, on the basis of data derived
from a subject's very first relational movements with respect to his
objects, that he is already in a position to take a step back in such
a way as not only to experience an articulated frustration as such,
but also to hang upon it the apprehension of a drying-up of desire.
It was actually around the notion of privation, as what purport-
edly gives rise to the fear of aphanisis, that Jones tried to articulate
his entire genesis of the superego as the formation in which the
Oedipus complex naturally culminates. Of course, he promptly
found himself faced with the distinctions to which I believe we are
succeeding in giving a slightly more manageable form. When Jones
uses the term prj.v¢fz.o#, he doesn't manage for an instant to dis-
tinguish between sfeccr prj.vcz/z.o#, which means that the subject is
not satisfied in any given need he might have, and the privation
that he calls c7c/zbercz/c daprj.vcr/i.o#, which presupposes, across from
the subject, another subject who refuses him the satisfaction he is
seeking. Furthermore, since it is not easy, based on such indistinct
data, to unite the passage from one to the other, especially when
they are being kept in the state of synonyms, he quite naturally
comes to suggest that, more often than not, privation is taken as

frustration. He suggests that, for the subject, prz.v¢/I.o72 j.S egwz.va/c#J
/a/rwsrr¢/j.o#. Of course, on this basis a good many things are facili-
tated in the articulation of a process, but while they are facilitated
for the speaker, this does not mean that the same holds true for a
moderately exacting listener.
In point of fact, on my chart I don't give the term prz.v¢/I.o# any-
thing like the meaning that Jones gives it. The privation that is
involved on the chart, where it features as one of the terms, is the
very thing in relation to which the notion of castration has to be
located. I have tried to restore to the term/rwJfrofz.o# its complexity
as a veritable relation. As you were able to see in the session just
before the February break, I did so in a highly articulated way,
and you ought to be able to retain enough from this to see that I
do not employ the term in the summary form in which it is usually
employed.
In my schematic, privation and castration feature as distinct
simply because it's not possible to articulate the impact of castra-
tion onto something else without isolating the notion of privation
as what I have called a recz/ Ao/e. Rather than throwing out a red
herring, let's try on the contrary to isolate the herring. Privation is
the privation of the herring. I It is, in particular, the fact that woman
does not have a penis. I mean that this fact has a constant impact in
the evolution of practically all the cases that Freud lays out for us.
Taking on board the fact that woman is deprived of a penis affords
the boy the most salient example, which we can meet at every turn
in the Freudian case histories, of how castration, if indeed it is
this that we are seeking out, takes as its base the apprehension of
woman's absence of penis in the real. This is the crucial point in the
majority of the cases. In the male subject's experience, this is the
fundament upon which the notion of privation sits in a way that is
especially efficacious and anguishing. There is a share of beings in
humanity who are, as it is put in the texts, cos/rcz/cd. This term is, of
course, utterly ambiguous. They are castrated in the subjectivity of
the subject. In reality, when it comes to what they are in the real, and
which is invoked as a real experience, they are cJepr;.vecJ.
I am alluding to the reference to the real around which the experi-
ence of castration turns in the teaching to be derived from Freud's
texts. I mentioned to you in this connection that to spell out the
thinking correctly we must correlate to this privation in the real the
fact that it necessarily concerns our own way of apprehending what
is at issue. This is due to the simple fact that we are setting things out
in reference, not to the patient's experience, but to the experiences
of our own thinking.
The very notion of privation is exposed in this kind of experience

-which entails the symbolisation of the object in the real - as some-
thing markedly tangible and visible. In the real, nothing is deprived
of anything. Everything that is real is sufficient unto itself. By defini-
tion, the real is full. If we introduced the notion of privation into
the real, this is because we already symbolise it quite enough, and
even altogether fully, to indicate that if something is not there it's
because we suppose its presence to be a possibility. That is to say, we
introduce into the real, in order to cover it over and to hollow it out
in some way, the elementary order of the symbolic.
This is why I say that, at the level of this progression, the object
at issue in this instance is the penis. It's an object that is given to
us in a symbolic state on the tier at which we have been speaking
about privation. I'm reminding you of the necessity of the chart. It's
quite clear that castration, insomuch as it is effective and felt in lived
experience, and present in the genesis of a neurosis, is the castration
of an imaginary object. In its impact in a neurosis, no castration is
ever a real castration. Castration enters the game to the extent that
it is played out in the subject in the form of an action that bears on
an imaginary object.
The issue for us is precisely to conceive of why and through what
necessity this castration is introduced into a development that is the
subject's typical development. It's a matter of the subject joining
this complex order that constitutes the relationship between man
and woman and which means that genital realisation is submitted to
a number of conditions in humankind.
So, our starting point will be, as it was last time, the subject in his
originative relation with the mother at the stage that is being quali-
fied as preoedipal. We have seen that there is much to say about this
stage, and we hope to have spelt it out better than is usually done,
with greater differentiation. Even when these authors do demon-
strate what is at issue, we believe that they do not handle it so well
and fail to reason it out. We are going to start again from this point
so as to try to seize at its moment of emergence the necessity of the
phenomenon of castration as something that symbolises a symbolic
indebtedness, a symbolic castigation inscribed into the symbolic
chain, and as something that snatches hold of this inaginary object
as its instrument.
To serve us as a guide, and so that we may refer to terms that
I laid out previously, I ask you to accept for the time being the
hypothesis, the supposition, that our articulation will lean on and
which we saw last time, namely that behind the symbolic mother
stands the symbolic father.
The symbolic father is in some sense a necessity of symbolic
construction, but one that we can locate only in a beyond-zone, I

would almost say in a transcendence, in any case in something that,
as I indicated in passing, can only be joined through a mythical
construction. I have often insisted on the fact that ultimately this
symbolic father is not represented anywhere, and the next part of
our disquisition will confirm for you whether this is valid, whether it
is effectively useful in allowing us to find this element of the drama
of castration in complex reality.
We now have on our chart the real father and the imaginary
father. While the symbolic father is the signifier about which one
can never speak without encountering both its necessity and its
character - which we have to accept as a kind of irreducible given
from the world of the signifier - the imaginary father and the real
father are two terms that present far less difficulty for us.
We are constantly dealing with the imaginary father. The imagi-
nary father is the commonest point of reference for the whole
dialectic of aggressiveness, the whole dialectic of identification, and
the whole dialectic of idealisation whereby the subject gains access
to what is called identification with the father. All of this occurs
on the level of the imaginary father. We also say that this father is
imaginary because he is integrated into the imaginary relationship
that forms the psychological support for dealings with the sembla-
ble, these being strictly speaking relationships of kind, the same
that lie at the root of any libidinal captivation or any aggressive
stand-off. The imaginary father also participates, ipso facto, with
typical characteristics. This imaginary father is the terrifying father
with whom we are acquainted, who is behind so many neurotic
experiences and who bears no mandatory relation to the child's
real father. We frequently see cropping up in the child's fantasies
a figure of the father - and also of the mother - who twists into a
grimace and who is very far removed from the real father who was
present for the child at the time. He is linked solely to this period,
and to the function that this imaginary father will hold at this stage
of development.
The real father is an altogether different matter. The child has
only ever had a very difficult apprehension of this real father, due
to the interposition of fantasies and the necessity of the symbolic
:sel::ieo?fii:.,Ihnaie|:fs,:?i:hi:g:siiatni::ire?:xnhduaTi:i:efi:F|.al#ye,::
experience, then it's that we find it so very hard to apprehend what
is most real around us, that is to say, human beings such as they
are. The whole difficulty of psychical development and everyday life
alike is that of knowing with whom we are really dealing, This is no
less the case for the person of the father, who under ordinary condi-
tions may rightly be regarded as a constant element in what these

days is called the child's cH/owrczge. I ask you therefore to take on
board what might strike you as paradoxical in the first approach to
the stationed character of the chart, namely that, contrary to a sort
of normative or typical notion that people seek to pin on the insist-
ence of the castration complex in the Oedipal drama, it is effectively
to the real father that the prominent function of what occurs with
respect to the castration complex is deferred.
So, you can see from the way I'm formulating it what can already
appear as a contingency, as something scarcely explicable. Why is
this castration here? Why is there this strange form of intervention
in the subject's economy that is called castration? In itself it has
something shocking about it.
I will double this contingency by telling you that it is no accident,
it is no strangeness ascribable to the first approach to this topic,
that physicians were the first to dwell on these things that were
recognised as being more fantasmatic than people believed, namely
the scenes of primary seduction. You know that this is a stage in
Freud's thought, even before he had analysed this topic and pro-
duced the doctrine on it. When it comes to castration, however, it's
not a matter of fantasmatising the whole affair, as was done with
the scenes of primary seduction. While castration does effectively
warrant being isolated by naming it in the subject's history, this is
always linked to the impact, to the intervention, of the real father.
Or, if you prefer, it may equally be marked, and profoundly so, by
the absence of the real father, which throws it deeply off balance,
and this necessity, which introduces something of a profound atypia,
then calls for the substitution of the real father by something else,
which is deeply neuroticising.
; We will take as our point of departure the supposition of the
fundamental character of the link between the real father and cas-
tration, so as to try to find our bearings in these complex dramas
that Freud elaborates for us. Very often we have the sense that he is
allowing himself to be led in advance by a sort of guiding thread that
occasionally is so assured - as in the case of little Hans -that we too
have the impression of being guided, from one instant to the next,
yet without grasping anything and without the motives that lead us
to make a choice at each fork in the path.
I ask you, therefore, tentatively to accept this position, on a provi-
sional basis, as the position around which we shall try to understand
this necessity behind the signification of the castration complex, by
now taking up the case of little Hans.
From the age of four-and-a-half, little Hans develops what is called

a phobia, that is to say, a neurosis.
This phobia was taken in charge by Hans's father, who as it hap-
pened was one of Freud's acolytes. He was a good honest fellow,
which is the best thing for a real father to be. We are also told that
little Hans had every positive feeling for him, wfoom Ac Aczd cz/wcrys
/oved, and that he is far from fearing such abusive treatment as
castration from the father.
On the other hand, it cannot be said that little Hans has been
frustrated of something for real. In the way we see it at the begin-
ning of the observation, little Hans, still an only child, is as happy as
can be. He is the object of an attentiveness that his father certainly
didn't wait until the appearance of the phobia to lavish. He is also
the object of the most tender care from his mother, so tender, in
fact, that everything is handed over to him. In truth, it takes Freud's
sublime serenity to approve her actions, when nowadays all manner
of anathema would be pronounced upon her, she who every morning
allows little Hans into the conjugal bed as a third party, against the
express reservations voiced by the husband and father. Not only
does the latter show himself on this oceasion to be very peculiarly
tolerant, but also we may deem him not to be in on what's going
on, because regardless of what he says, things carry on no less in the
most determined fashion. Not for a second do we see the mother in
question taking even slightly into account the observation that has
been respectfully suggested to her by the person of the father.
Little Hans is in no way frustrated. He is not deprived of anything
for real. Nevertheless, at the start of the observation, his mother
does go so far as to forbid his masturbation. Not only is this no
small matter in itself, she even goes so far as to utter the fatal words,
If you do that, I shall send for Dr A. to cut off your widdler. I:firs
is reported at the start of the observation, but we don't have the
impression that it is decisive. The child continues of course. This is
not an element that is assessed, but certainly her intervention needs
to be taken note of given the qualm with which the observation is
picked up on, and due to the fact that the parents are sufficiently
well informed, which moreover doesn't stop them from behaving
exactly as though they knew nothing. Nevertheless, Freud doesn't
entertain, even for a second, bringing in at that moment anything
whatsoever that would be decisive with respect to the appearance of
the phobia. The child harkens to this threat, I would say almost as is
fitting. You will see that after the event there even emerges the impli-
cation that one could say nothing more to a child, that it's precisely
what will serve him as the material from which to construct what he
needs, that is, the castration complex. However, the question of why
he needs this is precisely another question. This is where we are, and
we are far from being able to give an immediate reply.
For the time being, it's not about castration. It's about phobia
and the fact that on no account can we tie it in a direct and straight-
forward way to the forbidding of masturbation. As Freud puts it
very well, the child's masturbation docs 7zo/ b}; ¢ny mecz#s cap/¢J.# fe!.s
cz#xz.c/};. The child will continue to masturbate. Of course, in what
ensues he will integrate it into the conflict that will become manifest
at the time of his phobia, but this is certainly not anything appar-
ent. What occurs at this moment is not some traumatising impact
that would allow us to understand the outbreak of the phobia. The
conditions that surround the child are optimal, and the issue of the
scope of the phobia remains an issue that one has to know how to
introduce with its truly dignified character, though it is a question-
able one on occasion. It is on this basis that we shall be able to
uncover the cross-references that will enlighten and indeed enhance
our attempt at theorisation.
I want to give due consideration - and this will be a reminder - to
what we can call the fundamental situation with regard to the child's
phallus in relation to the mother.
What do we have in the child's relation to the mother, which we
spoke about in the preoedipal relationship? There the mother is
an object of love, an object desired for its presence, an object that
presupposes a relationship that is as simple as you may imagine, but
very early on in the child's experience, in his deportment, his sensi-
bility and his reaction, this relationship is very soon made manifest
in its articulation in a presence-absence pair. As you know, this is
our point of departure. Some difficulty has arisen regarding what
might be called fAc cA!./d's ¢rsf oJy.ccf¢/ wor/d due to insufficient
distinction of the term oZJy.cc/. That there should be a primordial
object that we can on no account constitute ideally, that is, in our
ideation - the child's world as a bare state of hanging on to the
undetermined limits of the organ that satisfies him, the nourishing
organ - is something that I am not the first to contradict. The entire
life's work of Alice Balint, to take one example among others, is
there to articulate what I am telling you in a different way, one that
I believe to be less sustainable, namely that the mother exists but
that this does not presuppose that there is already such a thing as
mc and #oJ-me.
The mother exists as a symbolic object and as a love object. This
will be confirmed both by experience and by what I'm formulating
for you in the position I've given to the mother on the chart. The
mother is first of all, so we are told, a symbolic mother, and it is
only in the crisis of frustration that she starts to become a reality
through a certain number of confrontations and peculiarities that
arise in the relationships between mother and child. The mother qua
love-object can at any moment become the real mother in so far as
she frustrates this love.
The child's relationship with the mother, which is a relationship
of love, has something about it that can open the door to what is
usually called, for want of knowing how to articulate it, /fec¢rsf
w#c7j:#1crc#/z.a/ed rc/af!.o#sAz.p. But, in fact, what is it that occurs fun-
damentally in the first concrete stage in this relationship of love
as such, this something that constitutes the ground on which the
child's satisfaction may or may not be produced, along with the
signification that it carries? It's that the child includes himself in
this relationship as the object of the mother's love. It's that the child
learns that he brings his mother pleasure. This is one of the child's
fundamental experiences. He comes to know that if his presence
commands, however little, the presence of the one who is necessary
to him, it's because he himself introduces something into the experi-
ence, namely the radiance that means that this presence is there and
that it surrounds him as something to which he brings a satisfaction
of love. The fact of bcj.#g /ovcd, gc/z.ebf wcrc7e7!, is fundamental. It is
the ground upon which everything that will develop between mother
and child is played out.
As I have indicated to you, the question that is brought to the fore
by the facts themselves is that of how the child apprehends what he
is for the mother. Our starting hypothesis, as you know, is that he
is not alone. Little by little, something is articulated in the child's
experience which indicates to him that, in the mother's presence
beside him, he is not alone. The whole dialectic furtherance of the
mother's relationship with the child will be articulated around this.
One of the most commonplace experiences is that first of all he is
not alone because there are other children, but our starting hypoth-
esis is that there is another term at stake, which is constant, radical,
and independent of the contingencies and peculiarities of his history
and the presence or not of another child. This hypothesis is that
the mother maintains, at varying degrees depending on the subject,
her Pe#!.s#c!.d. Her child may fulfil her or not, but the question is
posed. The two discoveries, of the phallic mother for the child and
of Pc#i.s#cj.d for the mother, are strictly coexistent with the problem
that we are now trying to broach.
They do not lie on the same level. I have chosen to start from
one particular point in order to get to another, and it's on this level
that we must take Pe7}!.a/7cj.cJ as one of the fundamental givens of the

analytic experience, as a constant term of reference in the mother's
relationship with the child. Experience proves that there is no means
of articulating the perversions in any other way, insomuch as, con-
trary to what is said, they are not fully explicable by the preoedipal
stage, though they do indeed necessitate the preoedipal experience.
We can see that it is in the relationship with the mother that the child
experiences the phallus as the central focus of the mother's desire.
And he places himself there in different positions, through which he
is led to maintain, but more exactly to lure, the mother's desire.
The articulation from the lesson I was alluding to earlier bears on
this. Either way, the child presents himself to the mother as being the
very thing that offers her, in himself, the phallus. This happens to
varying degrees and from different positions. He may identify with
the mother, he may identify with the phallus, he may identify with the
mother as bearer of the phallus, or present himself as the bearer of
the phallus. Here, there is a high degree, not of abstraction, but of the
generalisation of this level of imaginary relationship, of the relation-
ship that I've been calling a luring relationship, wherein the child
attests to his mother that he can fulfil her, not only as a child, but also
with respect to her desire and, to spell it right out, with respect to what
she lacks. The situation is certainly a fundamental and structuring
one, because it's around this, and only around this, that the fetishist's
relationship with his object can be articulated. Take for example the
wbole intermediary scale that links hin to such a complex and elabo-
rate relationship as transvestism, and to which analysis alone has been
able to furnish its accentuation and its terminal point. Homosexuality
is here set apart for what is at issue in homosexuality, that is to say, a
need of the object, of the real penis, in the other party.
At what point will we see that something brings an end to the
relationship that is sustained in this way? What, for example, brings
this to an end in the case of little Hans?
At the start of the observation, through a kind of lucky encounter,

through the illumination of a miraculous stroke of fortune, which is
what has happened whenever we make a discovery, we see the child
fully committed to a relationship in which the phallus plays a most
evident role.
The father's notes on what he picked out from the child's develop-
ment, up until the hour of reckoning when the phobia began, tell us
that little Hans was constantly fantasising the phallus, questioning
his mother about the presence of her phallus, then about his father's
phallus, and then about the phallus of animals. He speaks about
nothing but the phallus. Going by the comments that are reported
to us, the phallus is truly the pivotal object, the central object in the
organisation of his world. We have Freud's text before us, and we
are trying to make sense of it.
What was it, then, that changed, since nothing of especial impor-
tance, nothing critical, occurred in the life of little Hans? What
changed was that his penis started to become something altogether
real. It began to stir, and the child started to masturbate. The
important element is not so much that his mother intervened at
that moment, but rather that his penis became real. This is the solid
fact in the observation. From that point forth, it's quite clear that
we need to ask ourselves whether there might not be a relationship
between this fact and what appears at that time, that is to say,
anxiety.
I have yet to tackle the problem of anxiety here in this Seminar,
because things need to be taken in sequence. As you know, the
question of how anxiety is to be conceived of is one of the abiding
questions that runs throughout Freud's work. I'm not about to
give you a single-sentence synopsis of the path Freud took, but I
will note that, as a mechanism, anxiety is constantly present at each
stage of his observation. The doctrine comes afterwards.
How are we to conceive of the anxiety that is at issue in this
instance, while staying as close as possible to the phenomenon? I ask
you to try out for a moment the fashion that consists in showing a
little imagination and to notice that anxiety appears in this extraor-
dinarily evanescent relationship when the subject peels away from
his existence, however imperceptible this may be, and when he real-
ises, though scarcely so, that he is on the verge of being drawn back
into something that you may label as you wish depending on the
occasion -I.mage o/ffec ofAcr, /cmp/¢/j.o#, and so on -in short, the
instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which
he no longer knows where he is, and a shift towards a moment when
he will become something in which he will never be able to find
himself again. That's what anxiety is.
Can't you see that right when there appears in the child, in the
form of a drive in the most elementary sense of the tern, this thing
that stirs - the real penis - what formerly had long been the very
paradise of happiness starts to feel like a snare? This snare is what
formerly was the game of being what one is not, of being for the
mother everything that she wants.
I can't speak about everything at once, so I shall make do with
saying that all of this depends after all on the fact of what the child is
rc¢//); for the mother. Presently we shall be trying to introduce some

difference into this, and to get much closer to what Hans was for his
mother, but for the time being we shall stick with this crucial point
that yields us the general scheme of things.
Until this point, the child is in the paradise of the lure. It may be
satisfying or not, but either way there is no reason for us not to see
that he can keep up this game for a very long while in a satisfying
way. The child tries to slip into, to integrate himself into what he
is for the mother's love, and, with a bit of good fortune, and even
very little, he manages, because that's all it takes to authorise this
relationship that is so very delicate. But as soon as his drive, his
real penis, starts to interfere, the unsticking that I have just men-
tioned becomes apparent. He is caught in his own snare, the dupe
of his own game, and falls prey to every discordance now that he is
confronted with the particularly immense gap that lies between sat-
isfying an image and having something to present - to present, so to
speak, in full. What invariably happens is not merely that the child
simply fails in his attempts at seduction, for one reason or another,
or that he is rejected by the mother. The decisive factor is that what
he ultimately has to present is something that seems to him to be
something quite meagre. There are countless such experiences in
analytic experience. The child comes face-to-face with the opening
where he is the captive, the victim, the pacified element in a game in
which he now becomes prey to the significations of the Other. There
is a dilemma here.
As I indicated last year, it is very precisely at this point that the
origin of paranoia branches off. Once the game starts to become
serious, while still being a mere game of luring, the child is entirely
left hanging on what the partner indicates to him. The partner's
every expression becomes for him the verdict on his sufficiency or his
insufficiency. This is what happens to the extent that the situation
evolves, that is to say, when the term of the symbolic father does not
intervene, having been left on the outside due to ycrwcr/w#g. We are
going to see, concretely, just how necessary this term of the symbolic
father is. But when the situation evolves without this term, it turns
into the highly peculiar situation of being thenceforth delivered up
entirely to the eye and the gaze of the Other. Let's leave to one side,
however, this future paranoiac. On the other branch, in and of itself
there is literally no way out of the situation. Of course, there is a
way out, because I'm here to show you how the castration complex
is the way out.
The castration complex takes up, on the purely imaginary plane,
everything that is at stake in the phallus. This is precisely why it is
most fitting that the real penis should in some sense be placed out of
range. The Father introduces an order that intervenes with its prohi-
bitions, with the fact that he introduces the reign of Law here, which
means that the affair is taken out of the child's hands but is settled
elsewhere. The Father is the one with whom there is no more chance
of winning but to accept the distribution of stakes as they stand. The
symbolic order intervenes precisely on the imaginary plane. It is not
for nothing that castration bears on the imaginary phallus, but in
some sense outside of the real couple. Order is thus re-established,
within which the child will be able to wait out events as they evolve.
This might strike you as straightforward for the time being as a
solution to the problem. It's an indication. It's not a solution. It's
a bridge that's been quickly flung across the divide. Were it really
so easy, were there just one bridge to be made, there would be no
reason to do any bridging. What is of interest is the point we've
reached, namely the point that little Hans had reached precisely
when nothing of the sort had been laid out for him.
What is little Hans faced with? He is poised at the meeting point
between the real drive and the game of the imaginary phallic lure,
and this is in relation to his mother. What happens at that moment,
because there is a neurosis? It will come as no surprise to you when
I tell you that a regression occurs.
I would nevertheless prefer you to be surprised by this because
I'm giving the term rcgrcssj.o# neither more nor less than the strict
scope I gave it in the last session before the break, when we spoke
about frustration. I told you back then that in the presence of the
mother's failing, the child brings about a quashing in the satisfac-
tion of being fed. Here too, where the child stands at the centre,
regression occurs when it's no longer enough to give what is there
for the giving, and he finds himself in the disarray of no longer
sufficing. There is a feigning of the same shortcut by which primary
frustration is satisfied, where the child snatches hold of the breast
in order to fence off all his problems. The only thing that opens
up before him as a yawning gap is exactly what is now happening
eisewhf=Ie -to be devoured by the mother.
This is the first coat that the phobia dons, and this is exactly what
appears in the case of our young fellow. Whichever horse becomes
the object of his phobia, it is always a horse that bites. The theme
of devouring is always to be found, in one aspect or another, in the
structure of the phobia.
Is this the whole of it? Of course it is not. It's notjust anything that
bites or that devours. We find ourselves confronted with the problem
of phobia whenever a certain number of fundamental relationships
come about, some of which have to be left to one side in order to
be able to articulate something cogent. What is certain is that the
objects of phobias, which are animals in particular, are marked

out from the first, even to the eye of the most casual observer, by
something that turns them by their very essence into objects of
the symbolic order. Whether the object of the phobia is a lion, a
wolf, or even a giraffe, and above all when the child doesn't live in
parts where this animal presents the faintest sign, not of danger, but
simply of actual presence, they are foreign objects - among which
we can see on this occasion that the horse presents as an extremely
precise limit - which show very well to what extent they are objects
that have been lifted, as it were, from a sort of list or category of
signifiers that share the same nature, consistent with what can be
found on coats-of-arms. These objects are the same that led Freud,
when putting together ro/cm cz#d roboo, to the analogy, which even
became a necessity, between the father and the totem. They have
a very special function, which is to stand in for the signifier of the
symbolic father.
We cannot see what the final term of this signifier is. One can
wonder why it takes one form or another. There must be something
in what we encounter that belongs to the realm of fact or experience,
both of the positive and the irreducible kind. This is not a deduction
but an apparatus necessitated by the support of what we find in
experience. Besides, we are not here to sort out why the phobia takes
the form of such and such an animal. This is not the question.
I ask you to take up, between now and next time, the text of the
observation on little Hans. You will see that it's a phobia without a
shadow of a doubt, but it's a phobia that is, so to speak, in motion.
His parents seized the thread the moment it first appeared, and his
father doesn't let go until it's over.
I should like you to read this text. You will have all the flitting
impressions that one can have from it. You will even on several
occasions have a sense of being utterly lost. Nevertheless, I would
like those of you who will have been willing to put yourselves
through the test to tell me next time whether you have been struck
by a contrast in the text.
At the first stage, we see little Hans in full flow developing all sorts
of extraordinarily fictionalised imaginings concerning his relations
with all the children whom he adopts as his own. This is a theme of
the imaginary in which he shows himself to be very much at ease,
as though in this state he were extending in some way the luring
game with his mother. He feels himself quite at ease in a position
that combines an identification with the mother. At the same time,

adopting the children entails a series of loving relationships of every
stripe, going from the little girl whom he woos and courts at close
quarters -the daughter of the landlord of their holiday lodgings -to
the girl who inspires his /o#g-r¢#gc /ove. This locates him as already
inscribed in all the forms of loving relationship, which he can pursue
with great ease on the plane of fiction.
All of this contrasts with what will come to pass when, after the
father's interventions under the pressure of a more or less directed
analytic questioning, he gives himself over to a sort of fantasy nov-
elising in which he constructs the presence of his little sister, years
before her actual birth, j.# c! box, !.# cr cam.czge, and o77 a foorse. In
short, the coherence of this draws a firm line in the analysis of little
Hans between what I would call the imaginary orgy and the inter-
vention of the real father.
In other words, while the child reaches a most satisfactory cure
- and we will be seeing what sc[/j.s/ocfor); cwrc means with respect
to his phobia - this is quite clearly to the extent that the real father
has intervened, a real father who hitherto had intervened so very
little. Moreover, he was able to intervene because he had the sym-
bolic father, Freud, behind him. However, commensurate with this
intervention, everything that was tending to crystallise on the plane
of a sort of premature real sets off again in a radical imaginary, so
radical indeed that one no longer knows very well where one is. One
keeps wondering whether Hans might not be making fun of every-
thing, or producing a refined brand of humour, which moreover is
incontestably the case because what we have here is an imaginary
that is being played out to reorganise a symbolic world.
One thing is certain, however, which is that his recovery comes
about when he expresses castration in the clearest way in the form of
an articulated story, namely the plumber who comes and unscrews
his widdler and gives him another one. It is right there that the
observation stops. We can gather from this that the solution of the
phobia is linked to the constellation of this triadic intervention of
the real father.
We will be coming back to this next time. Supported and assisted
as he is by the symbolic father, the real father enters here as a
schmuck. Freud is constantly forced to say that it's better than
nothing, that the child had to be allowed to speak. Above all, says
Freud at the bottom of one page, I/ ;.s #o/ I.# ffec /cczs/ octr bwsz.#cff
ro `w#c7ers/o#d' cz c¢sc a/ o#ce. With all the questions that the father
obviously presses on his son, he goes barking up the wrong tree. No
matter. The result is punctuated by these two points -Hans's imagi-
nary orgy, and the advent, as it were, of fully articulated castration.
This castration is spelt out as follows - wfecz/ z.s rca/ w.// be rep/czcccJ
by something more impressive, something bigger. The bringing to
light of castration is both what puts an end to the phobia and what
shows, I would say, not its finality, but what it stands in for.
You must have a fair sense of how this is but an intermediary
stage in my disquisition. I simply wanted to give you enough to see
where his repertoire of questions opens up. Next time we will take
up this dialectic of child and mother, and we shall set about isolating
the value, the true signification, of the castration complex.
13 March 1957
XIV
THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL
The rLetwork o[ The Purloined Letter

Quite alone with Mariedl
A metonymic child
The black on the mouth
A world structured phobically
I should like to begin by setting things straight regarding the article

published in the second issue of lil Pst;cAcz#cz/j;sc under the title
S6mz.7?czj.re swr Ìfl Leffrc vo/Ge', and especially its Introduction.
A number of you have had time to read it and to go into it more
deeply. I am grateful for the attention of those who have devoted
themselves to this inspection. It is to be believed, however, that
the memory of the context in which what is there laid out in the
Introduction was first delivered is not so easy for everyone to get
back in touch with, because some have fallen back into a sort of
rccz/-I.s;.72g error of another kind, which is what a few people allowed
themselves to be overtaken by when I was first setting out these
terms. For example, they imagined that I was denying that there
is such a thing as chance. I allude to this in my text and I won't be
coming back to this point.
I'm now going to clarify what is at issue.
It will be useful for me to remind you of the basic data.

We take the signs + and - , randomly ordered in a temporal suc-
cession, in groupings of three. We order these groupings as 1, 2 or 3,
depending on whether they represent a succession of identical signs
+ + + ,---, or an alternating succession + - +, - + -, or on the
contrary a succession that is distinct from the others in that it has no
The Signifier in the Real 225
symmetry, such as + + -, but also --+. I call this last grouping ocJd,
using an English term that cannot be translated into French. It's the
one that is asymmetrical, and which stands out as being uneven and
lopsided. It's a simple question of definition. It's enough to set it out
like this for it to be established as a convention, as the existence of a
symbol. While this was laid out unambiguously in my text, though
perhaps in a way that was dense enough for some to have found it
difficult, the context prevents one from taking it even so long as a
second for anything but this definition, this convention that is the
point of departure.
Next, it's a matter of using the letters u, a, y and 8, to label a third
series of symbols that is built from the second series. This is founded
on the remark that when one knows the beginning and end term in
the second series, the middle term is univocal. So, in order to define
the terms Ci, a, y and 6, we take into account only the two extremes
of the series. In a case like this one here, y, you can see that it goes
from odd to odd. Therefore, the convention has been established
whereby a sign is set down that captures within its range the five
previous symbols from the first line. This will give the sign ci when
going from same to same, that is, from symmetrical to symmetrical,
whether it's a matter of going from I to I, from 1 to 3, or from 3 to
I. I Going from odd to odd gives y. Starting from the same to arrive
at odd will give a. Coming back to the same from odd will give 6.
These are the conventions.
On this basis, if we want to define all the possibilities by means of
a network, we can construct it as a parallelepiped formed of vectors.
This has been found by one of the people who has best understood
and best examined this thing, in the most precise way and even, I
would almost say, in the most competent way.
The network has to be oriented, which is exactly how it is here.

The Ci can reproduce indefinitely, which is not the case for the other
points unless it is expressly indicated by the loop defined thus. So,

this network provides an exhaustive summary of all the possible
sequences. These are the only ones. A series that cannot be set into
this network is an impossible series.
Why didn't I put this in my text? First of all, because I hadn't
represented it for you here. It's a simple device for checking the
calculations, which allows for the definitive envelopment and lock-
ing-down of the problem in such fashion as to ensure that none of
the possibilities has been pretermitted. What is convenient about it
is that you can always refer to it as something trustworthy. It will
indicate when you might perhaps in a certain case have overlooked
a possible solution, whichever the problem may be that you are
posing with respect to the series, or even when you have gone com-
pletely wrong.
This brings me to a point of contention, which you can see in
the network. The network shows you that there are in some sense
two kinds of y, two kinds of 8, and so on. If you look at any of the
vertices, which have been labelled with these letters, you can see that
a dichotomous division is always posited when starting from any
one of them. Take for example y. After y there can be a a, and there
can also after y be an Ci, because this vector here has the privilege of
running in both directions. Likewise, down here you can see a 6, and
there are two possible outcomes - it can go to this 6 up here, or to y.
So, there is another 8 up here -which is not the same as the 8 down
here - after which there can be a a or an ct.
The objection that some people have levelled at this way of laying
out the evidence for functional diversity is that, according to them,
one could for example label the vertices with eight different letters
instead of four, or else put a lower-case cz or a subscript 2. It was put
to me that there was no clear and distinct definition of the symbol
here, and that consequently everything I was representing and spell-
ing out in my text was merely a sort of opacifying of the mechanism
for how the symbols play out. It would be a sort of creation that
would make some kind of internal law emerge from within. This is
where a disquiet began to arise in some people's minds regarding
one implication of something that is introduced by the creation
of the symbol and which goes beyond the pure randomness that is
given at the outset. I think I have to explain myself on this matter.
It's exactly that. And in one sense it can indeed be said that in the
choosing of the symbols there is a certain ambiguity that is given
at the outset, from the moment you set down the symbols, with the
simple indication of oddity, that is to say, asymmetry, when in fact,
given that we've spoken of a temporal succession, these items are
oriented. Obviously 2 followed by 1 is not the same thing as 1 fol-
lowed by 2. To confound them would be to introduce an ambiguity

into the symbol itself when this can be expressed more clearly in the
reference that has been set out.
However, what is at issue here is to find out what is meant by the
clarity in question. There is something that you may call ambiguity,
but be sure to tell yourself that this is precisely what one has to get
a sense of. At every level, the symbol that is a + presupposes the - ,
and the symbol that is a -presupposes the +. The ambiguity is still
there as we move further into the construction. By grouping them
in threes, I took the smallest step one can take. I didn't demonstrate
this in the article because my sole aim was to remind you of the
context in which the purloined letter was introduced. Please accept
for the moment that this is the smallest possible step, because it is
precisely to the extent that the symbol harbours this ambiguity that
what I have called /czw becomes apparent.
In other words, were you to assume that you could replace four of
the vertices by €, ¢, n, and 0, you would effectively obtain possible
sequences that would be different and which would be extremely
complicated because you would be dealing with eight terns, each
of which would pair up with two others in keeping with an order
that would be far from immediately obvious. Yet this is precisely
the convenience of choosing these ambiguous symbols that pair up,
because they do indeed pair up with something, this vertex ct with
another vertex that we have also labelled u, and which do indeed
have different functions. It is in this respect that it's convenient to
group them in this way, and from which, as you can see, there arises
the exceedingly straightforward law that I expressed for you in one
of the schematics in the text.
ci,6
Th - G> a, v, 8 _
Phase I Phase 2 Phase 3
This schematic allows you to say that, while in the first or second
phase you can have any one of the symbols, the third phase is
subject to a dichotomy that rules out any possibility of obtaining y
or 8 in the third phase if you began with cL or 8 in the first. Likewise,
there is no possibility of obtaining an ct or a P in the third if you
began with a y or a P in the first.
In my text I indicated some of the sequential effects this entails,
certain properties that are interesting in that they always bring out
other phrases of the same form, laws of syntax that can be deduced
from this exceedingly straightforward formula. I tried to put them
together in such a way that they would be metaphorical, that is to

say, so that they would enable you to glimpse how the signifier truly
is the organiser of something that is inherent in human memory.
This is so to the extent that, by always implicating elements of the
signifier in its weft, human memory turns out to be structured in a
fundamentally different way from any possible conception of vital
memory, of the persistence or the effacement of an impression. Why
so? Because it's important to see that as soon as we introduce the
signifier into the real - and it is introduced into the real simply from
the moment we start speaking, less still from the moment when
simply we count - everything that is apprehended in the realm of
memory is taken up in something that essentially structures it in a
way that is fundamentally different from anything that can be con-
ceived of in a theory that is founded on the theme of vital property,
pure and simple.
This is what I try to illustrate, clearly in a metaphorical way,
when I speak to you about the future perfect, and when I bring in a
fourth phase after the third. If one takes the fourth phase as a point
of arrival, any one of the four symbols can feature there because
the fourth phase has the same function as the second phase. If you
set down an er, P, y, or 6 in this fourth phase, certain eliminations
will result from it at the second and third phases. This can serve
as an image of what comes into focus in an immediate future once
it has become - in relation to a goal, a determined project - the
future perfect. That certain signifier-elements should be rendered
impossible by this simple fact is something that I will illustrate
metaphorically as the function that we can give to what on this
occasion I shall call the impossible signifier, the cczpw/ morfwwm of
the signifier.
What I want to stress today is that this is, of course, where I broke
off my development. However, as people might quibble in the name
of some kind of false evidence that might arise from the fact that not
every facet of mystery vanishes away, because laws can be extracted
from it -laws that are just as straightforward -upon consideration,
in a differentiated fashion, of the terms at the different vertices in
the parallelepipedic construction I have given you, this is not the
question. What I would like you to hold in your minds for a moment
is simply that this means that as soon as there is grczpAz.a, there is
orthographia.
I'm going to illustrate this for you right away in a different manner,
which might have a more conclusive value in your eyes, even though
I didn'tjust concoct all this as some kind of mathematical excursion,
with the incompetence that characterises me as much as everyone
else. You would be wrong to think that. First, these are not items
that I merely tarried with overnight. Second, I got a mathematician

to check it. Please don't think, just because I've added this further
precision, that the slightest element of incertitude or fragility might
have crept into it.
So, as soon as there is grapfez.cI, there is orfAogrczpfei.a. I begin with
this simple hypothesis, but not in the sense that the word hypothesis
is usually understood, rather in the sense of a definition of the action
or the exceedingly straightforward premises that result there from. I
begin with the ocJd, and do not do what I could equally have done at
the start, which would be to distinguish, as I was told, between the
ocJd with two light feet at the beginning and the oczd with two light
feet at the end, the anapaest and the dactyl. I didn't do that, and the
interest of the question lies precisely here. I'm using certain defini-
tions, which perhaps indeed are quite rudimentary, and from which
certain intuitive elements have been purged, and especially this par-
ticularly gripping intuitive element that is grounded on scansion,
which already entails a whole bodily engagement. This is where
poetry begins. But we are not even moving into the realm of poetry.
We are bringing in solely the notion of symmetry or asymmetry.
I'm going to tell you why it seems to me to be of interest to curb the
creation of the first signifier to this strict element.
Here I'm reproducing my table, with the second indeterminate
phase, here -oL, P, y, 8. Now we come to the fifth phase. If we note
down what is possible after an Ci, then what is possible after a P, and
what is possible after each of the symbols, we can see that here [in
the fourth phase] there can be Ch, P, y or 8. You can see the excess of
possibilities that we have. We have all the possible symbols, and we
have them at two levels. Yet the most cursory examination of the
situation shows you that if you choose this fifth phase as the point of
arrival, and if you choose here for example the letter a - it could be
any letter - and if you take as the point of departure another letter,
for example the letter ct, you will realise right away that in no case
whatsoever can you have a letter from this line here [below the bar in
the third phase - y, 6]. By virtue of starting with ct, you can have at
the third phase only what features here above the line of dichotomy,
that is to say a or P. However, what [exactly] is required in the third
phase for you to have a in the fifth phase? It has to be an or, because
P can only have a as its provenance.
The result of this is that when your design is to form a series in
which two letters are determined at either end of a spacing of five
moves, the middle letter, the one that stands at the third phase, is
determined in an absolutely univocal way.
I could show you other properties that are just as striking but
I'm confining myself to this one in the hope that this will succeed
in bringing into your minds the dimension that has to be evoked.

Indeed, what results from this property is that if you take any term
in a sequence, by considering the term that lies two moves before
and the term that lies two moves after, you can always check, and in
a straightforward way that can be reckoned by eye without difficulty
- this is a check that a typographer can perform - whether there is a
fault at any point in the chain. It is enough to refer to the term that
stands two moves before and the term that stands two moves after
to see that in this case there can only be one possible letter here in
the middle. In other words, as soon as there is the faintest emergence
of a grapAz.cI, an or/AograpAz.cz emerges at the same time, that is to
say, a means of cbecking for a possible fault.
This example has been put together for this purpose. It shows
you how, from the most elementary emergence of the signifier, law
emerges quite independently of any real element. On no account
does this mean that chance is being steered. It means that law
emerges with the signifier, in a way that is intemally independent of
any experience. This is what this speculation on the alphas, betas,
gammas and deltas is intended to demonstrate.
It seems that for some minds these items entail very consider-
able resistance. This path nevertheless struck me as being a more
straightforward one, to give a sense of a certain dimension, than
recommending for example that you undertake a reading of Frege,
or offering a commentary on his work. Frege was a mathematician
of this century who dedicated himself to a science that at first blush
looks to be as simple as can be, that of arithmetic. He thought it
necessary to take wide detours - because the closer a thing is to
simplicity, the harder it is to grasp - but detours that were surely
altogether convincing when it came to demonstrating that there is
no possible means of deducing the number 3 on the basis of experi-
ence alone. Of course, this leads us into a series of philosophical or
mathematical speculations, and I didn't think it necessary to put
you to this test.
Yet this is no less important because while, contrary to what
Jung believed, no deduction from experience can make us accede to
the number 3, it's quite certain that the symbolic order, as distinct
from the real, enters the real like a ploughshare and introduces
an originary dimension. In so far as we operate on this register of
speech, we analysts have to take into account the originariness of
this dimension. This is what is at stake in this instance.
I'm afraid I might wear you out, and 1'11 tell you something else.
I'm going to share with you a more intuitive idea that occurred to
me, one that is less certain in its affirmation.
This remark popped into my head one day when I was in a
wonderful zoo, some thirty-odd miles north of London, where

apparently the animals enjoy the greatest freedom since the bars
are sunk into the ground at the bottom of concealed ditches. I
was contemplating a lion surrounded by three magnificent lion-
esses that bore an altogether peaceful look of good temper and
concordance. I asked myself why there was such good concordance
among these animals, when as a rule, given what we know, I should
have been seeing unmistakeable eruptions of rivalry and conflict.
It seems to me that I didn't make such a big leap in my mind when
I gathered that it's simply because lions don't know how to count
up to 3.
You understand that it's because lions don't know how to count
up to 3 that the lionesses do not feel the faintest sense of jealousy
for one another, at least apparently. I offer this to your meditation.
In other words, we ought never to neglect the introduction of the
signifier when it comes to comprehending the emergence at issue
whenever we find ourselves across from the appearance of the reality
that is our principal object in analysis, the reality of inter-human
conflict.
One could even go further and say that ultimately conflict exists
because men don't know how to count any better than lions do,
namely because this number 3 is never fully integrated. It is merely
articulated. Of course, the dual relationship, which is fundamentally
animal, maintains no less its supervalence across a certain zone, pre-
cisely that of the imaginary, and to the very extent that man does,
even so, know how to count, in the final analysis something that we
call co#/7z.c/ occurs. Were it not so difficult to manage to articulate
the number 3, then this gap between the preoedipal and the Oedipal
wouldn't be there. This is the same gap that of late we have been
trying to cross as best we can, with the aid of little rope ladders and
other contraptions. What I simply want to make you realise is that
once one has started to try to cross it, one is always falling back on
such contraptions. There is no veritable experiential crossing of the
gap between 2 and 3.
This is exactly the point we have reached with little Hans.
We left little Hans at the moment when he is about to tackle the

passage we defined, and which is called the castration complex.
We can clearly see that at the start he has not yet come to it,
because he is playing with the W;.w.mocfecr which is there and is not
there. It's the Wrj.wj.macfecr of his mother, or of the big horse, or the
little horse, or his father's, and which is also his own, but ultimately
it does not seem to amount to much more for him than a very fine
object in a game of hide-and-seek, from which he is even capable of
deriving the greatest pleasure.
I think that a certain number of you have consulted the text. This
is the starting point, and it's the only thing at issue. At the start the
child presents, without doubt to the attention of his parents, a sort
of problematic of the imaginary phallus, which is everywhere and
nowhere. It is presented as the essential element in his relation to
what at that time is for him what Freud called the o/focr pcrso#, in
the most clear-cut fashion, namely the mother.
This is the point Hans has reached, and everything looks to be
moving along perfectly well, as Freud underscores, thanks to a kind
of liberalism, or even an educative laxity that was fairly typical of
the pedagogy that, so it seems, emerged from these early days of
psychoanalysis. We can see the child developing in the strongest,
clearest, and happiest way. Now, it is after these fine antecedents
that, to everyone's surprise, he comes to what we can call, without
being too dramatic, a small hitch, the phobia. That is to say, from
a certain point forth, the child took great fright at one privileged
object, which happens to be the horse whose presence was already
heralded in the text, metaphorically, when the child said to his
mother, I thought you were so big you'd have a widdler like a horse.
It's clear that if we can see the image of the horse appearing on the
horizon, it's from this moment forth that the child enters the phobia.
In order to pursue this trajectory metaphorically through the
observation on little Hans, it has to be understood how the child will
pass from such a simple relationship, which ultimately is altogether
blithe and clearly articulated, to the phobia.
Where then is the unconscious? Where is the repression? There
doesn't seem to be any. It is with the greatest liberty that he ques-
tions his father and his mother about the presence or absence of the
widdler, and tells them that he went to the zoo and saw an animal, a
lion as it happens, endowed with a large widdler. The widdler plays a
role that tends to become presentified for all sorts of reasons, which
are not quite spelt out at the start of the observation, but which we
can see appearing in hindsight. The fact that the child takes great
pleasure in exhibiting himself, and some of his games too, show
very well the essentially symbolic character of the widdler at the
time. He will exhibit it in the dark. He will show it at the same time
as a hidden object. He will also make use of it as an intermediate
element for his relationships with the objects that catch his interest,
that is, the young girls whom he asks to assist him and allows to
watch him. The fact that his mother or his father assist him, which
is also underscored, plays a major role in establishing his organs as

an element of consideration from which he doubtless derives further
pleasure by catching attention, interest, and even caresses from a
certain number of people around him.
This is the point we've reached when this thing is about to arise.
To get some idea of the prevailing harmony prior to the phobia,
note how Hans is showing on the imaginary plane the most formally
typical attitudes one may expect from what in our harsh language we
call vz.rz./c aggrcsf!.o#. With the little girls he is performing a courtship
that is present to a greater or lesser extent, and which is differenti-
ated into two patterns - there are the young girls whom he hustles,
clasps and molests, and there are others whom he treats in the
manner of Lz.cbc per Dz.5/cz#z. These two patterns of relationship are
highly differentiated, and are already very subtle, I would almost say
very civilised, very ordered and very cultivated. The term k#/fz.w.cr/c
is used by Freud to designate the differentiation that Hans makes
between his objects. He doesn't conduct himself in the same way
with little girls whom he considers to be refined ladies, ladies of his
world, as he does with the landlord's young daughters. So, this has
every appearance of opening out onto the favourable prospect of
what one might call the transference towards other female objects,
the reinvestment of his sentiments with respect to the female object
in the guise of the mother. We can conceive of there being something
that was produced which contributed to this development that was
facilitated, so we are told, by the particularly open relationship of
dialogue, which didn't forbid the child any mode of expression in
the slightest.
What happens? How might we try to broach this problem, because
now it's a matter of pursuing step by step a critical reading of the
observation and not merely offering a conspectus, which is what I've
done so far?
I don't think I'm forcing the text when I tell you already what
the sign of the underlying structuration is. This is the same struc-
turation as the one I pointed out to you, of the child's relationship
with the mother, on the basis of which the onset of the crisis can
be conceived of in the form of the entrance, the bringing into play,
of the real penis. There is something in the text that has never been
commented on. The child dreams he is with little Mariedl, one of his
playmates from the summer resort in the Austrian lakes. He gives
his account of being with the young girl, and then, when his father
is retelling the dream to the mother in his presence and saying how
amusing it is that he should have dreamt about being with her,
Hans makes a very nice rectification, IVoj w./A A4lorz.cd/, but gcz#z
allein mit der Mariedl, quite alone with Mariedl. Ljike rnelny other
elements that abound in the observations, people cast this aside

as mere childish talk, but this retort has all its importance, Freud
puts it very well, ever)//fej.7tg c¢rrz.cs cz sz.g#j#c¢/z.o#. Hans's retort is
conceivable only within the imaginary dialectic which I laid out
for you as the initial plane of the child's relations with his mother.
Indeed, this scene occurs when he is three and three-quarters, his
little sister having been born just three months before. So, not only
with, but quite alone with, that .is to say, one calm be quite alone with
feer, and not have this intruder there, as is the case with the mother.
There is no doubt about it, Hans takes six months to get used to the
presence of his little sister.
I think that on the plane of such typical and classical remarks,
this can only strike you as evident and satisfactory. Nevertheless,
you know very well that this is not the plane on which I shall be
staying. While the real intrusion of the other child in the relationship
between the child and his mother certainly has all it takes to bring
about some such critical moment or some such decisive anxiety, it
still remains that I have no hesitation in accentuating this gw;.Jc cr/oHc
wJ.fA because, whatever the position may be, a child is never alone
with his mother. The full progression of a child's apparently dual
relationship with his mother is marked by one absolutely essential
element, which is that the child comes in - as the experience of the
analysis of female sexuality assures us, this being the referential axis
that has to be staunchly maintained given what Freud upheld to
the very end concerning female sexuality - only as a substitute, as a
compensation, in short as a reference to what the mother essentially
lacks. This is what means that the child is never left quite alone,
gc7#z cz//c;.7€, with the mother. Little by little the child leams that the
mother situates herself as being marked by this fundamental lack,
which she strives to fill, and in relation to which the child only ever
brings her a satisfaction that we could provisionally call f#bs/z./wfz.vc.
It is essentially on this basis that we are to conceive of any kind of
fresh opening of the gap, any kind of reopening of the question, and
especially the question that arises with real genital maturity, that is,
in the boy, with the introduction of masturbation, this real jouis-
sance with his own real penis. Nothing can be understood unless
within this initial constellation, through which the crucial elements
can be introduced that open onto the various outlets that constitute
either an Oedipus complex with a normal outcome or an Oedipus
complex that is broached more or less in a way that is negativised to
a greater or lesser extent, and which is not at all a neurosis, as you
are usually taught.
So, let's pick up from the point we've reached and make a brief
remark.
The child has to uncover this dimension wherein the mother

desires something beyond him, that is, beyond the object of pleasure
that at first he feels himself to be for her and which he aspires to be.
This situation can be conceived of, like any analytic situation, as I
have taught you, only within the essentially intersubjective reference
that always includes, simultaneously and correlatively, the originary
dimension of each subject, yet also the reality of this intersubjective
perspective such as it anchored in each subject. In other words, I am
making the passing remark that something is veiled at the start and
we will only come to unveil it at the end.
Yet you already know the observation well enough at least to be
able to ask yourselves the question, and to refer to terms that I have
used in the past, whether wisely or unwisely, namely the two essen-
tial terms of an altogether major division in the signifying approach
to any reality whatsoever in a subject, mefapAor and mc/o7t};m};. This
is very much a case where this distinction is to be applied, at least
giving vent to so many question marks.
In any intersubjective situation such as it becomes established
between child and mother, we will have, as it were, a preliminary
question to ask ourselves. It will be preliminary, and probably it
will be settled only at the end. In this function of substitution, what
ultimately forms an image, as a way of expressing it, doesn't mean
a thing. It's easy to say swbS/z.fwfz.o7!. But try substituting a pebble
for a hunk of bread when you put it in an elephant's trunk. He
won't take it with quite the uniform tone you might suppose. It's
not about substitution. It's about what this signifying substitution
signifies. To spell it right out, it's a matter of finding out, in relation
to the phallus that is the mother's object of desire, what the function
of the child is for her. It's clear that if the child is the metaphor of
her love for the father, this is not quite the same thing as being the
metonymy of her desire for the phallus, which she does not have and
never will have.
Which is it in this case? Everything in the mother's conduct with
little Hans, whom she literally drags around with her everywhere,
from the WC to her bed, clearly indicates that the child is an abso-
lutely indispensable appendage for her. Hans's mother, of whom
Freud is very fond, to whom Freud had previously been o/czfsi.s-
tance, this excellent and devoted mother, sehr besorgte, ilnd pretty to
boot, still finds the wherewithal to take off her knickers in front of
her child. This is a very peculiar dimension. If there is one thing that
illustrates very well what I just said about the essential dimension
that lies behind the veil, then the observation on little Hans is it.
Though there are many others too. Can't you see that in this case
the child is the metonymy of the phallus for the mother?
This doesn't mean that she has greater consideration for the
child's phallus. In truth, she shows very well - this person who is so
liberal in matters of childrearing and what may be spoken of -when
it comes to deeds and to laying a finger on the little thingummy that
the child whips out for her, she is seized by a sudden dread - Dos cz.#c
ScAwc;.«crcz. z.sJ. After all, this is how it is in this kind of live dynamic.
We need to try to give another lick of polish to this observation on
little Hans to restore its shine.
So, you see, saying that the child is taken as a metonymy of the
mother's desire for the phallus does not mean that he is taken up
in the metonymy as a phallophore, but on the contrary that he
is metonymic as a totality. This is where the drama takes shape.
Everything would be all well and good for him were it a matter of his
W/I.w.mczcAcr, but it's not. It's him as a whole that's in question, and
this is why the difference starts to become very seriously apparent
when the real Wj.wj.m¢cAer comes into play. This real fJrz.w.mczcfecr
becomes an object of satisfaction for Hans, and this is when what is
called o#xz.cj}J starts to be created. What is called a#xj.cty hinges on
the fact that he is able to gauge the full difference that lies between
what he is loved for and what he is able to give.
Given the child's originary position in relation to the mother,
what can he do? He is there to be an object of pleasure. Therefore, he
is in a relationship that is fundamentally an imagined one. The best
thing that can happen to him is to come out of this purely passive
state. This primordial passivation is what is essential, and if we fail
to see that this is where it is inserted, we understand nothing of the
Wolf Man case study. Beyond this imaginary capture in which he
has become ensnared on account of being his mother's object, and
in which he gradually becomes aware of what he truly is, the best
thing he can do is to imagine himself such as he is imagined, to pass
over, so to speak, to the middle road. Once he starts also to exist as
real, he doesn't have a great deal of choice. He can quite certainly
imagine himself to be fundamentally other and rejected, something
other than what is desired and as such outside the imaginary field
where hitherto his mother could derive satisfaction from the place
he occupied.
Freud underscores this. What is at issue is something that super-
venes. An anxiety. But anxiety over what? We have traces of it.
There is a dream from which he wakes up in tears because his
mother was going to leave. On another occasion he says to his father
Swpposc };ow were fo go crwa);. It's about separation. We can comple-
ment these terms with numerous further details. His anxieties arise
when he is separated from his mother and when he is with someone
else. What is quite certain is that the anxieties are the first to appear,
and Freud underscores how the sense of anxiety is distinct from

phobia. But what is a phobia? It's not so easy to grasp.
We are going to try now to ascertain what it is.
One can, of course, blithely skip forwards and say that the phobia
is the representative element in this. Fine, but where does it get you?
Why is it such a singular representation? What role does it play?
Another trap consists in telling oneself that there is a finality and
that the phobia must serve some purpose. Why, then, would it serve
a purpose? Might there not also be things that serve no purpose?
Why take it as settled in advance that the phobia serves a purpose?
Maybe it serves precisely no purpose and everything would have
come equally to pass had it not been there. Why have preconceived
ideas about finality in this instance?
We are going to try to find out what the function of the phobia is.
What is the phobia in this instance? In other words, what is the par-
ticular structure of little Hans's phobia? This will perhaps lead us to
form some notions about what the general structure of a phobia is.
Either way, at this stage I would like to point out how the differ-
ence between anxiety and phobia is altogether tangible here.
I don't know whether the phobia is as representative as all that,
because as we are going to see, it's rather hard to figure out what
Hans is afraid of. He voices it in umpteen different ways, but an
altogether singular residue remains. If you've read the observation,
then you know that this horse, which is white, brown, black ...-
and these colours are not devoid of a certain interest - poses a riddle
that through to the end of the observation is never solved. It has
to do with goodness knows what black stain that it has around its
muzzle, lower than the bridge of the nose, which turns it into a pre-
historic animal. His father asks him, W4cz/ do };oc{ mecz7!? 7lfec /7z.ccc
a/z.ro7! ffee)/ feczt;c I.# /Acj.r mozt/fas? Hans replies IVo. It doesn't seem to
be the harness either. And then when later Hans says it looks like a
rr[uzzLe, for the last three days not a single horse has passed on which
fee cow/dpoj.#/ owf /Az.s `mwzz/c'. Then finally, worn out, Hans says,
Here comes a horse with something black on its mouth, a,nd war[+s rro
more to do with it. What is most certain is that we never know what
this black on the horse's mouth is.
A phobia is not, therefore, such a straightforward matter because
it even includes these quasi-irreducible elements and so can scarcely
be a representative. If there is one thing that gives a good sense of
the negative hallucinatory element on which someone has recently
expressed himself in one of those theoretical forays that periodically

sprouts up in analysis, it's this kind of blurriness, because ultimately
this is what appears to be the clearest thing about this horse's head.
It is somewhat reminiscent of the horse's head above Venus and
Vulcan in Titian's painting.2
One thing, however, is quite certain, and this is the radical dif-
ference between the two feelings, the sense of fear and the sense of
anxiety that is created when all of a sudden the child feels himself to
be something that in one fell swoop can be completely side-lined. Of
course, the little sister prepares the question to the highest degree.
The crisis opens against a backdrop that reaches much deeper, when
the ground falls away from under his feet upon his realisation that
he can no longer fulfil his erstwhile function in any way whatsoever.
He can no longer be anything. Quite simply, he is nothing more than
something that looks like it is something, but at the same time is
nothing, and which is called a mc/o#};in);.
I'm using a term which we have already seen. Metonymy is the
procedure of realist novels. If a realist novel can hold our interest it's
not because of all the minor realistic glimmer that is put before us,
because ultimately such a novel only ever amounts to a piling up of
snapshots. If these snapshots hold our interest it's precisely because,
behind it, they always aim at something else. They take aim exactly
at what looks to be most contrary, that is to say, everything that is
missing. This means that, far beyond these many details, beyond the
entirety of scintillating pebbles laid out for us, there is something
that tethers us. The more metonymic the novel is, the more it aims
at this beyond-zone.
So, our dear little Hans suddenly finds himself precipitated, or at
the very least precipitable, through his metonymic function. To say
this word in a way that is more vivid than theoretical, he imagines
himself as a nothingness.
What happens once the phobia has entered the fray of his exist-
ence? One thing in any case is certain - faced with the anxiety-horses,
the 14#grffz/crc7c, it's not anxiety that he feels, it's fear. He is afraid
that something real will happen. He tells us that there are two things
that make him afraid - that the horses might bite, and that they
might fall. The difference between anxiety and phobia is quite liter-
ally that anxiety is w.ffooc4/ oZ)y.ec/. Here, I'm merely repeating what
Freud said, because he spelt it out perfectly. What is at stake in the
phobia is not at all anxiety, in spite of the tonality that Hans here
lends to the horses. The horses arise from anxiety, but what they
bring is fear. In a certain sense, fear always bears on something real
that can be voiced and named. These horses can bite, and they can
fall.
They have a good many further properties that can harbour

within them the trace of the anxiety that is at issue, and perhaps
indeed there is some relation between them. We will be taking a
look at the relations between this blurriness, this kind of black stain,
and something that appears beneath, which shines through from
behind the blackness that starts to blur, but in the lived experience
of anxiety. Little Hans is afraid, but afraid of what? It's not a fear of
one horse, but of horses, such that from this moment forth the world
seems to be punctuated by a whole series of points of danger, points
of alarm, which in a certain sense restructure it.
In keeping with the indication from Freud, who on one page poses
himself questions about the function of phobia and advises us to
refer to other cases to settle these questions, let's not forget that one
of the most widespread and typical forms of phobia is agoraphobia.
Afterwards we will be seeing what constitutes a phobia, whether is it
a morbid entity or a syndrome, but agoraphobia is surely something
that in itself brings its own value. Here we have the world punctu-
ated by alarm signals which sketch out a field, a domain or an area.
If we have to try absolutely to indicate in which direction takes
shape not the function, because we mustn't rush here, but rather
the sense, of the phobia, it's that it introduces a structure into the
child's world. In a certain sense it brings to the fore the function of
an interior and an exterior. Until then the child was, all in all, in his
mother's interior. He has now been rejected from it, or has imagined
himself to be rejected from it, into anxiety. And so here he is, trying,
with the aid of the phobia, to establish a new order of interior and
exterior. A series of thresholds starts to bring structure to the world.
It's not so easy. I'm sure there would be a great deal to learn
here from a study of certain elements that have been furnished by
ethnography, from the way spaces are constructed in a village. In
primitive civilisations, villages are not built just any old how. There
are fields that have been cleared and others that have been left
untouched, and in the midst of all this there are further limits that
signify things that are truly fundamental with respect to the bearings
at the disposal of these people who stand in greater or lesser proxim-
ity to their extrication from Nature. There would be much to learn
from this and perhaps in time I shall say a word or two about it.
Either way, there is a threshold, and there is also something that
presents as an image of what protects the threshold, the Scfow/zbczw
or the I/orb¢ct, the defensive outpost or the barrier, these being the
terms with which Freud expressly articulates phobia. It's something
that is erected further out towards the point of anxiety.
Already, something is becoming apparent to us here. It is starting
to hold together and to show us its function. I simply want to avoid
going too quickly, and I ask you not to stick at this level. One gener-
ally contents oneself with little. And after all, to have transformed
anxiety into fear is a nice idea. Fear is apparently more reassuring
than anxiety. But nor is this certain.
Today I simply want to punctuate how we absolutely cannot
mark out fear as a primary element, a primordial element, in the
construction of the ego, contrary to what has been voiced in the
most categorical manner, as the base of his entire doctrine, by
someone whom I'm not about to name and who occupies a leader-
ship position in a certain school that is more or less rightfully termed
Porj.si.¢#. On no account can fear be regarded as a primitive element,
as a final element, in the structure of neurosis. We can see that fear
intervenes in neurotic conflict as an element that defends, from a
point that is posted further out, against something that is utterly
other and which of its very nature is without object, namely anxiety.
Phobia is precisely what allows us to articulate this.
I shall stop for today on this Vorbaw of my disquisition, having
led you to the precise point at which the question of phobia is posed,
in relation to what it is led to respond to. I ask you to take the word
rcspo#d in the most profound sense of the term. We shall try next
time to see where the ensuing sequence of items can lead us.
20 March 1957
XV
WHAT MYTH IS FOR
Functions and structure of myth

Orgasm and the Kr¢wcz//
The fantasy of the two giraffes
Fixing in I Boring a hole I Screwing and unscrewing
Symbolic transposition of the imaginary
Let's resume our walk through the observation on little Hans.

Walking is not a bad way of recognising that one is within a
considered space. For me, however, it's a matter of teaching you
to imagine the topography of a field without falling back onto the
routes that have already criss-crossed it. It's a matter of perceiving
when, for example, you might have come back to your starting
point without realising, or else to reflect, when you are in a place as
perfectly independent and familiar to you as your bathroom, that
were you to drill through the wall you would be on the first floor of
the neighbouring bookshop. This is not something that will often
pop into your minds. I would even say that it's a matter of perceiv-
ing, when you take your bath each day, that work is going on in the
bookshop next door and that this is an arm's length away. And then
they say . He' s one hell of a metaphysician, this Lacan fellow!
Yet this is more or less what it's about. It's about enabling you
to spot certain connections and, by the same stroke, making you
perceive the elements of the overall plan such that you will not be
reduced to what I would call, quite intentionally, the c6r6mo#j.a/, the
protocol, of charted itineraries.
So, here we are with little Hans, having reached the point at which,
in a situation where everything had been moving along fairly well,
anxiety and phobia arise. I remind you that I distinguished one from
the other and in this respect I was in strict conformity with what you
can find in Freud's text.
It's about topography, and not some random walk, though indeed
it's by taking you on an unusual walk that I hope to represent this
topography for you. Unusual as it is, this walk has already been
paced out. It was paced out in the observation on little Hans.
I simply want to show you the kinds of things that the first imbe-
cile who comes along could find here - except a psychoanalyst,
/
because an analyst is not the first imbecile who comes along.
agent lack of object object
castration
real father s,,,in bo/,.a ,.„deb!eches£ Phallus
\
symbolic frustration
symbolic mother real breast
imaginary detriment
father
privation
imaginary father rea/ ho/e Symbolic object
The symbolic mother becomes real precisely in so far as she mani-

fests herself in her refusing of love. The object of satisfaction itself,
the breast, becomes symbolic of frustration, the refusing of the love
object.
The real hole of privation is this thing that does not exist. The real
being full by its very nature, one has to introduce a symbolic object
into it in order to make a real hole.
What's at stake? We have arrived at a point in the so-called preoe-
dipal process that can be defined as follows. To turn himself into an
object of love for this mother, who for him is the most important
thing there is and who is even what essentially carries import, the
child is progressively led to realise that he must shift into a third-
party position. He must slide in, squeeze himself in, somewhere
between his mother's desire, which he learns to experience, and the
imaginary object that is the phallus.
We have to posit this because it's the most straightforward rep-
resentation that allows us to synthesise a whole series of accidental
happenings that are inconceivable unless they are taken as the
product of this structure of the imaginary and symbolic relationship
during the preoedipal period. As I told you, this is strictly spelt out in
the chapter from the 71rfercc Essczys o7€ Scjcwcz/!./}7 entitled Dj.c j.#/¢#fj./c
What Myth is For 243
Sexualforschung, th3ut .rs to eery , The Sexual Researches of Childhood

or JH/cz#f!./a 7lfecorj.cs o# Se:¥wcz/I.f}7. There you will find it formulated
that what are broadly called perversions are to be conceived of and
explained in relation to the childhood theory of the phallic mother
and the necessity of passing through the castration complex.
One can still hear people maintaining that perversion is some-
thing fundamentally instinctual, an underlying trend,I something
like a direct cutting of corners in the direction of the satisfaction
that constitutes its true density and balance. They think that in this
way they are interpreting Freud's notion that perversion is neurosis
in negative, as though perversion were in itself the satisfaction that
is repressed in neurosis, as though the latter were the same thing in
positive. It's actually the exact opposite, because the negative of a
negation is on no account necessarily its positive, as is demonstrated
by the fact that Freud roundly affirms that perversion is structured
in relation to everything that takes on an order around the absence
and presence of the phallus. Perversion always bears some relation,
even if only on the horizon, to the castration complex in its own
right. In consequence it stands - as it were from the genetic point of
view -on the same level as neurosis. It is structured in such a way as
to be its negative or, more exactly perhaps, its inverse, but it is just
as structured as neurosis. It is structured by the same dialectic, to
employ a vocabulary that is closer to the one I use here.
The importance that Freud ascribed at a very early date to the
notion of childhood sexual theories and their role in the child's
developing economy means that it is incontestably worthwhile us
tarrying with this, though its full opening-up, in the form of the
chapter I just mentioned, was only added to the Zlrfercc Esso};s long
after its first edition, in 1915 I believe. One shortcoming of the
German edition is that it doesn't include any mention of the date
on which each chapter was integrated into the book's composition.
The importance of childhood theories of sexuality in libidinal
development ought in itself to instruct a psychoanalyst to maintain
some sense of proportion when it comes to the sweeping notion of
intellectualisation which has been wielded here, there and everywhere
with its somewhat pejorative tone. I mean that it ought to teach us
to realise that something which on first blush might present as being
situated in the intellectual domain clearly holds an importance that
the simple and sweeping opposition between the intellectual and
the affective could never account for. What are called chj./d7!ooc7
/fecor!.cs, or the child's activity of rcscarcfe concerning sexual reality,
correspond to a necessity that is quite different from what we label
- unduly, but it has to be recognised as a kind of diffuse notion - as
the superstructural character of intellectual activity which is more
or less implicitly admitted in what might be termed /fee/o#/ a/bc/j.c/

with which common consciousness aligns .
Something quite different is at issue in this activity. It concerns
something that lies, if this term may also be employed, in the body
as a whole, where its common sense runs much deeper. It lies much
deeper because it envelops all of the subject's activity and motivates
what might equally be called fAc czjrccJz.vc /AcmcS, which means that
it steers the subject's affects or affections along the lines of key
images. All in all, it is correlative to a whole series of things carried
out in the widest sense, things which become manifest in actions that
are fully reducible to utilitarian ends. Let's classify this full set of
actions or activities under a term that is perhaps not the best, nor the
most encompassing, but which I select for its expressive value when
I qualify such activities as c6rGmo#i.¢/cs [in the sense of pro/oco/j.c],
and not only as c6r6mo#z.c//es.
I'm referring to the entirety of everything that can be included
within this register in both individual and collective life, and
you know that there is not a single example of a human activ-
ity that supresses them. Even civilisations with a firm utilitarian
and functional bent peculiarly see these ceremonial activities being
reproduced in the most unexpected corners. There has to be some
reason behind this. To spell it right out, what we must refer to in
order to bring into focus the exact value of what are called cfez./dfeood
/foeorj.es a/scxwcz/j.J}j, and indeed the full order of the child's activities
which are structured around them, is the notion of myth.
There's no need to be a mental giant, I mean, to have gone into
this notion of myth in detail, though this nevertheless is my inten-
tion here. I'm going to try to do so carefully, stage by stage, because
it also strikes me as necessary to accentuate further the continuity
between our field and the referential elements to which I believe they
need to be linked. Not that I claim on any account, as I once was
told, to be offering you a general metaphysics, nor to be covering
the whole field of reality, but simply to be speaking to you about
our reality and the realities that border on it, those that are most
immediately connected to it. This is precisely so as not to fall into
an unwarranted world-system, into a projection that is quite insuf-
ficient and impoverished yet very often performed when our domain
is projected into a whole series of realms and layered fields of reality
on the pretext that they might have something to do with what
we do, since the mczcro can always be found in the 7#z.cro. No such
projection could ever exhaust reality, or even the sum of human
problems. On the other hand it would be wrong to isolate our field
completely and to refuse to see what within it is, not analogous
to, but directly in connection with, I mean directly geared into, a
reality that is accessible to us through other disciplines and other

human sciences. This has to be done if we are properly to situate our
domain and even, simply, to find our bearings within it.
This is how we are now coming quite naturally to the notion of
childhood theories, because for as long as I've been speaking to
you about Hans you've been able to note that this observation is a
labyrinth and even, on first approach, a muddle, precisely due to the
place held by a whole series of Hans's flights of fancy. Some of these
flights of fancy are very rich and give the impression of a prolifera-
tion, a wealth, which cannot fail to strike you as falling within this
class of theoretical elaborations that plays such a major role.
We are going to approach myth simply as though it were a
primary fact.
What is called myth, whether it's religious or folkloric, at which-
ever stage of its passing down it might be taken, is something that
presents as a sort of narrative. Many different things may be said
about this narrative and various structural aspects may be taken up.
For example, it may be said to be atemporal. One might also try to
define its structure with respect to the sites it defines. One can take it
in its literary form, which quite strikingly shares some kinship with
poetic creation while at the same time being very distinct from it, in
the sense that myth is linked to certain constants that are absolutely
not submitted to subjective invention. It is also something that
would allow us at least to indicate the problems it poses.
I think that on the whole we can say that myth has a fictive
character but that in itself this fiction harbours a stability which
means that it is scarcely malleable to any modification that might
be brought to it. Or, more specifically, it entails that any modifica-
tion implies, ipso facto, another modification, and this invariably
suggests the notion of a structure. On the other hand, this fiction is
but a singular relation to something that is always implied behind it,
and which even carries within it its formally indicated message, to
wit, a singular relation to truth. This is also something that cannot
be detached from myth.
Somewhere in the S6mz.#czj.rc sc/r `£cz /c/fre vo/Gc', I wrote, in con-
nection with the fact that I was analysing a work of fiction, that at
least in a certain sense this operation was quite legitimate because
in any correctly structured fiction one can lay one's finger on the
structure that in truth itself may be designated as the same as that of
fiction. The structural necessity brought forth by any expression of
truth is precisely a structure that is the same as that of fiction. Truth
has a structure, so to speak, of fiction.
These truths, or this truth, this aim of myth, presents with a
character that is still utterly striking, a character that presents first
and foremost as inexhaustible. I mean that it partakes of what may

be called - to employ, briefly, an old term - the character of a
scfecmcz, in the Kantian sense. It's much closer to structure than
to any content, and can be found again, re-applied, in the most
material sense of the word, across all sorts of data, with the kind of
ambiguous efficacy that typifies all myth. That which is structured,
that which is most adequate to this kind of cast furnished by the
category of myth, is a certain type of truth, and, to restrict ourselves
to our field and our experience, we cannot fail to see that what is at
issue here is a relationship of man - but with what?
We are not about to give an immediate reply to this wj./A wAa/?,
and when we do, it will be neither randomly nor lightly. Were we
to reply wj./fe IVcz/wrc, this would, I think, quickly leave us dissatis-
fied, in view of the remarks I've made on the fact that Nature, such
as it presents to man, such as it coapts to him, is always deeply
denatured. Were we to reply wz.jfe Bcj.#g, we would certainly not be
inexact, but perhaps we would be going a little too far and ending
up in philosophy, indeed the most recent philosophy of our friend
Heidegger, as pertinent as this reference is. We surely have refer-
ences closer at hand and terms that have been more fully articulated,
which we can immediately broach in our experience.
We need only perceive that this has to do with themes of life and
death, of existence and non-existence, and especially of birth, that
is, the appearance of what does not yet exist. On the one hand, this
is linked in particular to the existence of the subject himself and to
the horizons that his experience brings him. On the other, this is
linked to the fact that he is the subject of a sex, and most especially
his own, his natural sex. Our experience shows us that the mythical
activity is limited to these themes, and it is deployed in the child.
Therefore, we can see here, and with ease, that in its content and its
aim, this mythical activity is at once in agreement yet not completely
in coincidence with what we find under the specific term of m}j/A in
ethnographic exploration.
In their presentation as fiction, myths always aim to a greater
or lesser extent not at man's individual origin but at his origin as
a species - the creation of man, the genesis of his fundamental
nurturing relationships, the invention of the so-called major human
resources such as fire, agriculture, animal domestication, and so on.
This is also the fiction that explains how man came to be in relation
with something that is constantly brought into question in myths,
namely a secret force which may be maleficent or beneficent but
which is essentially typified by its sacred character.
This sacred might is variously designated in the mythical narra-
tives, but it certainly allows us to situate it in a manifest identity with
man's relationship to the power of signification and most especially

to its power as a signifying instrument. This power is what means
that man introduces into Nature something that, on account of dis-
tancing hin, brings him closer to the universe. It makes him capable
of introducing into the natural realm not only his own needs and
factors of transformation submitted to these needs, but something
that certainly goes beyond this, the notion of a profound identity,
which is never completely grasped nor even grasped in anything but
a roundabout way, between the power that he possesses, to wield
or to be wielded on account of being included in a signifier, and the
power that he possesses to incarnate the agency of this signifier in
a series of interventions that, at the start, are not posited as gratui-
tous activities, as the pure and simple introduction of the signifying
instrument into the chain of natural things.
These myths, whose relation of contiguity with the mythical crea-
tion of childhood is indicated well enough by the comparisons I have
just set out, pose us the problem of something that has already been
going on for some time now, namely the investigation of myths or,
if you prefer, scientific or comparative mythology. This has steadily
developed into a method of formalisation which is already indicat-
ing that a certain step forward has been taken. The fruitful character
of this formalisation further indicates that this is the direction that
ought to be pursued, rather than turning to the method of analogies
and the various culturalist or naturalist references that have thus far
been employed in the analysis of myths.
This formalisation extracts from myths what might be called ele-
ments or units which at their own level possess the character of a
structural functioning that is comparable, without for all that being
identical, to the one that in the study of linguistics extracts elabora-
tions of various modern taxemic elements. It has been possible to
build and to put into effective practice an isolation of elements that
we may define as the units of mythical construction, which have
been labelled 7");/Acmcs.2
By pursuing the experiment through a series of myths that have
been put to this test of decomposition so as to see how their re-
composition functions, a surprising unity has been noted between
myths that in appearance stand very far apart, on the condition
that analogies between the face-value of the different myths are set
aside. For example, saying that an act of incest and a murder are
two equivalent things is not something that would come to mind on
first approach, but the comparison of two myths, or two stages of
a single myth, can bring such a thing to light. Consider for instance
what happens to a myth across two different generations. By posit-
ing a constellation that looks altogether comparable to the little
cube I drew on the blackboard last week, and by arranging at the

different vertices of this construction the terms /czffoer and moffeer,
a mother who is unknown to the father-subject, you will also find,
in this first generation, j.#ces/. When you move on to the following
generation, you will find point by point, and in keeping with laws of
which the sole interest is that they can offer a strict and unambigu-
ous formalisation, the overlapping notion of /wz.# bra/focrs, which
is in some sense the predicted transformation of the father-mother
couple from the first generation. Thus you can see the murder of
Polynices taking up its place, through this operation of transforma-
tion, in the stead of the incest. This operation is already regulated
by a certain number of structural hypotheses about how myth ought
to be treated.
So, this gives us an idea of the weight, the presence, and the
instance of the signifier as such, its specific impact. What is isolated
here is always in some sense what is most hidden, because it has to
do with something that in itself signifies nothing but which assuredly
bears the full order of significations. If something of this nature
exists, nowhere is this more tangible than in myth.
This necessary preamble indicates the angle from which I think we
should approach, in order to put them to this test, the abundance of
themes that we meet in the observation on little Hans and which on
first blush look, quite frankly, as though they have been made up.
How genuine are Hans's imaginative themes? Freud himself men-

tions the possibility that they might have been suggested to him by
comments that could be supposed of an interlocutor.
But is the term swggcsJz.o# to be taken in its simplest sense? Is it to
be taken as something that is voiced by one subject then to pass into
another subject in the state of an admissible truth, at the very least
in a form that is accepted with a certain character of belief, like a
garment that clothes the reality that is being received? The very term
swggcsffo7! implies some doubt as to how genuine the construction in
question is. It's a construction that is received by the subject, and of
course there is no notion that can more easily be seen - why not? - as
a legitimate critical element. And who more than us could imagine
that there is something here that warrants fuller consideration still?
We maintain that the cultural elements of the symbolic organisation
of the world are elements that, by their very nature, belong to no
one and so have to be received and learnt. Isn't this something that
furnishes the incontestable fundament to this notion of suggestion?
What is equally striking is that not only does this suggestion exist
in the case of little Hans, but we are able to see it unfolding, out in
the open. The father's way of questioning Hans is tantamount to
a continual and sometimes insistent inquisition, even bearing the
signature of a steering of the child's responses. As Freud under-
scores several times, the father certainly intervenes in a way that is
rough, coarse and even downright heavy-handed. Furthermore, he
shows all kinds of misunderstanding in his reception of his son's
responses, which he scrambles to understand, but all too hastily.
This is also underscored by Freud. What is likewise utterly explicit
when reading the observation is that something occurs that is far
from independent of this paternal interference, with all its defaults
which are pointed out and designated by Freud. One can see Hans's
deportment, and his constructions too, responding in the most
palpable manner to one or another of his father's interventions.
One can even see this taking on its own momentum from a certain
point forth, and the phobia assumes a character of acceleration and
hyper-productivity that is quite tangible.
Of course, it is of the utmost interest to see what these different
moments of Hans's mythical production correspond to. There is
something else that is quite manifest, which is the fact that this
production, while having a character that is implicitly made-up, in
the sense of gratuitously invented, is playful. After a recent patient
presentation that I conducted, someone pointed out the imaginative
character of some of the patient's constructions, which seemed to
him to indicate an hysterical note of suggestion, of suggested effect
in what the patient produced, when in fact it was easy to see that it
was not that at all. Even though it was provoked or stimulated by a
question, the patient's pre-delusional productivity manifested itself
with its own stamp and force of proliferation, in strict accordance
with its own structures.
This is not at all the same impression one has with Hans. At no
point whatsoever does one have the impression of a delusional
production. I would further say that one has the distinct impression
of a playful production. It's not only about play, yet it's quite clear
that everything is so playful that even Hans himself is in something
of a pickle when it comes to bringing the whole thing to a close and
sustaining a single path to which he can commit, after having come
out with goodness knows what magnificent tall story verging on
farce, for example the story of the stork's intervention in the birth
of his little sister Hanna. He is quite capable of stating, J scz}7, wfe¢/
/'m /e//;.ng j;act z.j'#'/ a bz./ /rwc. Nevertheless, it still remains that
what is apparent in this very game is not so much constant terms
but rather a certain configuration. And while this configuration is
sometimes fugitive, at other moments it can be grasped in a striking

fashion.
This is what I wanted to introduce, this sort of structural necessity
that presides over not only the construction of each of what may be
called, with caution, Hans's little myths, but also their furtherance
and transformation. I would especially like to draw your atten-
tion to the fact that what is important is not always necessarily
their content. By co#/c#/ I mean the revival, which is arranged to
a greater or lesser extent, of previous states of the soul, the anal
complex for example.
The anal complex will be exhausted in everything that Hans
allows himself to demarcate with respect to the /win/. Its appearance
was perfectly unexpected for the father, and Freud tells us that
he entirely concealed from Hans's father my expectation that there
would turn out to be some such connection. F[oud nalrnes the two
themes that arise in the course of Hans's probing by his father - the
anal complex3 and, no more no less, the castration complex.
Let's not forget that in the analytic theory of the time, around
1906-1908, the castration complex was already a kind of crucial
key for Freud but had not yet been brought into the full light of day
that would reveal it as the central key. Far from it, It was one small
key, lying around among others, that almost seemed to be nothing
at all. What Freud ultimately means here is that the father was in no
respect aware of something that is related to the essential relation
that makes the castration complex the major peg through which
passes both the establishment and the resolution of the constella-
tion, the ascendant and descendent phases of the Oedipus complex.
So,wecanseelittleHansreacting.Hereactsallalongtotheinterfer-
ence of the real father, to being put in the hothouse under the crossfire
of the father's interrogation to which he is exposed for a certain while,
and which, when the observation is taken as a whole, proves to have
been favourable to a veritable development in little Hans, even to a
veritable culture. This is something that, given its richness, allows us
to think that the phobia would not have borne such extensions and
echoes without the paternal intervention, nor would it have borne
in its centre this development and this richness, nor even perhaps a
certain insistence that at one stage is so prevalent. This is admitted by
Freud, and I would even say that he takes it on board when he admits
that there might have been a momentary flaring-up, a precipitation,
an intensification of the phobia under the father's action.
These are just some basic truths, but they still needed to be said.
Let's pick things up from the point we've come to. So as not to leave
you completely at a loss before this wealth of elements, I'm going to
indicate the general scheme of what we will be trying to understand
in the phenomenon of the analysis of Hans, its point of departure

and its results. I think that with this scheme these elements will fall
into order for us in a satisfactory way.
So, Hans is in a certain relation with his mother, into which is
mixed his direct need for his mother's love and something that we
have called the game of the intersubjective lure. It is enough to read
the beginning of the observation to see that this luring game is mani-
fest in the clearest fashion in the child's remarks, and this indicates
that for him his mother must have a phallus. This doesn't mean,
however, that this phallus is something real for him. On the con-
trary, in his remarks there is a constant eruption of the ambiguity
that is made apparent by this relation within a playful perspective.
In the end the child is fully aware of something, and at the very least
indicates as much when he says, J waf o7]/};/.wff /fez.#kz.#g ..., and then
breaks off. What he was thinking was, Docs sAe feovc I./ or #of? And
he asks her, and he gets her to say - and who knows whether or to
what extent the reply was satisfactory - that she has a Wrj.wj.mczchcr.
This is the word in the observation. The French rendering, /czz./-pjpz.,
does not fully translate this m¢cAer. It's a maker of wee, with the
suggestion of a worker, an agent, as in UfermclcAcr. A masculine
gender is implied here, which can be found in other words that carry
the prefix W!.wz..4
The child is in this intimacy, this connivance of the imaginary
game with his mother, when suddenly he finds himself in a situation
where, from one angle or another, a decompensation arises, because
something happens that manifests itself through an anxiety that
touches precisely on these relations with his mother.
Last time, we tried to see what this anxiety was responding to. We
said that it was linked to various real elements that complicate the
situation in some way. These real elements are not univocal. Among
the mother's objects there are real elements that are new, for instance
the birth of the little sister with all the reactions that this leads to
in Hans, but these reactions do not come about immediately. It's
only after fifteen months that the phobia breaks out. There is also
the interference of the real penis, but this had also been there for a
while before the complications arose. At least a year had gone by
following the masturbation to which the child confessed thanks to
the good relations that exist on the plane of speech between him and
his parents.
We also noted, last time, whence these elements of decompensa-
tion can come into play.
From one angle, Hans is excluded. He falls out of the situation.
He is ejected by the little sister. From another angle, something
else is at stake. This is the interference of the phallus in a different
form. I'm speaking about the masturbation. It's the same object,
but it presents in an altogether different form. Let's say it right
out. It has to do with the integration of sensations linked at the
very least to turgescence and very possibly to something that we
can go so far as to qualify as orgasm. Of course, it's not a matter
of ejaculation. There is a question and a problem in this regard,
which Freud doesn't resolve. At this stage he hasn't amassed enough
observations to broach this difficult problem of orgasm in childhood
masturbation. I'm simply pointing out to you that this lies on the
horizon of our questioning.
It's peculiar that Freud doesn't ask himself the question of whether
the row, the racket, the Krawcz//, which is one of the dreads that the
child feels when faced with the horse, might not bear some relation
with orgasm, and even an orgasm that would not be the child's own.
It might be related to some scene he perceived between the parents,
for example. Freud readily accepts his parents' assertion that the
child could not have glimpsed anything of the sort. This is a small
riddle, and we shall have the absolutely certain solution to it.
All of our experience indicates to us that in children's pasts, in
their lived experience and their development, there is something
that is very hard to integrate yet which is clearly manifested. I've
been insisting for a long time now - I believe it's in my medical
thesis or an almost coeval text - on the ravaging character, most
especially for paranoiacs, of the first climactic, orgasmic sensation.
Why for paranoiacs? We shall try to answer this en route, but we
assuredly find in a very constant way such testimony of a character
of harrowing invasion, of destabilising upsurge, that this experience
presents for certain subjects. This is enough to indicate for us, here
at this turn in the path, that the fact that the real penis is something
new must play a role as an element that is integrated with difficulty.
None the less, given that this had already been going on for some
time, it's not what presents at the forefront with respect to the out-
break of anxiety. What is it, in the end, that causes anxiety to arise
at this moment, and only at this moment? The question plainly
remains.
Here then is our little Hans, who has now arrived at the moment of
the apparition of the phobia.
It wasn't Freud, but rather and without doubt - as the ensuing
part of the text of the observation shows - the father who is cor-
responding with Freud who promptly forms the notion that there is
something going on here that is linked to a tension with the mother.

As to what triggers the phobia in particular, he states in the very
first lines of his letter to Freud, with clarity that lends its full bearing
to this first communication in the case history proper, that he is #oJ
able to specifty the actual exciting cause. Whereapon he begjlns hiis
description of the phobia.
What is it? Let's leave to one side the appearance of the phobia,
and reflect.
We have attributed all this importance to the mother and to the
child's imaginary symbolic relation with her. We have been saying
that for the child the mother presents with the requirement of what
she lacks, of this phallus that she doesn't have. We have said that
this phallus is imaginary. For whom is it imaginary? It is imaginary
for the child. Why have we been speaking about it like this? Well,
because Freud told us that this always plays a role for mothers. Why
so? Well, you will tell me, it's because he discovered this. But let's
not forget that if he discovered it, it's because it's true. So, if it's true,
why is it true?
It's a matter of finding out in what sense it is true, because ana-
lysts, and especially analysts of the feminine sex, regularly raise
the objection that it's not so clear why women should be given
over more than the rest to desiring precisely what they don't have,
or to believing themselves endowed with it. Well, it's precisely for
reasons that belong -let's limit ourselves to this -to the order of the
existence of the signifier and its specific insistence. It's because the
phallus has a symbolic value in the signifying system and is thereby
retransmitted through each and every text of inter-human discourse
in such a way that it imposes itself among other images, and in a
supervalent way, on woman's desire.
Isn't the problem, precisely at this turn in the path, at this moment
of decompensation, that the child should be taking this step that is
literally an insuperable hurdle for hin on his own? What is this step?
Hitherto, he was playing with the phallus desired by his mother,
with the phallus that for him became an element of his mother's
desire, and so this was something he had to pass through in order to
captivate his mother. This phallus was an imaginary element. What
is at stake now is for him to manage to do something that in itself is
insurmountable, namely to realise that this imaginary element has a
symbolic value.
In other words, the system of the signifier, or the system of lan-
guage, to define it synchronically, or the system of discourse, to
define it diachronically, is something that the child enters at the
outset, but without entering the full breadth, the full scope, of the
system, because he enters on an occasional basis in connection with
his relations with his mother, who is there or who is not there.
However, this first symbolic experience is something that is utterly
insufficient. The full system of relations with the signifier cannot be
constructed around the fact that something that one loves is there or
is not there. We cannot content ourselves with just two terms. There
have to be others.
A minimum of terms is necessary for the symbolic to function. It's
a matter of knowing whether it's three of them, whether it's four of
them - it's certainly not three, because the Oedipus complex gives
us three terms, yet certainly implies a fourth when it tells us that the
child has to come through the complex. This means that there has
to be someone who intervenes in this business, and this is the father.
We've been told how the father intervenes. We've been told the
whole little story about rivalry with the father and inhibited desire
for the mother, but at the level we've reached, moving forward step-
by-step, when we found ourselves in one particular situation we said
that the father has a very curious presence. We shall see whether it's
simply this role of presence, in other words this degree of paternal
shortcoming, that plays its role in the affair. Are we to fall back on
these so-called real and concrete characteristics to which it is hard to
bring a final word? For what does it mean that the real father falls
more or less short in this instance?
On this point, each commentator contents himself with an
approximation. In the end, we are told, and we are not supposed
to linger over it, in the name of goodness knows what logic that is
purported to be our own, that things are even more than contradic-
tory. Well, we are going to see that, on the contrary, all of this falls
into order in accordance with the fact that certain images have a
symbolic functioning for the child.
What does this mean? It means that those images which thus
far reality has afforded Hans may well be abundant, present and
profuse, but they lie in a state of manifest incoordination. For Hans,
it's a matter of aligning the world of the matemal relationship -
which, up to now had been functioning harmoniously for him
- with this element of imaginary opening, or lack, which made
him so amusing and even so exciting for his mother. At one point
we are told that his mother becomes somewhat fretful when the
father tells her to send the child out of the bed, and she protests,
she plays around and starts to flirt. What has been translated as
rather irritated is wohl gereizt, whiich here means to be all worked
wp. There's a reason for Hans's being there of course. We will learn
why he is there in his mother's bed. It's one of the main axial lines
of the observation.
I'm going to illustrate what I'vejust said about these images which
are first and foremost those that arise from the relationship with the
mother, but which are also other images, new images, which the
child confronts rather well. Since his little sister has been around,
and since things have simply no longer been holding together in
the world with his mother, two notions have arisen, which he knows
how to face up to very well on the plane of reality - the notion of
big and small, and the notion of what is there and what is not there,
but which appears. So, there is a notion of growth and emergence,
a notion of proportion and size. These are different phases in which
big and small find themselves confronted with different antinomies,
depending on the pairings. We can see him handling all this exceed-
ingly well. When he speaks about his little sister, he says, Srfec'L7 #of
go/ cz#}; fcc/A };cf, which implies that he has a very accurate notion
of this emergence.
Freud ironises on the side, because he has no need to think that
the child is a metaphysician. What the child says is quite sane and
normal. He very rapidly faces up to notions which are by no means
self-evident. First, there is emergence, the appearance of something
new. Second, the growth of the other - she will grow, or what she
doesn't have will grow. There's no reason to be ironic about this.
And then there is a third term, which seems to be the simplest but
which is not given immediately -that of proportion or size.
They will speak to the child about all this, and it seems that it's
still too soon for him to accept the explanations they will give him.
The father will tell hin that there are some who are without, that
the feminine sex has no phallus. But this child -who is quite capable
of handling these notions in a cogent manner because previously he
handled them both deftly and pertinently - far from being content
with these explanations, takes detours that on first approach look
astounding, frightening, morbid, and which look to be part of the
phobia. Where does this lead him? Well, to something that we shall
see at the end, to the solution that he finds to the problem. But what
is quite plain to see is that there are paths to this solution, paths that
he must follow, and which, while they amount to this apprehen-
sion of forms that might be satisfactory for objectifying the real,
nevertheless take a frightfully wide berth in relation to it. From
one instant to the next we will meet this passing over, this raising
up, from the imaginary to the symbolic, and you will see of course
that this cannot be produced without something that is invariably a
structuration in circles that are at least ternary. Next time I shall be
showing you some consequences of this.
For now, however, I'm going to choose an example for you.
On Freud's instruction - and you will be seeing next time what
these instructions of Freud's mean - the father hammers it home to
Hans that women do not possess a phallus and so his searching for
one is futile. That it should have been Freud who told the father to
step in in this way is an enormity unto itself, but let's leave that to
one side.
What happens after this intervention by the father? Hans reacts
with the giraffe fantasy.
In the middle of the night the child comes into his parents'
bedroom to take refuge. They ask him whether perhaps he is afraid,
but it's not clear whether he's afraid or not. Either way, he falls
back to sleep in his parents' bed and they carry him into his room.
The next morning they ask him what it was all about. It's a fantasy.
There are two giraffes.5 A big giraffe, and a little giraffe that is zcr-
wctfzc//c, which is translated as crwmp/cd but really means ro//ed z.77/a
cz b¢//. They ask him what he means and he shows them by taking a
piece of paper and scrunching it up into a ball.
How is this interpreted? Right away, the father has no doubt
that of the two giraffes, the big one is the symbol of the father. The
little one, which the child grabs and sits on top of while the big one
cries out, is a reaction to the maternal phallus. The longing for the
mother and her lack are named, perceived, acknowledged and pin-
pointed by the father, straightaway, as the signification of the little
giraffe. Moreover, this doesn't stop him, in a way that doesn't strike
him as contradictory, from reading the couple of the big and small
giraffe as the father-mother couple. Naturally, all of this poses the
most interesting problems. One can endlessly debate whether the big
giraffe is the father, whether the little giraffe is the mother. Indeed,
for the child it's a matter of regaining possession of the mother, to
the father's greatest irritation and even anger. Yet this anger is never
a real anger. The father never allows himself to slip into anger, and
little Hans puts his finger on this - yoc4 owgAf /o be cross, )/ow sfeow/d
bc /.c¢/owl. Unfortunately, the father is never there to embody the
god of Thunder.
Let's pause for a while on what is quite obvious and visible. A large
giraffe and a small giraffe are of the same stuff. One is the double of
the other. There is the aspect of big and small, but there is also the
aspect of always being a giraffe. In other words, here we find some-
thing that is altogether analogous to what I was telling you last time
when I said that the child was caught in the mother's phallic desire
as a metonymy. The child is the phallus in his totality. So, when it's
a matter of restoring to the mother her phallus, the child phallicises
the mother as a whole entity in the form of a double. He produces a
metonymy of the mother, which hitherto was merely the enigmatic
phallus that is at once desired, credited and not credited, submerged
in ambiguity, in belief, and in the term of reference, namely the luring
game with the mother. All of this turns into something that starts
to hang together as a metonymy. And as though it weren't enough
simply to show us the creation of the image and its introduction into
a properly symbolic game, in order to explain to us that we've passed
from the image to the symbol - this little giraffe about which no one
in the observation comprehends anything, even though it's so visible
- Hans tells us that the little giraffe is so very much a symbol that
it can be crumpled like a little giraffe on a sheet of paper. We have
come to the point that the little giraffe is no more than a drawing.
The passage from the imaginary to the symbolic can be no better
translated than in these things that in appearance are absolutely
contradictory and unthinkable, because you always turn what
children say into something that from either side partakes of the
domain of three dimensions when actually there is also something in
the play of symbols that is in two dimensions. I pointed out to you in
7lfoc Pwr/o;.#ed fc/jcr the moment when there remains nothing more
of the letter than something that the queen holds in her hands, when
there is nothing more to be done but to scrunch it up into a ball.
This is the same gesture by which Hans strives to make his parents
understand what is at issue in the little giraffe. At that moment, the
little crumpled up giraffe signifies something that belongs utterly
to the same realm as the drawing of the giraffe that had been made
once before.
widdler
The drawing of the giraffe
Here it is, with its widdler, which was already on the path to the
symbol. Whereas the drawing of the giraffe is freely sketched and
each of the members is in its right place, the widdler that has been
added to it is something that is truly graphic. It's a linear stroke,
and, to boot, so that we are fully aware of this, it is separate from
the giraffe's body.
We are now entering the major play of the signifier, the game on
which I gave a seminar, on 7lrfec Pwr/oj.#cd fcf/cr. The little giraffe is
a double of the mother, reduced to the support that is always neces-
sary as a vehicle for the signifier as such. It is something that can be
held, crumpled and sat on. It's such a loving testimony that, even so,
it has something of a draft or a jotting about it.
Observe if you will that this is not the only point at which we can
grasp the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic. There are
all kinds of other points. We can see a parallel gradually settling
in between the Wolf Man case study and the observation on little
Hans, which allows us to compare these paths along which the
phobic image is approached, We have yet to determine the significa-
tion of this phobic image, but in order to determine it we need to
turn to how it is approached in the child's experience. In the case
of the Wolf Man, it is plainly an image, but an image that is in a
picture-book, and the child's phobia is the wolf from the book. In
the case of Hans, this is not absent either. The image comes from a
page of his picture-book, the same page that shows the stork bring-
ing children to a chimney top, which Hans reads as a red box. As
chance would have it, on this same page there is a picture of a horse
being shod.
Now, what are we going to find? Since we are looking for struc-
tures, what we are going to find throughout this observation are
logical instruments being played out in a kind of turning game where
each complements the other, forming a kind of circle through which
little Hans seeks a solution, but a solution to what? In this series of
elements or instruments that are called 77tofAer, cfel./d and pAcr//ws,
the phallus is the new element that is no longer merely something
that is played with, because it has become unruly. It has, if it may
be expressed like this, its whims and fancies. It has its needs, its
demands, and it wreaks havoc everywhere. It's a matter of finding
out how this is going to be settled, that is to say, how, at least within
this original trio, things are going to be fixed down.
We are going to see a triad emerging.
First, in)7 pc#z.s z.s ¢#gcwczcfosc#, ¢;¥cd z.#. Here we have a form of
guarantee. Unfortunately, no sooner had he been led to profess that
his penis isj;x.ec7 i.% than the phobia promptly flared up. It has to be
believed, therefore, that there is also some danger to its being fixed
in.
Then we see another term appearing, the borz.#g a/ a flo/c. We
can see it appearing in umpteen different forms when we know how
to hunt it out in a way that conforms to the mythical analysis of
themes. First of all, in a dream, Hans himself has a hole bored in
him.6 Then he cuts a hole in a rubber doll. There are things that are
bored with a hole from the inside out, and others from the outside
in.
Next, Hans comes across a third term, one which is particularly
expressive because it cannot be deduced from natural forms. He
introduces it as a logical instrument in his mythical passage, and it
truly constitutes the third term at the apex of the triangle formed
together with the fixing-in and with the gaping hole that leaves
an open void. If the penis is not fixed in, then there is no longer
anything. So, there is a mediation. It can be put there and put back,
removed, and put back again. In short, it is detachable. What does
the child use for this? He introduces the screw thread. The plumber
or the fitter come by and do their unscrewing. Then the plumber
comes by and unscrews his penis so that another, bigger one can be
screwed in.
The introduction of this logical instrument, of this theme bor-
rowed from his limited childhood experience, of this mythical
element, will lead to a veritable resolution of the problem, which is
that ultimately, through the notion that the phallus too is something
that is taken up in the symbolic play, this phallus can be combined.
It is fixed in when it has been put in, but it can be mobilised, it can
circulate, and it is an element of mediation. It is from this moment
forth that we find ourselves on the slope upon which the child will
find his first respite in this frantic search for conciliatory myths that
are never satisfactory, and which will lead us right to the final term
of the solution that he will find, the approximate solution of the
Oedipus complex.
This is to indicate for you the direction in which we need to
analyse the terms and the child's use of the terms. Another problem,
a no lesser one, is taking shape, which is the problem of the signifier-
elements that he brings in by borrowing them from symbolised
elements. The horse being shod is just one of the solutions, buried
in the observation, to the problem of fixing-in the missing element
and which as such can be represented by anything at all. Indeed,
it is most readily represented by any object that in itself possesses
sufficient hardness. We will see that ultimately the object that sym-
bolises the phallus in the simplest way in the mythical construction
is the stone. We find it everywhere in the major scene from the true
resolutive dialogue with his father. The role of the stone can also be
found in the horseshoe that is hammered into the horse's hoof. It
also plays its role in the child's auditory panic, in his fright when the
horse is pawing with its hoof, to which something is attached that
surely is not properly attached, for which the child will at last find
the solution of the screw thread.
In short, this progress from the imaginary to the symbolic
constitutes an organising of the imaginary into myth, or at the very

least into something that is on the way to a true mythical construc-
tion, that is to say, a collective mythical construction. This is why it
reminds us in every respect of myth, to the point that in some cases
it reminds us of the systems of kinship. Strictly speaking, it never
reaches these kinship systems because it's an individual construc-
tion, but it's along this path that something has to be accomplished,
that a certain minimum number of detours have to be taken in full,
so that the efficacy of the relation between terms can be found. A
model for this is presented in the skeleton or, if you prefer, in the
metonymy, of my stories of a, P, y, 8. Up to a certain point, the child
needs to have roamed something of this order, to have crossed this
difficult passage that becomes a reality in a certain gap or shortcom-
ing, in order to find his rest and his harmony. Perhaps not every
Oedipus complex needs to pass in this way through such mythical
construction, but it's absolutely certain that each Oedipus complex
needs to make a reality of this same plenitude in symbolic transposi-
tion. It might take another shape that is more efficient, because it is
in action, because the presence of the father would have symbolised
the situation by his Being or by his non-Being.
The crossing of something of this order is implicated in everything

we find in the analysis of little Hans, and I hope to show you this in
greater detail next time.
27 March 1957
XVI
HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED
Offering to view alnd being surprised

The Professor's divine position
L6vi-Strauss's method
Naked in her chemise
Capture in the permutative mechanism
agent lack object
real father symbolic castration imaginary phallus
symbolic mother imaginary fmstration real breast
imaginary father real privation symbolic phallus
What have we been trying to do this year?

It's been a matter of preserving the depth and the Freudian
articulation of what is infamously claimed to be an object rela-
tion, which on examination, as they say, proves not only to be
not so straightforward, but never to have been as straightforward
as all that. Otherwise one wouldn't really see why Freud's oeuvre
in its entirety gives such a prominent place to two dimensions in
particular - which are perhaps still enigmatic, and now even more
so - known as the castration complex and the phallic mother. This
has led us over the course of our research to focus our examination
on the case of little Hans, in which we are now trying to broach
the application of our analysis to the disentangling of the subject's
fundamental relationships, to what in one analytic persuasion of
relational types is called his c'#v7.7.o#mc77/.
Yesterday evening we were able to see how this instrument leaves a

lot to be desired. When we try to approach the relationship between
child and mother as a fundamental reference and we tell ourselves
that by sticking to the general terms of the dual relationship as
fixed upon the phallic mother - as enveloped by the mother or not
enveloped by the mother - we find ourselves faced with characteris-
tics that are perhaps like those we were told about yesterday at our
Society's meeting, characteristics that are excessively general when it
comes to allowing us to circumscribe the points of impact - I mean,
the e#c!.c#/ points of impact -that stand to be pointed out. Indeed,
it is quite peculiar that categories as flexible as those that Freud
introduced cannot, in this current use, be corroborated in a way
that would be fairly commonplace and would enable us to differenti-
ate, at any given moment, within a single family of relationships,
between a character trait and a symptom, for example. It's not
enough to establish an analogy between them. Since they occupy
different functions, there must be a different structural relation.
This is precisely what we have been trying to put a finger on in
these eminent examples that are Freud's case studies. As you know,
over the years we have been giving a direction to the experience, a
direction that we have been striving to make more specific, because
there is no better way of defining a concept than to put it to use. We
claim that without the distinction introduced by the three relations
that are called a)/moo/z.c, I.77tczg!.#czr}J and rccz/, these three essential and
profoundly distinct modes of our experience, it is utterly impossible
to orient oneself in the most everyday experience.
Last time, we arrived at the notion that little Hans, whom we are
taking at a particular biographic moment, is marked by a certain
type of relationship with his mother, the fundamental terms of
which are defined by the manifest presence of the phallic object
between him and his mother.
This should come as no surprise to us after our previous analyses
because we have already seen, through other case studies and then
since the start of this academic year, the extent to which the term of
the phallus as an imaginary object of the mother's desire constitutes
an absolutely crucial point in the mother{hild relationship. We
saw the extent to which, during a first stage, the child's accession to
his proper situation in the presence of his mother could be defined
as the necessity of his recognising, and indeed his taking on board,
the essential role of this imaginary object, the phallic object, which
How Myth is Analysed 263
enters as an altogether primary compositional element in the pri-

mordial structuration of the mother{hild relationship.
No other observation can serve us better in this regard than the
observation on little Hans. Indeed, everything begins with the game
between Hans and his mother - seeing, not seeing, being on the
lookout for where this phallus is. Let's underscore how at this point
we remain in total ambiguity regarding what might be called Hans's
belief. When the observation begins, we have a firm impression that
for some time, from the real standpoint, he has formed, as people
say, his own little idea. Jcfe hob' geczczcfoc, he says, J've cI/rccrc7)/ bcc#
/Az.#kz.#g czbow/ a// /Aj.s, which comes in response to the glib replies
designed to cloud the issue, these being the kind of replies that his
parents feel obliged to make whenever he poses a somewhat abrupt
question.
While the imaginary relationship might be taken for the reaction
of seez.7?g and bez.#g scc# par excellence, I want to punctuate how it is
important to uphold, already at this level, an intersubjective articu-
lation that is far from being a dual one, as you are about to see. If
the relationship that is called scap/apfez./j.c, with its two opposing
terms of sfoow!.#g and fAow.#g o#csc//, deserves to hold our attention
for a moment, it's because it is already distinct from the primordial
imaginary relation, which is this kind of mode of capture in the field
that we may call a reciprocal visual confrontation.
I insisted on this at length, back when I was referring to the
animal kingdom and these peculiar visual duels between pairs of
animals in which one can see the animal, be it a lizard or a fish,
caught in certain typical reactions which [in French] are called
pczr¢c7cs. Between the two adversaries or partners, everything is set
up through an array of adnexa and signals, through apparatuses of
visual capture that are present in each of the two, and then, solely
on the plane of this visual confrontation, something in one of them
gives way. The animal yields. One might say that the animal effaces
itself, to use a term that conjoins in some way the motor withdrawal
and the paling of colour. One animal turns away from the vision of
another that has taken the dominant position. Experiments have
shown that it's not always a matter of something that occurs strictly
to the benefit of the male against the female, because sometimes a
manifestation of this type arises between two males. What occurs on
this plane of visual communication prepares, and extends directly
into, the act of seizure, indeed the act of oppression, of ascendency,
which bends one of the subjects to the other, whereby the latter
gains the upper hand.
While certainly we have here the point of biological or ethologi-
cal reference that allows us to provide the right accentuation to the
imaginary relationship in its articulation with the whole process, not

ofp¢rczc7c, but ofpczrj.czc7e, of courtship displays, I don't want there to
be any doubt about how one can see from the outset that everything
that is being referred to this domain, which I have called the child's
divining of the mother's imaginary world, is actually quite different
from it. We can see that what is at issue here is not so much to see
and to submit to being seized by what has been seen, but rather to
seek to behold, to be on the lookout for, what is both there and not
there. What is aimed at in this relationship is something that is there
in so far as it remains veiled. In other words, what is at issue in this
fundamental relationship is to sustain the lure so that something
can be maintained that is literally there and not there. This culmi-
nates in the fundamental situation the crucial character of which we
cannot fail to recognise in the imaginary drama such as it tends to be
inserted into something else, which will give it a yet more elaborate
meaning -the fact of Swrprz.sc.
Don't overlook the ambiguous character of the French term Lrwr-
prz.sc, in the sense that it refers to the act of surprising, as in, Jg/j.mpscc7
fog.in Z)j; swrprz.sc. There is the surprising of an enemy force, or else the
surprising of Diana, which is indeed the surprise that culminates in
the mythology that I'm not mentioning again just for the sake of it
because the whole Acteonesque dimension that I allude to at the end
of my text £¢ Cfeosc/rc#dj.c7!#c is grounded on this essential moment.
Yet there is another facet to this word. If there is a surprise, it's not
the astonishment that is felt. On the contrary, being surprised is
something that happens through an unexpected discovery. Those
of you who have been attending my patient presentations might
have noticed in one of our transsexual patients the truly harrowing
character that he depicted for us of the painful surprise he felt the day
he saw his sister naked for the first time.
So, at a higher degree than mere scc!.#g and bcz."g sce#, the imagi-
mary dialectic culminates in o;#lcrz.7Ig /o t;I.cw and be!.#g Swrprz.scd by
an unveiling. This dialectic is the only one that enables us to com-
prehend the fundamental sense of the act of seeing. We have seen
how essential it is in the very genesis of everything that amounts to
perversion, for example. Or, conversely, how it is only too clear in
the technique of the exhibitionist act that the subject shows what
he's got precisely insomuch as the other party hasn't got it. The
exhibitionist strives, as he himself asserts to us in his declarations,
to capture the other party, by means of this unveiling, in something
that is far from merely holding her in a visual enthrallment, but
which literally gives him the pleasure of revealing to the other party
what she is supposed not to have, in order to plunge her at the same
time into the shame of what she lacks.
It is on this ground that each of Hans's relationships with his

mother is played out. We can also see that his mother fully partici-
pates in this and, with great indulgence, allows the child to partake
of everything to do with her bodily functioning. However, when little
Hans solicits her exhibitionist participation, she loses her mastery
and issues rebuffs, severity, and even condemnations. It is on this
basis that we see the imaginary object, which is already caught in
this dialectic of veiling and unveiling, playing its fundamental role.
This is the turn in the path at which we shall now take up little
Hans. We shall ask ourselves why he produces his phobia after an
interval of a whole year subsequent to the major occurrences that
arose in his life, notably the birth of his little sister and his discovery
that she too is an essential term in his relationship with his mother.
We have already indicated that this phobia needs to be mapped
into a process that cannot be conceived of unless we see that what
is at stake for the child is profoundly to change his entire pattern of
relationships with the world and to accept - which will ultimately
be accepted at the end - what subjects sometimes require a whole
lifetime to take on board, namely that in this privileged field of the
world which is that of their fellow semblables, there are effectively
subjects who are deprived, for real, of this infamous imaginary
phallus.
You would be wrong to think that it's enough to have a scientific
notion or even an articulable notion of this for it to be accepted
among the subject's beliefs as a whole. The deep complexity of
men's relationships with women emanates precisely from what we
could call in our coarse language the resistance of male subjects
effectively to admitting that female subjects are truly not endowed
with something, and all the more so given that they are endowed
with something else.
This is what needs to be firmly articulated on the basis of facts
and support from our analytic experience. It is literally on this level
that a misrecognition takes root which is often maintained with a
tenacity that influences the subject's entire world-conception and
especially his conception of social relationships. It is maintained
beyond any limit in subjects who would never fail to deem them-
selves, and with a smile, to have roundly accepted reality as it is. The
effacing of this fact from our experience shows the extent to which
we have been incapable of benefiting from the most elementary
terms of Freud's teaching. Why this is so hard to accept surely needs
to be accounted for, and this is perhaps what we shall manage to do
by the end of this year's path.
For the time being, our point of departure is the observation
on little Hans, so let's articulate how the problem of a similar
recognition is posed for him. Why does an acknowledgement such

as this suddenly become necessary when hitherto what had been
most important was precisely to play at this not being so? It is
retroactively that we shall clarify why it was so important to play at
this not being so.
Let's also look at how it is that, for this real privation to be
somehow taken on board, it cannot not be operative, if it is to
produce. results that are subjectively liveable for the subject, by
which I mean that they enable him to integrate into the sexual dia-
lectic in such a way that it allows the human subject to live it and
not merely to endure it. This necessitates the integration of a fact
that is already given, the fact that the mother is already an adult and
that she is taken up in the system of symbolic relationships in which
inter-human sexual relationships have to be situated. The child
himself has to take this path. He has to experience the Oedipal crisis
and its essential moment of castration. This is what the example of
little Hans illustrates, but perhaps neither completely nor perfectly.
It is perhaps indeed in this incompleteness that we can find the
hardest evidence of what I have indicated as the essential movement
of the observation.
This is a privileged case of analysis in that the transition from
the imaginary dialectic can be seen being produced out in the open.
We can see the child passing from this intersubjective game with
the mother around the phallus to the game of castration in the
relationship with the father. This passage occurs through a series of
transitions that are precisely what I have called the ")/ffes that little
Hans creates.
Why are we seeing this in such a pure way? I started to spell this
out, and now I shall pick up from the point we were at last time.
I left you, last time, on the riveting phenomenon of Hans relating

the fantasy of the two giraffes, in which we can truly behold, like
an illustration given in a seminar, the passage from the image to the
symbol.
Quite literally, little Hans is showing us, like a conjurer, the
duplicated image of the mother, what I called the m€/o#);m}j a/ fAc
mojfocr, to become a piece of paper, to become a crumpled giraffe
that the child sits on.
There is something like a sketching out of the overall scheme
here, which is the sign that we are on the right path. Had I wanted
to invent something by means of a metaphor that would spell out
the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic, I could never have
invented the tale of the two giraffes in the way that little Hans
dreamed it up and articulated it with these elements. He shows that
it's a matter of transforming an image into a ball of paper, into
something that is wholly a symbol and, as such, an element that can
be mobilised. He sits on his mother, reduced at last to a symbol, to
this scrap of paper, which they snatch hold of and exclaim, f4fe/ £c
bo# bz.//e/ qw'o /cpc/j./ Hcz7tf./t Of course, this is not enough. Otherwise
he would have been cured. But through this act he shows what he
has been ruminating, because the spontaneous acts of a child are far
more direct and lively than the mental conceptions of an adult, after
the long years of deepening cretinisation that make up the common
run of what is called wpbrl.#gz.#g.
Let's see what happens when we turn to our chart, as though it
had already been proved correct. What does it mean that it should
be an imaginary father who definitively sets the order of the world,
namely that not everyone has a phallus? It's easy to recognise that
the imaginary father is the all-powerful father. This is the grounding
of the world in the commonplace conception of God, the guarantee
of universal order. All things real and physical, the Lord God made
them all.
When I tell you this, I'm not merely forging my table. You have
only to turn now to the observation on little Hans. When he speaks
about God, which he does on two occasions, he speaks very nicely
of him. His father has started to clarify certain matters for him, and
there is an improvement, though it is fleeting. Then, on 15 March,
when he goes outside and notices that there are fewer horses and
carriages than usual, he says, How sc#szb/c./ God's c7o#c czwcz}; w.f¢
horses now .
What does this mean? We don't know. Does it mean that on this
day there is less need of horses? It could mean that, but the word
gcfcAc!./ doesn't mean kz.#d, but rather I.#dJ.xpwfczb/}; c/ct;cr. People
tend to believe that the good Lord has spared him some difficulty,
but if one deems that the horse is not merely a difficulty for Hans but
an essential element, then it could indeed mean that there is less need
of horses. Whichever is the case, it tells you that God is there as an
essential point of reference.
It's utterly striking to see that after the meeting with Freud - on
30 March, just after he had turned mother into a ball of paper,
which is not entirely satisfactory for Hans but had set him on the
right path -the child alludes to God once again. Hans supposes that
the Professor must talk to the good Lord, to be able to say every-
thing he has just said. Freud himself doesn't fail to be tickled by this,
though scruples to note that he had provoked it himself, because out
of his own vainglory he had peculiarly taken the high and mighty
position of bragging to the child, Lo7!g be/ore }7ow were i.# /fee war/d,
I had known that a little Hans would come who would be so fond of his
mother that he would be bound to feel afraid of his father because of it .
It is certainly quite striking to see Freud taking this position.
On no account have we dreamt of reproaching him for this. A
long while ago I noted the original and exceptional dimension that
Freud would open in each of his analyses precisely by uttering such
interpretative words to the subject. It's not something that he is
transmitting. It's truly something that he has found himself, that
comes in some way directly from the lips of Freud. I've given you a
reference that seems to me to be altogether essential regarding the
authenticity of speech, namely that it has to be seen how different is
an interpretation by Freud from all the rest that we might give in his
wake. As we have very often seen, Freud doesn't impose any kind of
rule on himself here. He truly takes what I could call /fee dz.vz.#c posz.-
fz.o#. He speaks to young Hans from Mount Sinai, and Hans doesn't
fail to feel the force of this.
Mark well that on this occasion the position taken by the symbolic
articulation - the symbolic father also remains veiled to Hans - is
that of Freud's poising himself as the absolute master, as something
that is not the symbolic father but the imaginary father. This is
important because we are about to see that this is how Freud tackles
the situation.
It is very important to appreciate the particularities of Hans's
relationship with his analyst. I mean that if we want to comprehend
this observation we should note that it has something about it that is
absolutely exceptional compared with all other child analyses. The
situation is developed in such a way that the element of the symbolic
father is rather distinct both from the real father and, as you can see,
from the imaginary father. It is doubtless to this - which we will be
able to confirm later - that we owe the absence of phenomena that
could be qualified as transferential, for example. Likewise there are
no phenomena of repetition, and this is why we have pointed out the
pure state of the functioning of the fantasies.
A further interest of this observation is to show us that the
Dctrcfo¢rbcz./w#g is not, contrary to what is commonly accepted, ani-
mated merely by some endless iteration at the end of which what
had not been intellectually assimilated will at last work its way
under the subject's skin, like gnawing on a bit or slowly permeating.
Dwrcfe¢rbe!.fw7cg is doubtless a necessary thing because a number of
circuits need to be travelled in several different directions so that the
function of symbolising the imaginary can be efficiently completed.
This is why we can see little Hans roaming along a whole labyrin-
thine path, to the extent that we can indeed reconstitute this path
because of course it is broken off from one moment to the next,
chopped up by the father's interventions which, as Freud underlines
for us, are certainly neither the best oriented nor the most respectful.
Nevertheless, we can see a series of constructions being produced
and reproduced, in which it's a matter of discerning what the veri-
table component-elements are. Rather than constantly contenting
ourselves with covering each fact with a catch-all term of such-and-
such a complex - anal relation or mother attachment - we would
be better off trying to see what functions, what representative and
figurative elements, are brought before us in the tight articulations
of ancient myths.
We have got used to matching sweeping equivalents to these
terms and functions - saying that this represents the father, or that
represents the mother, or something else represents the penis -- but
were we to try to perceive these elements, this effort would show us
that each of them, the horse for example, is conceivable only in its
relationship with a certain number of other elements that are equally
significant. It is impossible to make such an element correspond to a
univocal signification. I've taken the example of the horse, but this
is so for all the other elements of these Freudian myths. At the start
the horse is the mother. At the end, it's the father. Between the two,
it might have been little Hans himself, who plays horsey once in a
while, or even the penis, which is manifestly represented by the horse
at several points in the case history.
This is true in the most evident way for the horse but is no less
so for any other signifier that you might care to pluck from the dif-
ferent modes of mythical creation in which little Hans indulges and
which, as you know, are exceedingly profuse. For example, at one
point the bathtub is clearly the mother, but at the end it is Hans's
behind. This is understood in the observation as much by Freud, by
the father and by little Hans himself. You can equally perform the
same operation for each of the elements that is involved, the biting
or even the nakedness for instance.
In any case, in order to perceive these things it is absolutely nec-
essary to force yourselves, at each point of the observation, not
to understand straightaway. This is a point of method. You must
strive, as Freud expressly recommends twice in the observation, not
to understand immediately. The best way of not understanding on
this occasion is to jot down some brief notes, to record day-by-day
on a piece of paper the elements that Hans broaches and which have
to be taken as such, as signifiers. I insisted for example on gwz.jc
cz/o#c w./fe A4:czrjccz/. While you understand nothing about it, you
retain this signifier-element and, as the intelligence will come to you
when you sit down to eat, you will see that this overlaps strictly with
something else that you can write down on the same page. What
is supposed in the fact of being, not alone with someone, but gz{z./c
cz/o#c wz.ffo someone? It supposes that there could be someone else.
This method for analysing myths is the very same that Monsieur
Claude L6vi-Strauss has set out for us in an article in the October-
December 19SS issue Of The Journal Of American Folklore under
the title 7l¢c Sfrwcjwrcz/ S/wc7y a/ il4.j//fe. By proceeding in the way
he describes, you will see that each of the elements of the observa-
tion on Hans can be ordered in such a way that, when read in a
certain direction, it forms the sequence of these myths. After a while,
however, one is compelled by the element of recurrence alone, which
is not a straightforward recurrence but a transformed recurrence
of the same elements, to put them in order not merely on a single
line but by making bundles of lines that take on an order as though
they were an orchestra score, and then you can see a series of suc-
cessions being established which can be read both horizontally and
vertically. The myth is told in one direction, while its meaning or
its understanding are referred to the bundles of analogous elements
that recur in various forms. At each point these elements are trans-
formed, doubtless in order to complete a certain path that goes very
precisely from the point of departure - to state the obvious - to the
point of arrival, and which means that by the end something has
been integrated that at the start was inadmissible and irreducible.
So, in the little Hans case history, the point of departure is the
eruption of the real penis in the play between mother and child, and
the end point is when this real penis comes to be accommodated
in a way that is sufficient for life to go on without anxiety. I said
sw#cz.c#f . I didn't say #eccJsczr);. This sc/;ffcJ.e"/ means that it could
be even fuller, and this is indeed what we shall see. In the end, little
Hans's Oedipus complex perhaps doesn't lead to a solution that
would be completely satisfactory. It suffices simply to free him from
the interference of the phobic element. It renders unnecessary the
conjunction between the imaginary and anxiety that is known as
phobia. In other words, it culminates in the reduction of the phobia.
Indeed, let's not forget something that can be gleaned from the
1922 postscript. When Freud meets Hans again at the age of nine-
teen, the youth had just read the full case history for the first time,
but the whole of it came to him as something unknown. Fre;nd draws a,
very neat compar.rson - Any one who is familiar with psychoanalysis
may occasionally experience something similar in sleep. He will be
woken up by a dream, and will decide to analyse it then and there,. he
will then go to sleep again feeling quite satisfied with the result of his
efforts; and next morning drean and analysis will alike be forgotten.
This is indeed something we are familiar with, and Freud's compari-

son is highly appealing. It allows us to think, as does Freud himself,
that what is at stake in the observation on little Hans, as we our-
selves can grasp, is in no way comparable to the subject's integration
or reintegration of his history as a lifting of amnesia that allows
for the elements that have been won back to be preserved. On the
contrary, what is at issue here is a very special activity that stands on
the borderline between the imaginary and the symbolic, and which
does indeed belong to the same realm as dreams. This dream realm
is equally the realm of the mythification that is involved through-
out the observation on Hans, which plays an economic role that is
comparable in every respect to that of Hans's fantasies and even his
mere games and inventions.
However, 1et's not overlook what Freud tells us in passing. He
says that, even so, as Hans was reading his case history, fAerc cJaw#cc7
on him a kind of glimmering recollection that it might have been he
fez.mscr//ffea/ j./ fe¢j7pc#ed jo. It has to do with all the fantasmatisations
in the case concerning the younger sister. Hans's parents are now
divorced, as might have been anticipated from reading through to
the end of the observation, and Hans is no less spirited as a result.
There is just one thing that he still harbours as a wound, and this is
the fact that he lives apart from his sister. This little sister has come
to represent for him, over the course of his life, the term that has
been distanced beyond what is accessible to love. She is the idealised
love-object, the girl-phallus that we took as a point of departure
in our analysis and which will remain - there is no cause for doubt
here, even though this is just a supposition, an extrapolation - the
mark that will lend its style and its type to Hans's love life in its
entirety thereafter.
So, in spite of the masterful analysis of which Hans was the object,
not everything was fully brought to a close, nor did it culminate in
an object relation that would in itself be fully satisfactory.
Let's come back to the starting point, to Freud, to the child's father
who is Freud's acolyte, and to the instructions that Freud gives him,
because we have now seen how Freud assumes his role here. How
will he tell the one who is his agent to conduct himself? He gives two
recommendations.
The first recommendation has two aspects. After being informed
of little Hans's demeanour and the painful and anguishing phenom-
ena of which he is the object, Freud tells the father to explain to the
child that the phobia is a pz.ecg o/#o#se7!sc, c!.#e Dw7"7"Acj./, and that
the nonsense in question is linked to his desire to get close to his
mother. Furthermore, since Hans has for some time been greatly
preoccupied with fyz.w!.mocfocrs, he needs to be told that this is #o/
rz.gfef, w#rccAf, and that this is why the horse is so bad and wants to
bite him.
This goes a long way. We have here a sort of direct and immedi-
ate manoeuvre bearing on guilt, which on the one hand consists
in easing the guilt by saying that such things are quite natural and
straightforward but simply need to be put in order and dominated a
little. On the other hand, however, Freud doesn't hesitate to accen-
tuate the element of prohibition, at least relative prohibition, of the
masturbatory satisfactions. We shall see what the result of this is for
the child.
The second recommendation that Freud gives is even more char-
acteristic of the language he uses. Since Hans's satisfaction is clearly
derived from hunting out - this was why earlier I took up the dialec-
tic of discovery and surprise - the hidden object that is the penis or
the phallus of the mother, this desire is to be taken away from him
by taking away the object of his satisfaction. row ¢rc fo fc// fej.in /fecz/
/fez.a dcsz.rcdpfoa//cts cJocs #of exz.s/. This is voiced by Freud at the start
of the observation, on pp. 2634 of volume VII of the Gcs¢mme//c
Jyerkc. It has to be said that as an intervention from the imaginary
father, it would be hard to do any better. He who puts the world in
order is saying that there is nought to be found.
One can also see the extent to which the real father is incapable
of taking on such a function. In truth, when he tries to do so,
Hans reacts by taking a completely different path from the one
that has been suggested to him, just as previously he had reacted
by producing the story of the two giraffes. Right after the absence
of the phallus has been asserted to him, he fantasises a very nice
story - I saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and she let me see
her widdler. I showed Grete, my Grete, what Murrmy was doing, and
showed her my widdler .
This is a superb response, and utterly in line with what I was
trying to spell out for you earlier. What is at stake is very precisely to
see what is veiled insomuch as it is veiled. The mother is both naked
and in her chemise, just like Alphonse Allais's tale L'c#grczz.£sewr,
about a friend of his who was wont to exclaim with a flamboy-
ilat gesture, You see that woman over there, she is naked under her
c/a/fees./ It's quite possible that you have never gauged the impact
and scope of this remark in the metaphysical underpinnings of your
social deportment, but it is fundamental to interhuman relation-
ships as such.
With that, Hans's father, who doesn't distinguish himself by any

especially shrewd perception in these matters, tells him that she can
only be one or the other. He could only mean ìn her chemise' or
`qwj./c 7iczked'. Yet this is the whole issue. For Hans, she is at once
naked cz#d in her chemise, just like all of you here. Hence the impos-
sibility of taking on board the order of the world simply through
an authoritarian intervention that stipulates /¢cre J.s #owgfe/. Clearly
the imaginary father has existed for a long time, for all time. The
imaginary father is also a certain form of God. But this is not what
will resolve our difficulties in a way that is any the less permanent
and experiential.
Before this attempt, Hans's father had made a first approach,
under Freud's instruction, to easing the child's guilt. He made a first
clarification concerning the relationship between the horse and the
forbidden act of putting his hand on his penis. Analysts of our gen-
eration, after some twenty or thirty years of experience, now know
that such an intervention aiming to alleviate guilt-ridden anxiety
is always doomed to fail. Guilt should never be confronted head
on, lest it should be transformed into the various metabolic forms
that will never fail to arise. So, once the child has been told that
the horse is merely a more or less frightful substitute for something
that he ought not to be making such a fuss about, we see him here
in the observation, in the most articulate fashion, starting to feel
compelled to look at the horses. He says, J Aczt;a /o /ook ¢/ feorscs.
Let's pause for a moment on this mechanism, which is altogether
noteworthy. What does everything that he has just been told mean?
In the end, it amounts to saying that looking at the horses is per-
mitted. Just like in totalitarian systems, which are defined by the
fact that everything that is permitted is compulsory, he now feels
himself compelled. Little Hans has been told that he is allowed to go
towards the horses because the problem lies elsewhere. The result of
this is that he feels ordered, forced, to look at the horses.
What can this mechanism mean, which I have summarised as the
pcr7»j.//ed becoming the compw/for);? We have first a transition, that
is, the elimination of what was previously forbidden. Doubtless this
transformation - because it does indeed amount to a transformation
- must be caused by the fact that what is permitted is clad at the
same time with the term of obligation. This must be something like
a mechanism that preserves the right to what was forbidden, yet in
a different form. In other words, what now has to be looked at is
precisely what previously was not supposed to be looked at.
As we have already seen, something was forbidden by means
of the horse. We know that the phobia is an outpost, a protection
against anxiety. The horse marks out a threshold, and we know that
at this level this is what it does above all else. But now there is also
what has just been said to the subject, and so the horse also bears a
relation to what is at stake in the new element that has sown disor-
der across the subject's play as a whole, namely the real penis. Even
so, does this mean that the horse is the real penis? It most certainly
does not. As umpteen examples hereafter will show you, the horse is
a long way from being the real penis because, over the course of the
transformations of Hans's myth, the horse is also the mother, at the
end the father, and also on occasion little Hans himself. Let's bring
in here an essential symbolising notion, the same that I developed
for you during the Seminar of the year before last concerning the
play on words that Angelus Silesius makes on Or//Wrorf.2 We shall
say that, on this occasion, this is the place where the real penis must
be accommodated, and not without giving rise to fear and anguish.
With this first contribution from the father, which is still hardly
reassuring, we can nevertheless see the child reacting and committing
to the structure that is strictly speaking the signifier-structure, the
structure that resists against imperative interference, the structure
that will nevertheless react to the father's addled and clumsy inter-
ventions, and which will produce the series of mythical creations
that, through a series of transformations, will gradually integrate
the new element of the real penis into Hans's system. This new
element necessitates no longer merely the intersubjectivity of the
lure - which even so is fundamental and allows Hans to play at
surprising, at being caught by surprise, and at presenting himself
as absent - but at the same time, through this play which is still on-
going, a third-party object, which is the first element in his relation
with his mother and which ultimately must itself be integrated into
it. This new and inconvenient element - which actually turned up a
while ago - the real penis, Hans's own penis, with its own reactions
that run the risk of throwing the whole thing up in the air, as they
say, is clearly for him, as you will see in the series of imaginary crea-
tions, the element of perturbation and disturbance.
Since today is the 3rd of April, let's go straight to what happens
on the 3rd of April 1908, when father and child are at their apart-
ment window speculating as to what is going on in the courtyard
across the street. The elements that will become the first props to
Hans's problem are already to be found in this yard. With these he
will produce his first mythical construction under the sign, as Freud
tells us, of means of transport.
All this is going on constantly under his nose - the horses and carts
that shift around, that load and unload, that bring boxes onto which
the street-boys climb. What will Hans make of it all? Do you think
that there was some kind of preadaptation, planned for all eternity
by the eternal imaginary father, between these means of conveyance

in use during the imperial reign of Franz Joseph in pre-war Vienna,
and each drive and natural tendency that surges up hereabouts in
accordance with a solid order of instinctual development in a child
like little Hans? It's exactly the opposite. These elements also have
their order of reality, but the child will make use of them as elements
that are necessary to his game of permutation.
Let me say it again. The use of the signifier is conceivable and
comprehensible only when you take as your starting point the fact
that the elementary and fundamental playing-out of the signifier is
permutative. However civilised and learned you might be, as you
go about your everyday life you couldn't be clumsier when it comes
to exhausting all the possible permutations. I'm going to prove this
for you with the example of myself. I have a necktie that is lighter
on one side and darker on the other, and for the lighter side to be
underneath and the darker side showing on the front, I have to
make a mental permutation. I get it wrong every time.
The permutative order is what is being played out in everything
that little Hans will construct. Before you try to understand anything
about what the horse means, about what the cart means, about little
Hans getting onto it, or the unloading of the cart, you have to retain
the fact that there is a cart, a horse, and little Hans who wishes to
get onto it and who is afraid. But afraid of what? Well, that the cart
might set off without him before he gets up onto the loading dock.
There's no need to rush and to start saying that we are familiar with
this, that he must be afraid of being separated from his mother,
because little Hans reassures you straightaway, I ccz# cz/wa);s come
bczck /o A4wmm};, j.# ffec car/ or j.# cz cob. Little Hans stands quite firm
in reality. Something else is thus at stake. What counts is the fact of
being on a cart looking onto something that can separate from the
cart, that can displace.
Once you have isolated the element in relation to which the cart
can displace, you will find it in countless features in the observation
on little Hans, for example in connection with one of the fantasies
that crops up later, that of travelling in the train to Gmunden, when
they don't have time to put on their clothes before getting off and
the train carries them on. There are many others. For instance, one
of his last fantasies, on 22 April -.4 s/reef-bo}; wof rz.dz.#g o# cz fr#ck,
and the guard came and undressed the boy quite naked and made him
stand there till next morning, and in the morning the boy gave the
guard 50,000 foorins so that he could go on riding on the truck. You
cannot fail to see the patent kinship between these different stages
and moments in Hans's fantasmatisation.
You will also see all the fantasmatisation around the splendid and
intrepid little Hanna. At one point she is with little Hans in another
carriage that greatly resembles the previous ones, because it has the
same anxiety-horses. Hanna will go and ride on one of the horses, in
this first myth that we may call /fee c¢rrj.age in);Jfo.
You will try to see how these different signifiers constitute the
fej./cfez.#g, because this really is what is at issue. Everyone goes on
all the time about the horse, but it can be hitched or unhitched to
a carriage. You will see how these different elements that compose
the hitching, both the coachmen and the referring of the carriage
to a fixed map, turn out to have different significations as the case
history progresses. You will try to see what is most important in
all this. Is it the role of the signifier, as I explained for you in my
SGmz.#czz.rc scir `£a fc//rc vo/6c', or more precisely the displacement
of the signifier-element onto the different personages who each find
themselves caught in some way under its shadow and inscribed in
its possession? Does the vital part of Hans's progress consist in the
movement of the signifier as it turns around the different personages
in whom the subject shows greater or lesser interest, and who may
be caught, captivated, or captured in the permutative mechanism?
Or, on the contrary, does it lie in something else? On this occasion,
we can't really see what kind of progress this would be if it's not a
progress through the order of the signifier.
One can say that at no point do any of the elements of reality that
surround little Hans really lie beyond his means. There is no trace in
this observation of what might be called rcgressj.o#. If you think that
there is regression at one point because little Hans produces all that
immense anal phantasmagoria around the /win/, you are sorely mis-
taken. It's a fantastic mythic play, which at no point entails any kind
of regression. From beginning to end of the observation, little Hans
holds onto his right, so to speak, to masturbation, without allow-
ing himself to be ruffled. If there is one thing that distinguishes the
overall style of Hans's progress, it's precisely its irreducible aspect.
As Freud underlines in his discussion, it is precisely because the
genital element is utterly solid, present, resistant, and firmly installed
in a subject such as this, that he doesn't come out with a hysteria but
a phobia. This is very sharply articulated in the observation.
This is what we will be trying to see next time. We are going to see
that little Hans doesn't employ just one myth, just one alphabetic
element, to resolve his issue, the issue of passing from a phallic
apprehension of the relationship with his mother to a castrated
apprehension of relations with the parental couple as a whole. There
is also the infamous story of the bathtub and the borer, to which last
time I referred with the element of the screw thread. It's something
that revolves entirely around what I would call the logical function
of manufactured instruments. One cannot help but be quite struck

by the way in which this child takes elements that are grouped
around highly developed patterns of coaptation in human adap-
tation and turns them into logical instruments. They enable him
to create an opposition between that which is enrooted, or even
simply that which is naturally fixed in, and that which has a hole
bored through it. The latter is the point of apprcfec#sj.o#, in the
sense of /cczr. It is the formidable polarity before which the child
effectively comes to a standstill. The introduction of the element of
the unscrewing, or else the pincering - I mean, that which is gripped
in the pair of pincers3 - plays an absolutely essential role in what I
shall call the other myth, the myth of the bathtub and the tap.
All the progress that Hans brings about over the course of the
observation hinges on the detail of this mythical structuration, that
is, on the use of imaginary elements in order to exhaust a certain
exercise of symbolic exchange. This is what will allow the threshold
element to fall into disuse, the element that was the first symbolic
structuration of his reality, which is exactly what his phobia was.
3 April 1957
XVII
THE SIGNIFIER AND
DERWITZ
A golden rule
The combinatory value of the signifier
Hans through the looking-glass
Raillery and naivety
What passes out through the hole
Our progress through the observation on little Hans has led us to

highlight the function of myth in the psychological crisis that the
child is going through, a crisis that is inseparable from the paternal
intervention being guided by Freud's counsel.
This all-pervasive notion of the function of what is called in)//fe -
not metaphorically but at the very least technically - is something
that we suppose may be appreciated in its rightful scope to the
extent that Hans's imaginative creation always follows on from his
father's interventions, which can be adroit, not so adroit, or mala-
droit, but which are certainly sufficiently well oriented not to stem
this series of productions but ultimately to stimulate it. This series
presents to us as something that it would be hard to separate from
his symptom, his phobia, and indeed it can be put into order in rela-
tion to this symptom.
Last time, we arrived at the anniversary day of 3 April, when Hans's

remarks on the content of his phobia are aired.
The father says, all in all, that while that same afternoon his son
became more courageous in his conduct under the effect of the most
recent occurrences, and notably the effect of Freud's unmediated
intervention to Hans on 30 March, the phobia too had p/wckcd wp
cowrogc. Indeed, in this ambiguity which clearly was indiscernible,
The Signifier and Dcr Wz./z 279
the phobia seemed to be just as much enriching itself from details of

finer scope and incidence, of higher complication, now that Hans
knew better how to make such confidences about the way in which
the phobia was pressuring and oppressing him.
I'm venturing to overturn in your minds, or more exactly to re-
establish in your minds, the true function both of the symptom and
of its variously qualified productions which have been rounded up
under the name /rcz#si./or); a);mpJoms o/a7!¢/};sz.s. To summarise for
you the scope of what is meant by our approach, I shall try to set
out a certain number of terms, definitions and, while I'm at it, rules.
I told you last time that if we want to work in a way that is truly
analytic, that is truly Freudian, and which is in true conformity with
the major examples that Freud developed for us, then we ought to
become aware of something that can be understood and confirmed
only on the basis of the distinction between signified and signifier.
As I told you, not one of the signifier-elements of the phobia carries
a univocal meaning or is equivalent to a single signified.
There are many such signifiers that we could tarry with. The first
of them is, of course, the horse. It is impossible to regard the horse
in any way whatsoever as something that could be the pure and
simple equivalent of the function of the father, for example. One
can take this easy route and hastily declare that, like in the classic
formula from roJem cz#c7 r¢boo, the horse is responding to some
shortcoming of the father, as a sort of nco-production or equivalent
that somehow represents him or incamates him, thereby playing a
role determined by what does indeed seem to be the difficulty at that
time, namely the passage from the preoedipal state to the Oedipal
moment. The word momc#f is here intended in the sense it carries
in physics, and this passage is in effect what I have been teaching,
but of course such a declaration about the horse would be utterly
incomplete and insufficient. The horse is not merely the horse that
perhaps at the end it may indeed become, when Hans sees a pro#d
horse trotting past in the street and associates it with something
equivalent to the virile pride of the father.
At one moment near the end of the treatment, Hans has the
much-vaunted conversation with his father when he tells him some-
thing along the lines of, yoct owgA/ /a bc croff w.Jfe mc, )/ow mws/
hold it against me that I'm in this place, that I monopolise mother's
attention and take your place in her bed. ALnd this cornes in spite Of
the father's denegations, telling Hans that he has never scolded him.
Dczf mw¢ wczfer sc].#, Hans says again. J/ mws/ bc /rwc. Thus, for a brief
instant, doubtless having been duly indoctrinated some time hence,
the child makes the Oedipal myth loom up with an altogether special
imperiousness. Moreover, this has not failed to strike a few authors,
notably Robert Fliess, who wrote an article on this in the January-

February 1956 issue of the I/P devoted to Freud's centenary.
Before it came to fulfil this metaphorical function in a terminal
fashion, so to speak, the horse played a good many other roles. On 3
April, Hans gives all the possible explanations on this matter. Is the
horse to be hitched, or not? Is it hitched to a cart withjust one horse,
or two horses? In each case there is a different signification. What
becomes apparent to us is that at this time the horse is symbolic of
something. As the next part of the observation will show in a more
developed way, on one side the horse is symbolic of the mother. It
is also symbolic of the penis. At any rate, it is irreducibly linked to
the cart, which is itself a loaded dray, as Hans insists all along the
session of 3 April when he is explaining his interest and the brand of
satisfaction he derives from all the traffic that passes in front of their
apartment, these drays that drive into the yard and drive back out
again, and which, while they are there, are unloaded and reloaded.
Gradually the equivalence becomes apparent between the function
of the dray, together with the horse, and something that obviously
belongs to a very different realm, suggestive of what refers essen-
tially to the mother's pregnancy. As we are told in the observation,
by Freud and by the father, it refers essentially to the problem of the
situation of children in their mother's belly and how they come out.
So, at this moment, the horse has a very different scope and a very
different function.
Similarly, another element becomes a subject of lengthy exami-
nation both for the father and for Freud, namely the notorious
Krczwcz//, the idea of noise, of a row, of a disorderly racket, with some
Austrian overtones whereby it seems that the word can further be
used to designate a fracas or a rumpus. In each case, tbere appears
the troubling and especially anguishing character of this Krawcr//,
which is apprehended by little Hans when it arises with the bus-
horse that fell down, win/¢//c#. In Hans's own words, this was one of
the events that precipitated the phobic value of the horse. This fall,
which occurred but once, will thereafter be found as the constant
backdrop to the fear. He fears that this may happen to certain
horses, especially big horses hitched up to large, heavily laden vans.
The fall and the attendant noise of the horse's pawing, the Krczwcz//,
keep cropping up, from more than one angle, during the question-
ing of little Hans, yet not once in the observation will anything be
yielded that would amount to an overt interpretation of the Krczwcz//.
Furthermore, it should be noted that for the full run of the case
history of little Hans, Freud and the father alike are led to remain
in doubt, to float, and even to abstain, when it comes to the inter-
pretation of a certain number of elements. It turns out that, try as
The Signifier and Der JJrj./z 281
they might to press the child to come out with it, try as they might
to suggest every possible equivalent and solution, they obtain from
him no more than evasions, allusions and side-stepping. Sometimes
one even has the impression that the child is to some extent making
fun.
Actually, this is not to be doubted. The parodic character of
some of the child's figments and confabulations is patent in the
observation. I'm thinking above all of what happens in relation to
what could be called /rfec sfork m};/A, which in Hans's rendition is
so rich and lush, teeming so with humorous elements - 7lfec ,r/ark
came up the stairs . . . and he had the right key . . . and then he took
fe;.s focz/ cz77d we#/ czwcry czgczz.#, and so on and so forth. This parodic
and caricatured aspect of the child's figments has just what it takes
to have struck the various commentators.
In the end this brings us to the heart of something that is re-
established not from a perspective that deems the observation to be
incomplete, but on the contrary from a perspective that appreciates
its distinctive demonstrative phase. This is not an insufliciency. On
the contrary, it is along this path that it must show us the way to a
mode of comprehending what is involved both in the symptomatic
formation - the phobia, which is already so simple and yet already
so rich - and in the working-through itself. This aspect is expressed,
and it finds its place. There is no better illustration of this obser-
vation, to the extent that it's a Freudian observation, that is, an
intelligent observation.
What we can see essentially is the signifier as such in its distinction
from the signified. The symptomatic signifier is constituted in such a
way that by its very nature, all along its development and evolution,
it covers signifieds that are the most multifomi and the most varied.
Not only is it in its nature to be able to do this, it is its function to
do so.
The full set of signifier-elements that are put before us in the
course of this portion of the observation, its kit of signifiers, is
assembled in such a way that if we want the observation to be some-
thing more than a mere riddle, a confused and failed observation,
then we need to impose upon ourselves a certain number of rules
about how we tackle it. Why should this case be singled out as a
failed one, and not any other case to which we customarily refer?
Even so, we cannot help but be struck by the arbitrary, solicited
and systematic character of the interpretations made in the case
history in particular, yet also of the analytic interpretations vis-a-vis
the child. Precisely inasmuch as this observation is so remarkably
rich and complex, we have here a testimony given in a register that
is exceedingly rare on account of its abundance. If there is one
impression that one receives upon moving into it, it's the sense of
constantly getting lost in it.
The rules that I would like to propose in this regard are as follows.
Be it the analysis of a child or of an adult, no element that we may
regard as a signifier - in the sense that we have been promoting here,
that is to say, whether the signifier is an object, a relationship or a
symptomatic act, and however primal or vague it may be - fails to
appear as bearing already the firm and singular stamp of something
that is dialectical.
Such vagueness is characteristic of the first emergence of the horse,
when it appears after a certain interval during which the child's
anxiety manifests itself. The horse will hold a function that needs
to be defined, but this dialectical stamp is already apparent. This is
precisely what we are going to try to grasp, and it is already quite
palpable enough in the fact that the anxiety emerges exactly when
it's a matter of Hans's mother leaving. He is afraid that the horse
will come into the bedroom. But what comes into the room? It is he,
little Hans. In every aspect of this we can see a highly ambiguous
double relationship that is linked on the one hand to the function of
the mother by way of a sentimental tonality of anxiety, but on the
other hand to little Hans through his movement and his act. From
its very first appearance, the horse is already loaded with profound
ambiguity. It is already an all-purpose sign, just like any typical
signifier. We take just three strides forward into the observation on
little Hans and we can see this come pouring in from every side.
So, we posit the following rule. No signifier-element, thus defined
as an object, a relationship or a symptomatic act, in neurosis for
example, can be regarded as having a univocal scope. In no way is
it equivalent to any one of these objects, relationships, or even these
imaginary actions in our register upon which the currently used
notion of the object relation was founded. In our time, object rela-
tions, with everything that is normative and progressive about them
in the subject's life, with how they are genetically defined as mental
development, belong to the register of the imaginary. This register
is not, of course, without value, but when one tries to articulate it,
it presents all the characteristics of untenable contradiction that I
told you about when I was sharply caricaturing the texts that had
been published at the start of the academic year in a two-volume
collection. We had before our eyes the flagrant contradictions in
how this notion of the object relation plays out when it starts to be
expressed in terms of a pregenital relation that is becoming genital,
with the idea of progress that this entails. These contradictions are
upon us immediately, and so the task ahead is to arrange the terms
in the most basic fashion.
The Signifier and Dcr W/j./z 283
If we follow what for us is a golden rule, and which draws on our

notion of the structure of symbolic activity, the signifier-elements
must first be defined by their articulation with the other signifier-
elements. This is what justifies our rapprocAcmc"/ with the recent
theory of myth.
This theory has imposed itself in a way that is peculiarly anal-
ogous to the way in which the simple apprehension of the facts
compels us to articulate things. What guides Monsieur Levi-Strauss
in his article in the /owr#cz/ a/,4mcrj.ccz# Fo/k/ore? What does he use
to introduce the notion of 7lfec S/rwc/wra/ S/wd)/ o/A4`)/fA? He quotes
a remark from one of his colleagues, A. M. Hocart, who says that
if there is one thing that we need to overturn at the outset, then
this is the stance that down through the ages has been taken in the
name of goodness knows what deep-seated anti-intellectualist bias,
which consists in withdrawing psychological interpretations from
what is presumed to be an intellectual field only to introduce them
again in a field that is qualified as one of cz#ec/j.w./};. As the author
categorically concludes, this thereby adds, to /Ac z.#rfecrc#/ dc/ecfs o/
the psychological school . . . the mistake of deriving clear-cut ideas . . .
from vague notions .
What is here called /Ac ps};cAo/ogz.ca/ scAoo/ is the school that
seeks to find the source of myths in a so-called constant of human
philosophy that is somehow generic. We are constantly dealing with
such c/car-cw/ j.de¢s, as much in myth as in symptomatic produc-
tions. We ascribe to some vague drive something that presents in the
patient in a way that is very broadly articulated, which is even what
makes for the paradox of how it appears to our eyes as a parasite. It
is enough simply to avoid conflating what amounts to a mental play,
goodness knows what superfluity of intellectual deduction - which
can only be qualified as such from a perspective of the rationalisa-
tion of delusion, for example, or of the symptom, but which is an
utterly outmoded perspective - with our perspective, from which,
on the contrary, the play of the signifier snatches hold of the subject
and takes him far beyond all that he can intellectualise therein,
but which amounts no less to the play of the signifier with its own
specific laws.
I would like to presentify this for you with an image. What is it
that becomes palpable for us when little Hans starts coming out
with his fantasies one-by-one, and also, from a certain perspective,
when we have our eyes peeled for it, in the development of a neurosis
when we start to perceive its history and development in a subject,
the way in which he has been taken up by it and seized by it? I would
say that it's something that he doesn't enter face on. He backs into it
somehow. It seems that little Hans, from the moment the shadow of
the horse is looming over him, gradually enters a stage-set that takes
on an order and organisation, that is erected around him, but which
captures him much more than being developed by him. What we see
is the articulated aspect by which this delusion develops.
I've just said c7e/wsz.o#. It slipped out almost as a parapraxis
because what is going on here has nothing to do with a psychosis,
yet the tern is not inappropriate. On no account can we content
ourselves with deducing anything from vczgwe cmo/;.o7?s, as Hocart
puts it, cited by Levi-Strauss. On the contrary, we have the impres-
sion that the ideational edification - if we can use this expression
in the case of little Hans - has its own motivation, its own specific
plane and occurrence. It might correspond to some need or other,
to some function or other, but surely not to anything that might at
any moment be justified by a drive, by an impulse, by a particular
emotional movement that would be transposed here to find plain
expression. A very different mechanism is at issue, and it necessi-
tates what has been termed /¢c sfrwcfwr¢/ sJwd); o/in);fA, the first step
of which is never to consider any of the signifier-elements indepen-
dently of the others that arise, and then to reveal this. When I say /a
rcvca/ it, I mean /a cJevc/ap it on this same plane of a series of opposi-
tions that belong first and foremost to the realm of combinatorics.
What we can see looming up in the course of the development of
what is happening for little Hans is not a certain number of themes
that would have more or less some affective or psychological equiva-
lent, but rather a certain number of grouped signifier-elements that
progressively transpose from one system into another. An example
will illustrate this for you.
After the father's first attempts at enlightenment, under Freud's
guidance, an especially penile element is isolated in the horse, which
will lead Hans to react to this piece of enlightenment by the compul-
sion to look at the horse. Next, we find that the child is relieved at
certain moments by the prohibitive aid that the father brings him
concerning his masturbation. We are edging closer to a first attempt
at analysing Hans's concern over what has to do with his urinary
organ, the Wz.wj.m¢cher, as he calls it. Hans certainly absorbs the full
force of the ,4w;fir/d.rw#g, the real enlightenment, this being the strong
intervention that the father makes so as to connect more directly
with what he reckons to be the only real support of the child's
anxiety, and which amounts to saying, as Freud incites him to say,
that little girls don't have one, while he does have one. And, in a
way that does not escape Freud's notice, Hans underscores that his
widdler is ¢#gewc}chsc#. It is/xed z.# or c7croo/cd. It is something that
will grow and get bigger with him.
Isn't this already a first adumbration of something that appears
The Signifier and Dcr Wi./z 285
to lead in the direction of somehow allowing the phobia to fall into

disuse, if indeed it is purely and simply the equivalent of the anxiety
that is bound to the apprehension of a real that hitherto had not
been fully realised by the child? It is then that we see the fantasy of
the big giraffe and the little giraffe appear.
I showed you that this fantasy casts us into the field of a creation
characterised by a style and a symbolic exigency that are utterly riv-
eting. I'm repeating this for those of you who weren't here. I restored
its full scope - and this can only be done from our perspective - to
the fact that for Hans there is neither contradiction nor even ambi-
guity in the fact that one of the giraffes, the little one, is a crumpled
giraffe, just as one can crumple up a sheet of paper. He shows this
for us. We have an object that until then had its imaginary function
and which is now passing over to a sort of radical intervention of
symbolisation. This is formulated as such by the subject himself
and is underlined by the gesture that he then makes of taking pos-
session of this symbolic position, of occupying it, by sitting on top
of the crumpled giraffe, in spite of how the big giraffe calls out and
protests. There is something especially satisfying about this for little
Hans. It's not a dream. It's a fantasy that he has come up with
himself. He goes into his parents' bedroom to speak about it, and
he develops it.
The bafflement they evince yet again as to what this is about is
firmly underscored. You will have noted the wavering in the obser-
vation itself. According to the father, the big giraffe and the small
giraffe are initially the father and the mother. Yet right after he
says categorically that the big giraffe is the mother and the little
one is her genital organ, I.Ar G/j.cd, and so this is another form of
the relational value of these two signifiers. But will this suffice us?
Surely not, because the father makes a fresh intervention, telling
the mother, Good-a);c, bz.g gz.rczjffc./ Having so far accepted a differ-
ent interpretative register, the child doesn't reply Ofe }Jcs./ - which
is what the French [and the English] translation has, and which
fails to get across the point and the scope of his interjection - but
rather Nicht wahr, that can't be true! ALrrdhe edds, and Hanna's the
crumpled giraf fe, isn' i she?
What are we touching on here? What is this other mode of inter-
pretation doing here? Does this really have to do with Hanna and
her Jrrczwcz//, in the sense that further on in the observation we shall
see little Hanna appearing to be quite bothersome on account of
her crying? We cannot fail - so long as we keep our ears open to the
signifier-element - to identify this crying with the mother crying out
in the fantasy.
What ultimately, and what alone, is meant by this ambiguity?
Hans's moment of cheerfulness, which even carries a touch of rail-

1ery, is something that all by itself designates for us the false path
his father is taking in his attempts to make pairs of correspondences
between the two terms of the symbolic relationship and some imagi-
nary or real element that they would be there to represent. Hans is
right beside the father from one moment to the next to demonstrate
that this is not the right path and never will be.
Why will this never be the right path? What Hans is dealing with
when the phobia emerges - this being the moment in the observa-
tion that we are talking about - is an apprehension of particular
symbolic relations that so far have not been constituted for him and
which have their own value as a symbolic relationship.
Man, because he is man, is poised in the presence of problems
that are problems of the signifier as such. The signifier is introduced
into the real by its very existence as a signifier, because, for example,
words are being spoken, or because sentences are being articulated
and linked up, bound together by some medium, a copula, such as
whcrc/ore or bccczwsc. The existence of the signifier introduces into
the world of man something that I expressed near the end of the
little Introduction I made in the first issue of fcI Ps);chcz#¢/};Sc, to
the effect that it is in crossing the flow of things diametrically that
the symbol is tethered, in order to lend it another meaning. These
are problems to do with the creation of meaning, with everything
that this entails in terms of freedom and ambiguity, and everything
that might possibly be reduced at any moment to nothingness by the
utterly arbitrary nature of a sudden spirited remark.
Just like Humpty-Dumpty in 4/j.cc /ferowgfe /rfee fookz.#g-G/czss,
little Hans is quite capable of saying that this is how things are
because this is/.ws/ wfeo/ I cfeoose, because he is mczs/cr. This doesn't
stop him from being completely subordinate to the solution of the
problem, which arises from his having to adjust the way he had hith-
erto been relating to the maternal world, the world that was already
being organised by the dialectic of the luring between him and his
mother, the importance of which I have already underscored for
you. Who out of the two of them has the phallus and who doesn't?
What does mother desire when she desires something other than me,
/fee cfez./d? This was where the child was, but he can stay there no
longer.
The function of myth takes hold at this juncture. Once we are
on the path to the right way of analysing myth - that of structural
analysis - we can see that a myth is always an attempt to articulate a
solution to a problem. It's a matter of passing from a certain mode
of explication, let's say, bearing on the subject's relationship with
the world, or on a society's relationship with the world, to a trans-
formation that is necessitated by the fact that different elements

have come to stand in contradiction to the first formulation. These
new elements require a shift that as such is impossible, an impasse,
and this is what affords the myth its structure.
The same goes for Hans, who at this moment is faced with some-
thing that necessitates the adjustment of the first adumbration of
the symbolic system that was structuring the relationship with the
mother. This is what is at issue in the appearance of the phobia and,
far more than this, in the development of everything that the phobia
brings with it in terms of signifier-elements. Hans is faced with this,
and, by like token, it is what makes his father's every foray into a
piecemeal reading appear derisory to the child.
Regarding the style of Hans's responses, I simply must urge you to

refer to the absolutely admirable passages that constitute Freud's
immense work - which has still scarcely been exploited for our
experience -called Der W/j.fz.
This book perhaps has no equivalent in what might be called pst;-
cfeo/ogj.ccz/ pAz./osapdy. I know of no other that has yielded anything
so fresh and trenchant as this work. All the other books on laughter,
be it Bergson's or any of the rest, will always be of lamentable
poverty alongside this one.
What is the crucial thing that is put before us in Freud's book Dcr
Wj./z? It targets directly the essential nature of the phenomenon,
without dipping off and without falling wide in its considerations.
Just as in the very first section of the chapter on 7lfee Drcczm- Wrork
in the rrczctmdc#/ct#g he foregrounds the notion that the dream is
a rebus, and no one takes heed - the sentence has gone completely
unnoticed - so it doesn't seem to have been realised that section A,
the analytic part of Der Wrj./z, opens with the famous layout of his
analysis of the phenomenon of condensation as grounded in the
signifier. In the example of /czmz.//z.o#&r, there is a superposition of
/cz77?z./z.t3r and "7.//z.o77&r, and everything Freud will develop from it
consists in showing us that it is on the level of the suppressed case
that the truly destructive term is located, the term that disrupts the
play of the signifier as such in relation to what could be called the
existence of the real. By playing with the signifier, man calls his world
into question, right down to the root. The value of the spirited quip,
which distinguishes it from the comical, is its possibility of playing
on the nonsense that is fundamental to any use of sense. It is pos-
sible, at any moment, to call any element of meaning into question
insomuch as it is grounded on a use of the signifier. That is to say,

it is grounded on something that in itself is profoundly paradoxical
in relation to any possible signification because, in establishing this
use, the use itself is what creates what it is designed to sustain.
The distinction between the domain of wit and the domain of the
comic is one of the clearest there is. \h/hen Freud does touch on the
comic in this book, he broaches it only as an ancillary by which to
clarify wit by means of a contrast. First of all, he will come upon
intermediate notions, highlighting for us the dimension of the naive,
which is so ambiguous, and which is my reason for making this
excursus.
While on the one hand this dimension of the naive does indeed
need to be defined - because it exists - in order to see what manifes-
tations of the naive can arise from the comic, we can clearly see on
the other hand the extent to which this naivety is intersubjective. We
are the ones who impute naivety to the child, and in a way that some
doubt always lingers over it. Why so?
Once again, let's take an example. Freud begins his illustration
of the naive with the story of the children who gather an audience
of adults for their little drama piece. The show begins. The young
actors tell the tale of a poor fisherman and his wife who have fallen
on hard times. In an attempt to change their fortune, the husband
decides to set off for faraway lands. He comes back after his many
exploits, laden with riches, which he shows to his wife. She listens
to him, then opens the door of their hut saying, Look, J Coo feczvc #o/
bec# z.cZ/e. A dozen large dolls lie sleeping in a row.
This is the example that Freud gives to illustrate naivety. It is
one of the forms in which, were the definition of the comic to be
implicated here, the discharge would arise from an economic gain
brought about spontaneously by someone who is less naive, and in
this different realm would entail a share of tension that even gener-
ates a certain degree of embarrassment. The fact that the child goes
straight to this enormous gaffe without incurring the least trouble
triggers something that transforms into laughter. That is to say, it
becomes very droll, with all the overtones of the strange that this
word can entail.
But what is at issue here? While on this occasion we are in a zone
that borders on the comic, the economy at stake is very precisely the
gain that is made from bypassing what such a construction would
have undergone if the same things were to be evoked from the lips of
an adult. The child somehow makes a reality, directly, of something
that takes us to the height of the absurd. He produces what is called
#czz.vc w!.f. It's a funny story that triggers laughter because it has
come from the mouth of a child, leaving all the room for the adults
The Signifier and Dcr Wz.fz 289
to rejoice, 7lrfecsc kj.cJs czre pr!.cc/css./ They are assumed to have found,
in all innocence and in one shot, what an author would necessarily
have taken a great more trouble to find, or what he would have
had to enrich with some further subtlety, so that it might pass for
something droll, properly speaking.
However, this allows us also to see that it is not altogether certain
that the ignorance that has been given free run to hit the bulls-eye
is really so complete. To spell it right out, when children's stories
possess this disconcerting character of triggering our laughter, we
include them in the perspective of the naive, but we know that this
naivety is not always to be taken at face value. There is bcj.ng #czz.v€
and there is /cz.g#z.#g #oz.vc/}7. If we attribute a feigned naivety to
the children's drama play, we restore to it its full character of W/z.fz
in its most /c#dc#fz.ows form, as Freud puts it. It takes very little,
indeed it takes no more than for it to be assumed that this naivety
is not so very complete, for the children to gain the upper hand and
effectively become the masters of the game.
In other words, what is called for is something that Freud
highlights, and which I ask you to look up in the text, namely the
/fez.rdpcrfo# who is always implied in the spirited remark. The first
person makes a remark about a second to a third. Whether or not
there really are three people standing there, there is always this
ternarity which is essential for the remark to trigger laughter. The
comic, meanwhile, can be triggered simply between two people, like
Freud's example of seeing someone slip and fall down, or when you
see someone making a meal out of some task which for us is one of
the most straightforward there is. This on its own suffices to trigger
the comic relationship. However, in the naive, we can see essentially
that the perspective of the third person, even if it remains virtual,
is always implicit to some degree. Beyond the child whom we take
to be naive, there is but another, who is precisely the one whom we
suppose to be there for it to make us laugh so much. After all, it
could be that he is feigning to feign, that his bcj.#g #¢j.1;c is affected.
This dimension of the symbolic is exactly what is there to be felt
in the kind of hide-and-seek game, the perpetual mockery, that sets
the tone of Hans's every reply to his father.
We see this kind of phenomenon being produced when, at another
momeut, the [a;tier asks Ha.us, What did you think when the horse fell
c7ow#.? This has to do with the fall from which Hans says he go/ /foe
#o#sc#sc. His father blurts out the question, Wr¢s /Ac Aorsc dcczc7
wfee# j./ /c// dow#? As he notes just afterwards, Hans's expression
was quite serious when he first replied, yes./ But then the child has
a sudden change of mind, and lets out a laugh - this too is noted -
sayirLg, No, it wasn' i a bit dead. I only said it in jest, im Spa,B.
What can this mean? The observation is punctuated by all these

little remarks. After Freud allows himself to take in for a moment the
tragic resonance of the horse's fall - though is it really certain that
this tragic resonance is present on any occasion in the psychology of
little Hans? - he becomes mindful of the other, this moustachioed
father, the bespectacled one whom he depicts for us, whom he had
seen during the consultation sitting beside little Hans. Beside /fee
funny little fellow . . . with all his self assurance, this other is there,
heavy set, eyeglasses full of reflections, trying his hardest with the
best will in the world. Freud wavers for a brief moment. The matter
at hand is the notorious black on the horse's mouth, which they are
now wondering about, peering into it with a lantern, and Freud tells
hi"seHf , Why, here he is, the long-headed one, it's this ass right here!
And when I say /A!.s czss . , .
Even so, get it into your heads that this kind of floating blackness
around the horse's mouth, which is never elucidated, is neverthe-
less the real gap that is always concealed behind the veil and the
mirror, and which always stands out against the background like
a stain. Ultimately, there is a sort of short-circuit from a divine
character of professorial superiority, which Freud accentuates with
some humour, and the appraisal - which the experience and con-
fidences of his contemporaries show us was always on the ready
to come flying out of his mouth - which in French starts with the
third letter of the alphabet followed by an ellipsis. I Wlfeaf cz grccz/ . . .
presj.de#/ . . . /fej.s z.f, thinks Freud, telling himself that he has right
there in front of him the figure that cuts across and joins up with the
intuition of the fundamentally abysmal character of what stands out
from the background.
So, in these conditions, no doubt little Hans is leading the game
rather well from one turn to the next when he corrects himself, when
he laughs, and when in one fell swoop he cancels out a long series
of what he has just been developing in front of his father. We have
the impression that he is telling him, J sczw }Jozj comj.#g. On first
approach, he accepts the word deczc7 as an equivalent to /a//c#, but
in a second moment he tells himself, yow'rc repea/I.ng ffec Pro/esfor's
/esso# /a mc, that is, precisely what the Professor hasjust insinuated,
namely that Hans is against his father to the point of wishing him
dead.
This is something that comes to contribute, therefore, to these
rules of ours. As I said, first of all one maps out the signifiers in
accordance with their essentially combinatorial value. The full set
of signifiers that is brought into play is there to restructure the real
by introducing this newly combined relationship. To take up again
the reference to the first issue of fcz Ps);cfea#cz/}7sc, it is not merely
for the sake of it that what you can see on the cover is the symbol of
the signifier-function as such.2 The signifier is a bridge in a domain
of significations. The consequence of this is that the signifier doesn't
reproduce significations. It transforms and recreates them.
This is what is at stake, and this is why we always need to focus
the lens of our question on the signifier.
We need to be attentive to the twist in the signifier that little Hans

brings about. What is its point of departure and what is its point of
arrival?
So it is that in each of the stages that he travels through over
the first five months of 1908, we can see him turning his interest
successively to what is loaded and unloaded, or to what heaves into
motion with more or less of a jolt, and which also might tear pre-
maturely away from its landing dock. Among all these linkages of
variously fantasmatic signifier-elements revolving around the theme
of movement, or more exactly, if you will allow this, within the
theme of movement, the term of modification, acceleration, there is
specifically the word Bcwegw#g, 7„o/j.o#. This element is absolutely
essential in the structuration of the first fantasies and gradually
brings out other elements, among which are the mother's drawers, a
pair of yellow ones and a pair of black ones. We must pay particular
attention to what happens in relation to this element of the drawers.
Without the perspectives that I have been trying to introduce
for you, this passage is utterly incomprehensible. The father gets
his knickers in a twist, if you will forgive the pun. As for Freud
himself, he says simply that the father led the analysis to become
obscwrc cz#c7 w7tcer/cz;.#, but nevertheless in a side note at the end of
the exchange he indicates a certain number of perspectives, and in
particular that doubtless the father had failed to recognise a funda-
mental distinction linked to /fee cJz#ercHcc bcfwcc# fAc sow#c7s mczc7c
by a man micturating and a woman.
Little Hans says things that are quite incomprehensible. Surely he
wants to tell us that the longer a pair of drawers is worn, the blacker
they become. This follows a number of developments in which one
can see that when the drawers are yellow they have such-and-such a
value, and when they are black they don't. When he sees the yellow
drawers separate from his mother, it makes him want to spit. When
his mother is wearing them, it doesn't make him want to spit. In
short, Freud insists and says in a footnote that without doubt what
little Hans wants to indicate here is that the drawers have a different
function for him depending on whether his mother has them on or

he sees them on their own account.
We have, therefore, enough signposts to see that Freud himself is
heading towards an adumbration of the total dialectical relativisa-
tion of this pairing of the yellow drawers and the black drawers. In
the course of the long and complicated conversation in which little
Hans and his father try to unravel the question together, it transpires
that this pairing only takes on a value when it manifests a series of
oppositions, which have to be sought out in remarks that at first go
quite unnoticed. At any rate, they go drastically unnoticed when one
tries sweepingly to identify the yellow drawers with something like
urination, for instance, and the black drawers with something that
in Hans's language is called /win/.
Furthermore, it is quite wrong to identify this /"in/ with def-
ecation, thereby overlooking what is essential to Hans about this
element. We have his father's own testimony that Hans's word
Lwmp/ is a transformation of the word S/rwmf!/, a stocking, and
in another part of the observation little Hans associates it with a
black blouse. It partakes of the crucial function of clothing as a
concealing function. It is also the screen onto which is projected
the major object of his preoedipal questioning, namely the missing
phallus. The fact that excrement as such should be designated by a
term allied to this symbolisation also shows us clearly enough that
the instinctual relationship, the anality concerned in the mechanism
of defecation, is a trifling matter alongside the symbolic function.
Here, once again, this is the dominant register.
For little Hans, the symbolic register is linked to a questioning
that is vital for him - W'7!af c¢# bc /o5/? Wlf!o/ c¢# pass ow/ /ferowgfo
/fee feo/c? These are the first elements of what might be called a
s);moo/z.c j.73sjrw7»c;7fczfj.o# which thereafter little Hans will examine
while developing his mythical construction that includes, in the first
dream, the bath that the fitter comes to unscrew, or later, in the
second dream, his behind, which will also be unscrewed, along with
his penis as well. All of this gives rise to the greatest delight in Freud
and the father alike, it has to be said.
They are in such a rush to impose their signification on little
Hans that they don't even wait for him to finish his remarks on
the unscrewing of his little widdler before they tell him that the
only possible explanation is that, quite naturally, this was so that
he could be given a bigger one. Little Hans doesn't say that at all,
and on no account do we know whether he would have said it had
he been allowed to speak to the end. Nothing indicates that he
would have said it. Little Hans speaks only of replacement. This
is an instance where we can touch on the countertransference. The
The Signifier and Dcr Wz.J: 293
father is the one who comes out with the idea that if Hans's widdler
and behind are being changed, it's so that he can be given bigger
ones. This is an example of the kinds of wrongs that are done all the
time. After Freud, people have not held back from perpetuating this
tradition, following a mode of interpretation that goes hunting out
in goodness knows what affective proclivity whatever might prompt
and justify what actually possesses its own laws, its own structure,
its own gravitational pull, and which ought to be studied as such.
We are going to draw to a close by saying that, in the mythical
development of a symptomatic signifying system, one should always
take into consideration its systematic coherence, at each step of the
way, along with the kind of development that is specific to it in the
diachrony of time. The development of any mythical system in a
neurotie - 1 once called it the neurotic's individual myth - presents
as the issuing, the progressive dislocation, of a series of mediations
that are resolved by a chaining-up of signifiers which always bears
a circular character. This may be more or less apparent but is none
the less fundamental in that the point of arrival bears a deep relation
to the point of departure, without being exactly the same. I mean
that the impasse that is always there at the start is to be found again
at the point of arrival, where it can be regarded as a solution in an
inverted form, just with a change of sign. But the impasse from
which one began is always found in some fashion at the end of the
operative displacement of the signifying system.
I will be illustrating this for you in the next part, along the winding
paths that we shall take after the holiday break, by taking up the
hand that Hans was dealt.
At the start, little Hans was faced with something that until then
had been the game of the phallus, which was already a sort of luring
relationship that was sufficient to maintain a progressive movement
between him and his mother, and which offered him the meaningful
prospect and goal of perfect identification with the object of mater-
nal love. But then a new element came on the scene.
On this score, I concur with the authors, with the father and with
Freud. A problem arises, the importance of which in the child's
development cannot be overestimated. It is grounded on the fact
that nothing in the subject himself has been pre-established or
arranged in advance which might allow him to take on board the
prospect that sharply confronts him at two or three moments during
his childhood development, namely the prospect of growth. Given
the fact that nothing is pre-established or predetermined on the
imaginary plane, what brings in an essential element of perturbation
is very precisely a phenomenon that is quite distinct, but which for
the child comes to be annexed imaginarily at the time of his first
confrontation with the prospect of growth, namely the phenomenon

ofturgescence.
That the penis should go from being smaller to larger during the
first childhood masturbations or erections is no different from one
of the most fundamental themes in the imaginary fantasia of ,4/z.cc
j.# Wo#c7er/cz#d, and which lends this work its absolutely choice value
in the matter of childhood imagination. Hans is confronted with a
problem of this sort, that of integrating something that is linked to
the existence of the real penis, the distinct existence of a penis that
can itself become bigger or smaller, but which is also the penis that
belongs to the small one or to the big one.
To spell it right out, the problem of Hans's development at this
moment is linked to the absence of the penis of the big one, that is
to say, of the father. And the phobia is produced in so far as Hans
must face up to his Oedipus complex in a situation that necessitates
a particularly difficult symbolisation.
However, the fact that the phobia develops as it does, and that
the analysis produces this abundance of mythical proliferation, indi-
cates to us, in the same way that the pathological reveals the normal,
the complexity of the phenomenon at stake when it comes to the
child integrating the real of his genitality, along with the deeply and
fundamentally symbolic character of this moment of passage.
10 April 1957
XVIII
CIRCUITS
Wherefore the horse?

From horse to railway
Hans's back and forth
Wrcge» and Wagc#
If you needed reminding of the constitutive character of the impact

of the symbolic in human desire, it seems to me that, for want of any
accurate focus upon the most common and everyday experience, a
quite riveting example may be found in the following formula, the
immediacy and omnipresence of which should be lost on no one.
What is at issue here is a formulation of the desire that is perhaps the
keenest of all human desires, the most constant at any rate, which
at certain turning points in the lives of each and every one of us we
cannot fail to recognise, not to mention in the lives of those to whom
we grant the closest attention, those who are tormented by some
subjective unease. This desire, to name it at last, is called /Ae cJcsz.re
for some other thing.
What is meant, in terms of instinctual coaptation, by this desire
for some other thing? What can it mean in the register of the object
relation, which is conceived of as a sort of developmental evolution
that is immanent to itself, arising by way of successive thrusts that it
would be a mere matter of fostering? If the object relation is referred
to a /j;pe object that is somehow preformed, where can this desire for
some other thing come from?
This preliminary remark is intended to put you, as Freud expresses
it somewhere in his letters in connection with Egyptian realms, in
[. . .I.I
What I have just said is not unrelated to my subject, namely little

Hans.
What have we been trying to detect in the mythical fomentation that

is the essential characteristic of the observation on little Hans?
What I'm calling in);ffez.car//ome#fa/I.o# refers to each of the dif-
ferent elements, the ambiguity of which I have pointed out to you,
along with how they are essentially designed to cover just about any
signified, but not all the signifieds at the same time. When one of the
signifiers covers one such element of the signified, the other signifier-
elements that are in play cover other signifieds. In other words, the
signifying constellation operates by means of something that we
may call a ryffc777 o/fr¢#f/or7#¢fj.o", that is, a tuning motion which,
when looked at more closely, covers the signified, from one moment
to the next, in a different way, and by the same movement seems to
exercise upon it an action that profoundly reshapes it.
Why is this so? How are we to conceive of the dynamic function of
this kind of sorcery, the instrument of which is the signifier and the
goal of which, or the result of which, must be a reorientation of the
signified, its repolarisation and reconstitution after a crisis?
We are posing the question from this angle because we believe
that it has to be posed in this way, for the simple reason that if we
are turning our interest to the child's mythical fomentation, or, to
call it by a name that is more common, which says exactly the same
thing yet in a form that is not so well adapted, cfe!./dfeood /feeorj.cs a/
sexc/a/j./};, it's not because they are merely a kind of superfluity, an
insubstantial dream, but rather because in themselves they harbour
a dynamic element. This is what is at issue in the observation on
little Hans, without which it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever.
We ought to tackle this function of the signifier without any
preconceived idea about the observation, because this observation
is more exemplary than any other. It was seized in the miracle of
origins where, if I may say so, the mind of the inventor and of those
who followed him had not yet had time to become weighed down
with all sorts of taboo elements, with the reference to a real that
is founded on prejudices that somehow find goodness knows what
support in earlier references, which are precisely those that are called
into question, shaken up and discredited by the field that had just
been discovered. In its freshness, the observation on Hans still main-
tains its revelatory power. I would almost say j./s exp/osz.1;c power.
Over the course of this complex evolution, the dialogue with the
father that Hans is caught up in plays a role that is inseparable from
the furtherance of the said mythical fomentation. It may even be
said that with each new intervention from the father, this mythi-
Circuits 297
cal fomentation that is in some sense prompted, bounces back and

starts afresh, before falling back into a state of vegetation. However,
as Freud expressly remarks at one turn, it has its own laws and its
own particular necessities. What Hans gives us is not always what
is expected of him, far from it. He comes out with things that sur-
prise, which the father in any case was not expecting. While Freud
indicates that he had forewarned the father of them, Hans comes
out with things that go beyond what Freud himself could foresee,
because Freud doesn't hide the fact that many elements remain
unexplained and, on occasion, uninterpreted.
But do we need all of them to be interpreted? We can sometimes
press a little further the interpretation made by the two collabora-
tors, Hans's father and Freud, but what we are trying to do here is
to reconstitute the specific laws of gravitation behind the coherence
of the signifier which appears to accrue around the horse.
Freud tells us quite purposefully that we might be tempted to
qualify the phobia by its object, the horse in this instance, so long
as we perceive that the horse extends far beyond what appears as
something of a supervalent figure, a heraldic figure, which focuses
the entire field and is laden with all sorts of implications, and above
all signifying implications.
So, a certain number of reference points are necessary in order to
mark out where our path is now to lead.
We are not broaching anything new, because Freud himself
articulates this in the most deliberate fashion. This passage is to be
found after Hans's first dialogue with his father in which the child
starts to draw out of the phobia what I am calling its sz.g#!/};j.#g
j.mp/j.ccz/I.o#s. What Hans is able to construct around this is rich in
mythical or even in novelistic aspect. It is rich in a fantasmatisation
that bears not only on the past but also on what he would like to do
with the horse, or in relation to the horse. There is no doubt that it
accompanies and modulates his anxiety, but it also carries its own
constructive force. After the dialogue that we are coming to now,
between Hans and his father, Freud indicates that the phobia has
p/#ckcd wp coctrczge, that it is developing, that it is vc#/wrj.#g /o sfeow
;./se//in its various phases. He writes the following -I.# ffej.a wc gcf fo
see how diffuse it really is. It extends on to horses and on to carts, on
to the fact that horses fall down and that they bite. on to horses of a
particular character, on to carts that are heavily loaded. I will reveal
at once that all these characteristics were derived from the circum-
stance that the anxiety originally had no reference at all to horses but
was transposed on to them secondarily and had now become fixed upon
those elements of the horse complex which showed themselves well
adapted for certain transferences.
So, Freud formulates this in the most deliberate fashion. We have

two poles. The first pole is that of the signifier, and this signifier will
serve to support the full series of transferences, that is to say, the
reshaping of the signified across all the possible permutations of the
signifier. We may suppose as a working hypothesis, to the extent
that it conforms to everything that our experience requires, that in
principle the signified will be different from what it was at the start.
Something has happened on the side of the signified. By means of
the signifier, the field of the signified will be either reorganised or
extended in some way.
So, wherefore the horse? Things can be spun out in this regard.
The horse is a theme that is rather rich in mythology, in legends and
fairy tales, and in what is most constant yet opaque in the oniric
thematic, namely the nightmare, the mc7rc of the night. Dr Jones
dedicated a whole book to this to show us that it is no accident that
the mare of the night is not simply the anguishing apparition of the
night-fiend, but that the mare is a substitute for the fiend. Of course,
in keeping with the good old custom, Dr Jones goes searching in his
analysis on the side of the signified, which brings him to the finding
that everything is in everything. He shows us that there is no god in
antique mythology, or even in modern mythology, who eludes this
fact of having been a horse in some respect or other. And so Hippios,
Mars, Odin, Hermes and Zeus are all horses. It's a matter of finding
out why. They czrc horses. And they feovc horses. Everything is a
horse in this book. Clearly it's not hard to show on this basis that
the root A4R, which is at once more and the Gaelic mczr¢, and also
mer in French, is a root that in itself comprises a signification that
is that much easier to find in that it covers pretty much everything.
Obviously this is not the path along which we are to proceed.
We are not about to imagine that all the explanations stand on the
side of the horse. There is certainly on the side of the horse some-
thing that entails all sorts of analogous inclinations that turn it into
something that, as an image, can be a favourable receptacle for all
sorts of symbolisations of natural elements that come to the fore in
childhood preoccupations, which indeed is the turn in the path at
which we find little Hans. The accentuation that I'm trying to give
here, which has always been neglected in every quarter, is that this is
not what is essential. The essential point is that a certain signifier is
brought in at a critical moment in Hans's evolution, and this signi-
fier plays a polarising and re-crystallising role. Doubtless this looks
to us like something pathological, but it is assuredly a constitutive
factor. From this moment forth, the horse starts to punctuate the
outside world with what Freud will much later qualify - looking
back on Hans's phobia in fJcmmwj7g, S}7mprom ct#c7 4#gs/ - as a
Circuits 299
fz.g73cz/ function. These signals effectively restructure the world for

Hans, a world that thereafter is profoundly marked by all sorts of
limits, the property and function of which we must now try to grasp.
What can it mean that, these limits having been constituted, there
is by the same stroke a constitution of the possibility, through the
fantasy or through desire, of a transgression of the limit at the same
time as a constitution of an obstacle, an inhibition, that checks the
subject within this limit? All of this is done with an element that is a
signifier, the horse.
To understand the function of the horse, the path to be taken
is not that of trying to find what the equivalent of the horse is,
whether it's little Hans himself, or Hans's mother, or Hans's father,
because it's all of these and many other things besides. It can be any-
thing and everything in all this, in that little Hans makes successive
attempts to apply to his world, in order to structure it, the signifying
system that is coherent with the horse. Throughout these attempts,
the horse manages to cover one or another of the major composite
elements in the world of little Hans, notably his father, his mother,
himself, his little sister Hanna, his little playmates, the fantasmatic
girls, and many more. So, what is at stake, what we need to consider,
is that the horse, when it is introduced as the central point of the
phobia, introduces a new term that has precisely the property of
being an obscure signifier. There is a wordplay here, in that I would
almost say that w# fj.g#z#¢#f can be taken as a complete whole, as
z'#sj.g7'zz#o»/. In some respect, it is insignificant. This is where it has its
most profound function. It plays the role of a ploughshare that will
furrow the real in a new way.
We can conceive of how necessary this is.
Up to that point, everything had been all well and good for little
Hans.
The appearance of the horse is secondary. Freud firmly under-
scores how it is shortly after the appearance of the diffuse signal of
anxiety that the horse will start to function. It is by following the
development of this function step-by-step, right through to the end,
that we can manage to comprehend what has happened.
So, little Hans suddenly finds himself in a situation that has assur-
edly decompensated. Why did this come about? Up to a certain
date, 5 or 6 February 1908, that is to say, a couple of months before
his fifth birthday, he seemed to be bearing everything rather well.
Something happens, and let's take it as directly as possible in the
terms of reference that are set out in the observation. The game was
being pursued with the mother on the basis of the lure of seduction
that thus far had been fully sufficient. The love relation with the
mother introduced the child to the imaginary dynamic into which
he would gradually be initiated. I would almost say, to introduce
the relation to the bosom, in the sense of /ap, from a new angle, that
he insinuated himself into it. We have seen how at the start of the
observation this was spreading out constantly as the game with
the hidden object that Hans played in a sort of perpetual veiling
and unveiling. Now, into these relationships withhis mother, which
were being pursued on a playful basis, certain real elements are
introduced. The rules of the game, which revolved around dialogue
on symbolic presence and absence, are suddenly violated for Hans.
Two things appear. The first arises when Hans is no longer in a
position to respond in full. I mean when he is no longer able to show,
actually and in in its most glorious state, his little penis. Right there
and then, he is rebuffed.`His mother tells him word for word not
only that it's forbidden but that it's ez.#e Scfewcj.7ccrcz.. It's piggish.
It's something repugnant. We assuredly cannot fail to see an element
that is utterly essential here. Moreover, Freud underscores that the
effects of the depreciative intervention did not arise straightaway
but in the manner of aftershocks. He underscores the term that I've
been repeating and pushing to the fore of analytic reflection, namely
apres coup, retroaction. He i;ays nachtrdgliche Gehorsam, whirch
means c7e/erred obcdz.c#cc. GCAd.r is hearing, an attentive audience.
Gchorsom is submission, docility. Such threats and rebuffs are not
brought to bear immediately, but after a lapse of time.
And so my position would be far from a partial one. Freud also
underscores, and not merely between the lines, a real element of
comparison, of ycrg/cz.cfew#g. In making comparisons between big
and small, Hans has accurately assessed the reduced, minuscule and
ridiculously insufficient character of the organ in question. It is this
real element that comes to be added to the rebuff, lending it a weight
that shakes the edifice of the relationships with his mother right
down to its foundations.
To this we may add a second element, the presence of little Hanna.
At first this presence is taken from multiple angles of highly diverse
patterns of assimilation. Further to this, however, it comes increas-
ingly to vouch for another element of the game that is very present
here, and which also calls into question the whole edifice, all the
principles and all the bases of the game, perhaps even to the point of
rendering it superfluous in this instance. Those who have experience
with children know that these are facts of common experience that
the analysis of the child puts constantly before us.
Circuits 301
For the time being, what is occupying us is the way in which the
signifier will operate in the midst of all this. What is to be done?
One has to go to the text and make the construction. One has to
know how to read. When we see things recurring in a certain way,
with the same elements but recomposed in a different fashion, one
has to know how to register them as such, without hunting out
remote analogous references, without alluding to earlier events that
we might extrapolate or assume in the subject. It is not, as we say in
everyday language, the symbol of something that he is cogitating.
It's something else entirely. It's a matter of laws that manifest this
structuration, which is not real but symbolic. These laws will start
to play out amongst themselves, to operate, as it were, by themselves
in an autonomous fashion. At least they need to be regarded as
such for a while, so that we can perceive whether this operation of
reshaping, of reconstruction, is in itself something that is operative
in this instance.
I'm going to illustrate this for you.
On 22 March, the father takes little Hans to see his grandmother
in Lainz, as he does every Sunday. This is a crucial point. Let's
sketch out a map.
Vienna's Innere Stadt is located on a bank of the Donaukanal,

a former arm of the Danube. The home of Hans's parents is in this
part of the old town, delimited by the RingstraBe.
Across from their apartment stands the Hauptzollamt, the Head

Customs House, and a little further off stands the Hauptzollamt
station that is frequently mentioned in the observation. Facing the
Customs House [on the other side of the Wien river], you have a
square where now stands the Kriegsministerium and a very nice
museum, the Museum fur Kunst und Industrie. The Hauptzollamt
is where Hans thinks of going once he has made some progress
and is able to get beyond a stretch of space that lies in front of
their apartment. I am inclined to think that their apartment is right
at one end of the block, on the road behind the Customs House,
because there is an allusion to the fact that /fee IVordbczfo# r##s pczsf
apposz.fc octr feowsc. Now, the Nordbahnhof is on the other bank
of the Danube Canal. There are quite a few of these light railway
networks in Vienna, feeding in from east and west and from north
and south. But there are also a number of local lines, in particular
a circle line that is sunk into a cutting. It's probably the same one
that the young homosexual woman, whom I spoke about at the
start of the year, threw herself into. There are two lines that are of
interest to us as far as little Hans's adventures are concerned. There
is a link-line, the ycrbz.#c7w#grhafe#, connecting the Nordbahnhof to
the Meidling Stidbahnhof, which runs nearby the apartment block
in which Hans's apartment is located, and it is on this line that
Hans can see the truck, what Freud calls c;.7tc Dr¢z.sj.#c, on which he
Circuits 303
would like so much to ride. Before then, he had also been to another
station, to take a train that for some stretches runs underground,
and this is the line that goes to Lainz.
On Sunday 22 March, Hans's father proposes that they take a
route that is slightly more complicated than their usual one.
Hans' s apartment
They will take the Stadtbahn and stop at Sch6nbrunn palace,

which is like a Viennese Versailles. This is where the zoological
garden is that little Hans visits with his father and which plays such
an important role in the observation. It's far less grandiose than
Versailles. The House of Hapsburg was probably much closer to the
people than was the House of Bourbon, because you can see how
even at a time when the city didn't spread out quite so far, its profile
was visible on the horizon. After the visit to Sch6nbrunn park, they
will take the steam tramway, which at the time was line 60, and this
will bring them to Lainz. To give you an idea of scale, Lainz is about
the same distance from Vienna as Vaucresson is from Paris.2 The
tramway carries on beyond Lainz to Mauer and M6dling. Usually,
when they just go to the grandmother's house, they take a south-
bound tramway that goes straight to Lainz. A further tramway line
links this direct line and the Stadtbahn. The connection is made at
the station Unter-St-Veit.
This will allow you to understand what little Hans will say on the day
that he has the fantasy of coming back home from Lainz, when he says
that the train left with him and his grandmother on it while his father
missed it, and that he can see the second train coming from Unter-St-
Veit. The network forms a loop, a virtual loop because the two lines
don't connect. They simply allow each of them to get to Lainz.
A few days later, in conversation with his father, little Hans will
come out with something that is classified among the many things
that he shows us he has been pondering. Even when everyone wants
to make him say that he has been dreaming, he underlines very
fimly that these are things he has thought - IVci.#, #j.cfej gcfrd.win/,.
ich hab' mir's gedacht.
The essential point to keep in mind is that this is where the
yerkcArskomp/cx makes its entrance. Freud himself indicates that
it is quite natural, given how matters stand, that what refers to the
horse and everything that the horse will do, the P/crdekomp/cx,
extends much further into the transport system. In other words, on
the horizon of the circuits traced by the horse there are the circuits
of the railway.
This is so evidently true that the first explanation Hans gives
his father on how he experiences his phobia concerns the fact that
there is a large yard and a wide lane in front of their apartment. It's
easy to understand why it's such a big deal for little Hans to cross
over them. Across from the house, these horses-and-carts come to
load and unload, and they line up along the length of the loading
dock.
I- Lagerhaus
G±-Wnge"
I
Verladungsrampe
'
: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : ,' : : : ; : : ; : : : : :
'
'
'
Hansenge.planter Weg
The tangency, as it were, between the circuit system of the horse

and the circuit system of the railway is indicated in the clearest
fashion the very first time that little Hans starts to explain himself a
little on the horse phobia.
What does little Hans say on 5 April? He says that he sfeow/d so mwch
/i.kc to climb onto the cart where he has seen the boys playing on
the bones. If the cart stands still, then I can get on to the cart quick,
Circuits 305
geschwind, cz#d gc/ o# /a /fee board. By boczrd he means the loading

deck. What is he afraid of? He fears that the horses will set off and
prevent him from making this swift movement, and then he will
have to get straight back off again.
There must be some meaning to this. To comprehend this meaning,
and to comprehend anything in the functioning of the signifying
system, one should not start with the question of what the board
might be doing here, or what the cart might be doing here, or even
what the horse is doing here. The horse certainly is something, and
at the end we will be able to say what its purpose is, when we find
this out from its functioning. But as yet we can't know anything.
We need to pause on this horse. His father pauses here. Everybody
pauses here, except the analysts who pore endlessly over the obser-
vation on little Hans, trying to read something into it. The father
takes an interest in this and asks him why he is afraid. Pcrfeaps
you're afraid you won't come home any more if you drive away in the
ccrr/.? he says. OA #o./ replies little Hans, / ccz# a/wo}Js come bczck fo
Mummy, in the cart or in a cab. I can tell him the number of the house
foo. There's no difficulty.
No one seems to have paused on this, yet it's striking that while
Hans is afraid of something, this something is absolutely not what it
would suit us so well for it to be. This could even lead in the direc-
tion of the comprehension of things that I've been trying to mobilise
for you, namely the theme of being dragged along by the situation.
That would be a nice metaphor. But this is not at all the case. He
knows very well that he will always come back to his point of depar-
ture. If we have just a little comprc#oz.rc,3 we could tell ourselves that
perhaps after all this is what is at stake, namely that, whatever is
done, there's no getting out of it. This is a simple indication that I'm
making in passing, but to stick with this might well be overly subtle
and insufficiently rigorous.
We ought rather to perceive that there are situations in the obser-
vation that we are compelled to fetch alongside this one. We have
to pause over this because this is the very phenomenology of the
phobia. Here we can behold the total ambiguity of what is desired
and what is feared. In the end, we might believe that it's the fact of
being dragged away, of leaving, that anguishes little Hans. But by
his own testimony, this fact of leaving falls quite short because he
knows full well that one always comes back. What, then, is meant by
his wanting in some sense to go beyond?
Surely this formula - /fecz/ fee wo#/s /o go bc}7o#d - is something
that we can provisionally maintain in a sort of minimal construc-
tion. If his whole system is in disarray due to the fact that the rules
of the game are no longer being respected, he can feel himself to
be caught, purely and simply, in an untenable situation, the most

untenable element in the situation being that of no longer knowing
where to locate himself.
I am now going to bring in other elements that in a certain way
reproduce what is indicated in the fantasy of the phobic dread.
In the first fantasy, Hans will drive off with the horses, carrying
him further away from the loading dock. And he will come back to
re-converge with Mummy, which maybe he desired too much, or
feared too much, who knows?
When we have read and reread the observation, we should remem-
ber at least two further stories.
There is another fantasy, which doesn't crop up at just any
moment, and which is supposed to have happened. He imagined
the rest with his father. The date is 11 April. Wc wcrc fr¢ve//z.#g I.H
fAc /raz.7c /a G777w#de77. Gmunden is where they spend their holidays.
In the station we put on our clothes; but we couldn't get it done in
/z.mc, cz#d /fee /rcz!.;® c¢rrz.CCZ wf o#. It seems that at that time, gather-
ing together one's luggage and getting it on board was more of a
worry than it is for us these days. Freud himself hints at this in the
case of the young homosexual woman when he makes his analogy
with the two stages of a journey. The first entails ¢// /fee #ccessar}7
preparations, today so complicated and hard to effect, the secorrd
involves getting the luggage and oneself aboard. So, Hans and his
father don't have time to put on their clothes before the train starts
off again.
There is then a third fantasy, which Hans tells his father on 21
April and which we shall call /fee p/a//orm sce#c. These are just
conventional labels to help us find our bearings later on. It occurs
just before the major dialogue with his father to which we have been
referring. Hans tells his father, 7lrfecrc was a frcrj.# czf fczz.#z ¢#d J frczv-
elled with my Lainz Grandmummy to the Houptzollamt station. This
grandmother is the woman they visit every Sunday, about whom we
are told absolutely nothing in the observation, and I must say that
this is rather suggestive of a fearsome character, because at that time
it was much easier for contemporaries to situate the whole family
than it is for me today. So, cJj.c Lczz.#zerj.7t, as Hans later calls her, is
supposed to be on board the train with him. His father, meanwhile,
foad#'/ gof cJow#/ron ffoc brj.c7gc );cf, and they have left without him.
Given that the trains pass frequently, and one can see down the line
as far as Unter-St-Veit, Hans says that he arrives at the platform in
time to catch the second train with his father.
If little Hans had already left, how did he come back? This is pre-
cisely the impasse. In truth, it's an impasse that no one has managed
to elucidate, but the father does ask himself these questions. In the
Circuits 307
observation, a dozen lines are devoted to what might have occurred

in Hans's mind. As for us,1et's content ourselves with our schemas.
In the first schema, the two of them leave, Hans and his grand-
mother. The second, mysteriously, is the path of the impossible, of
non-solution. In the third, they end up leaving as two, Hans and his
father. In other words, there is something that cannot fail to strike us
if we are already roughly acquainted with the two poles of the obser-
vation on little Hans, namely, at the start, the whole maternal drama
that is constantly underlined, and, at the end, J czm #ow w.ffe/czrfocr.
One cannot overlook how there must be a certain relation between
this implacable back and forth to his mother and the fact that one fine
day he dreams of marching off with his father. This is a simple indica-
tion, but it's clear. Only, it's quite impossible. That is to say, one really
can't see how little Hans, having set off with his grandmother, can
now set off again with his father. This is possible only in the imaginary.
What we can see appearing here between the lines is the fun-
damental schema that I told you was the schema for mythical
furtherance on the whole - one starts from a point of impossibility,
or an impasse, to arrive at another impasse and another point of
inpossibility. In the first case, it is impossible to leave the mother
behind, one always comes back to her. Do„'/ /a// mc /flo/ /fez.s I.s wdy
J'7" ¢#xz.ows. In the second case, one may indeed think that all that
has to be done is to permute and to leave with the father, as Hans
himself thought, to the point of writing as much to the Professor,
which is the best use one can make of one's thoughts. Only, what
also appears in the text of the myth is that this is impossible, that
there is always something left half-open somewhere.
If we start with this schema, we will see that matters are not
limited to these elements alone, in that they offer us quite easily,
all by themselves, the opportunity of placing them alongside the
schema of the hitching.
What is hitched to what? This is surely one of the absolutely
primary elements behind the appearance of the choice of the horse
signifier, or the use of the horse. It is quite useless to discern in
which direction the coupling is made, because the sense in which
Hans operates is dictated just as muck by the favourable occasions
provided by the horse function. We can even say that this is what
guided his choice of the horse. In any case, he is careful to show the
origin of this when he tells us about the moment he go/ ffee #o#sc7!sc.
He tells us this on 9 April, in dialogue with his father, at a moment
that is no less noteworthy than any of the other moments, and we
shall see what this comes on the heels of.
Hans tells us that he was playing horsey, when something
happened that will be of great importance in that it will furnish the
first model of the fantasy of injury that will manifest later on with
respect to his father. First of all, however, it was extracted from the
real, precisely from one of these horsey games, when his friend Fritzl
sustains an injury to his foot.
In response to his father's query, Hans says that they played at
horses oA"e Wczge#, without carts, and in this case, /¢c carf ccz# a/c}}7
cz/ foomc. However, the horse can also be hitched to a cart. Hans
himself articulates how first and foremost the horse is an element
designed to be hitched. It is detachable and attachable. This czmbo-
ccp/or characteristic, which we meet constantly in the functioning
of the horse, is yielded in the very first experience from which Hans
extracts it. Before being a horse, the horse is something that links,
that coordinates, and, as you will see, it is precisely in this mediat-
ing function that we will find it throughout the development of the
myth. If a basis needed to be established for what will be confirmed
in every corner of what I am going to develop for you next in
the function of the horse signifier, here we have immediately, from
the mouth of Hans himself, that it is in the direction of the gram-
matical coordination of the signifier that we must head.
Indeed, it is at that very moment, when he is articulating this
in connection with the horse, that Hans himself says, J !A;.#k ffecz/
was how I got the nonsense, Mir scheint, da hab' ich die Dummheit
gckr;.cg/. The verb krj.cgc# is used each time in connection with the
nonsense. It means /o ge/ or /o cafcfe. It is also used in the colloquial
expression ez.# Kz.#cJ krj.cgc#, to denote a woman falling pregnant,
like in French when we say ##e/cmme cz/frapc w# c#/cJ#/. Once again,
this was not lost on the authors, on the father and on Freud. Freud
provides a long footnote on it, which everybody has leapt on, to
the point that the phrasing has posed something of a difficulty for
the translators, who for once have resolved it elegantly. Hans keeps
saying, wcgc# c7cm P/crc7. He comes out with this refrain, that he
got the nonsense 'cos a//fee Aorsc. Freud makes no mistake in iden-
tifying this with an association between the word t4;cge#, bccclwsc a/,
and the word W'logc#, which means com.czgc, coczcfo, cczrf, vcfez.c/c, and
so on, and which Hans would have heard pronounced Wrz}gc#. This
is how the unconscious works.
In other words, the horse pulls the cart just as something pulls
behind it the word wcgc%. So, there is nothing excessive in saying
that it's precisely at this moment, when Hans is prey to something
that is not even a wfecrc/ore - because beyond the point where the
rules of the game are respected there is nothing else but trouble, a
lack of being and a lack of any wAcrc/ore - that he gives rise to the
dragging along of his 'co5 a/, which doesn't correspond to anything,
by something that is the pure and simple x of the horse.
Circuits 309
In yet other words, at the begetting of the phobia, at its very point
of emergence, we find ourselves faced with the typical process of
metonymy, that is to say, the passage from the weight of meaning,
or more exactly from the questioning that the comment brings with
it, the passage from one point of the textual line, to the point that
follows. This is the very definition of metonymy in its structure. It's
because the weight of the wcgeJt is entirely veiled, and because it has
been transferred to what comes just afterwards, c7cm P/crd, that the
term assumes its articulatory value and accrues to it every hope of a
solution. The balance of Hans's situation hangs on this transfer of
grammatical weight.
In the end, we are simply meeting again the concrete associations
- and not associations imagined in goodness knows what psycho-
logical hyperspace - that fall into two kinds. On the one hand there
is metaphorical association, where one word corresponds to another
for which it can be substituted. On the other hand there is meto-
nymic association, where one word yields the following word that
can come next in a sentence. These are the two kinds of response
in psychological experience, and you call them czssocj.c}/j.o#s because
you want absolutely for this to occur somewhere in cerebral neu-
rones. I don't know anything about that. At any rate, as an analyst I
don't want to know anything about it. I come across these two types
of association, called metaphor and metonymy, where they stand, in
the text of this pool of language in which Hans is immersed.
It was here that he lighted upon the originative metonymy that
brought with it the horse, the first term around which his whole
system would be reconstituted.
8 May 1957
XIX
PERMUTATIONS
Don't race off from me!

The whole house decamping
Be a true father
Pincers
So, we've arrived at what is being played out between 5 and 6 April.
This spatial-temporal momc#f is not necessarily to be conflated with
chronological distance.
We have followed the explanation that little Hans gave his father,
on 5 April, of the fantasies he came out with, in which he expresses
how he would like to climb up on to the cart that usually unloads in
front of their building.
I remind you that we insisted on the ambiguity of the anxiety to
which Hans gives shape and form in the fantasy. It might seem that
this anxiety arises from the simple perspective of a fear of separa-
tion, but we pointed out how what is dreaded here is not necessarily
separation from his mother, because when his father asks him about
this he specifies that he is quite sure, and almost over sure, of being
able to return.
It is on the afternoon of 9 April that the wegeJc c7em P/ercJ arises,
in the course of Hans's revelation of a moment that seems to him
to be significant with respect to how he go/ /fee #o7!sc#fe. You know
that it's not for nothing that, in the retrospections of memory, the
moment when Hans gets his nonsense is far from univocal. He says
each time, with equal conviction, J go/ /fee 7eo#sc#sc. Everything is
grounded upon this, because what is at issue here is nothing other
than a symbolic retrospection linked to the signification that is pre-
sentified at each moment of the signifying plurivalence of the horse.
There are at least two moments, which we are already familiar
with, when Hans saysO Jgo/ /fee #o#fc#fc.
There is the moment when this wcgc# de7„ P/erd arises, which
Permutations 311
provided me with the peroration to my last lesson, but at the cost

of a jump that didn't leave me time to indicate the context in which
this manifest metonymy appears. It is in correlation with the story
of Fritzl's fall when they are playing horsey in Gmunden.
On another occasion he told us that he got the nonsense when
he was out with his mother, and the same text notes the paradox
of this explication, because if he didn't peel away from his mother
once throughout the whole day, it was because she already had his
intense anxiety on her hands. So, the anxiety had already begun, and
I would further say that the horse phobia had already been declared
in the context of this outing in her company.
This is the point we've reached, in Freud's text on the one hand
and in our initial decipherment on the other. Last time, I laid this
out for you at the level of something that is taking shape, and I
indicated its graphical aspect across its three forms.
It concerns things that Hans has thought and concocted. They are
never dreams. He always tells his father that he has thought, gcdcicfe/,
these things. We can recognise here the very material with which we
are usually working when we work with children, imaginary mate-
rial that is always so richly resonant, but what I'm trying to show
you is that all these imaginary resonances that can be sounded out
here are no match for the succession of structures, the series of
which I'm going to try to complete for you today.
These structures are each marked by the same exemplary feature.
The fantasy of 5 April, which is complemented by the father's ques-
tioning, traces out the idea of Hans's return to his mother.
In the fantasy of 21 April there is another important moment
of evolution when Hans imagines, not without reason, that he will
set off with his grandmother and then, on the other side of a gap,
that his father will join him again in a move that may equally be
inscribed into this cycle, with the proviso that we have an enigmatic
impossibility here when it comes to the two protagonists joining
again after having been separated just an instant before.
circuit 2
Before moving further into a confirmative exploration of this

exhaustion of the possibilities of the signifier, which here is the object
at the originary level that I'm putting before you, I shall mention
again the tangency I indicated. There is the enigmatic circuit of the
horse, which is clearly anguishing in the first example and which
manifests as inpossible in the other, and then its tangency with
the larger circuit constituted by the wider system of traffic. Freud
himself notes that Hans's imagination wczs crc7va#cj.7!g s}jsfem¢fz.c¢//}J
from horses, which draw vehicles, to railways.
Everything takes place between two longings - two #os/cI/gj.cs
in the sense of vc5crrof, a rcf#r# foome - to come and to come back.
Freud asserts that the function of return is fundamental to the
object, insisting that it ought to have been engendered in the form
of something that is re-found, but that, through the subject's devel-
opment, a necessity is constituted which is strictly correlative to
the distance taken from the object. This necessity is correlative to
the symbolic dimension, which distances the object, yet so that the
subject may re-find it.
This is the truth that is half-eluded, even lost, in the insistence of
psychoanalysis today on accentuating the term /rwsfrcz/I.o7t without
understanding that frustration is only ever the first stage of the
return to the object which, in order to be reconstituted, must be
re-found.
Let's remind ourselves what is at issue in the case history of little

Hans.
For Freud, what is at issue is none other than the Oedipus complex,
the drama of which brings of its own account a new dimension that
is necessary to the constitution of a replete human world and to the
constitution of the object. This object is not merely the correlate of
what is claimed to be instinctual genital maturation, but rather the
fact of having acquired a certain symbolic dimension.
What is this symbolic dimension? To aim directly at what is at
stake, given my disquisition thus far with which I am assuming you
are already familiar, we can say that it consists in what is involved
each time that we are dealing with the appearance of a phobia,
Here in the case of little Hans it is manifest. It has to do with what
comes to be revealed to the child, from any angle, concerning the
fundamental privation by which the image of the mother is marked.
It concerns the moment of this intolerable privation, because ulti-
mately the fact that the child himself appears to be threatened by
Permutations 313
this supreme privation, that of not being able to fulfil her in any way
whatsoever, hangs on this moment. Moreover, it is to this privation
that the father must bring something. It's as easy as pie - copula-
tion. He gives her what she doesn't have. Good Lord, wo#'/ fee/.cts/
gz.ve focr o7!c./I This is precisely what is at stake in little Hans's drama,
and we can see it gradually being revealed as the dialogue wears on.
People tell us that the c#vj.ro#mc72/cz/ ;.mczgc, as they put it these
days, of Hans's family circle has not been traced out sufficiently.
What more do they want? It's enough to read the case -and not even
between the lines -to see the father's constant and diligent presence
spreading out, while the mother is mentioned only to the extent
that the father asks her whether what she has just said is accurate.
Ultimately, the mother is never with little Hans in the observation.
Meanwhile, this very sensible, very kind and very Viennese father
is right there, sparing no effort in mollycoddling his little Hans and
toiling away. And then, every Sunday, he goes to see his mum, with
little Hans of course. One cannot help but be struck by the ease with
which Freud - knowing as we do what his main ideas were at the
time - accepts that little Hans, who slept in his parents' room until
he was four years old, could certainly never have beheld any scene
that might have unsettled him regarding the fundamental nature of
coitus. The father asserts this in what he writes to Freud, and Freud
doesn't challenge the affirmation. He probably had his own idea
about it, since Hans's mother was Freud's patient.
At one point in the major scene of the dialogue with his father,
Hans says c7w /asf cz/cr#. The phrase is almost untranslatable in
French, as has been noted by Fliess's son who has focused his atten-
tion on this scene. While Fliess's handling is not fully to his credit,
his remarks are quite right on this score. He highlights how the
expression is almost untranslatable and invokes the resonance of
the jealous God in Luther's Jcfe Dez.# Gof/ Oz." c>j.# ej/rz.ger Go//, a God
that is identical to the figure of the father in Freudian doctrine. yoc/
ought to be a father, you ought to be cross with me, it rrmst be true. Fly
the time Hans manages to say this, much water has flowed under the
bridge. He takes a while to reach this moment.
Let's also ask without further ado whether little Hans is in any way
gratified in this regard during the course of the crisis. Why would he
be gratified, if his father is in this critical position, the apparition of
which in the background needs to be conceived of as a fundamental
element of the opening from which the phobic fantasy has surged
up? It is certainly unthinkable that this very dialogue should have, as
it were, psychoanalysed, not little Hans, but his father, making him
more virile at the end of the story - which is rather happily settled in
four months - than he was at the start. In other words, if it is to the
real father that little Hans addresses so urgently his appeal, there is
no reason that this should make him rise up in reality.
If, therefore, little Hans reaches a happy solution to the crisis he
has entered, it is surely worthwhile asking ourselves whether at the
end of this crisis we may deem this to be a completely normal dis-
solution of the Oedipus complex. Is the genital position, in inverted
commas, at which little Hans arrives, something that in and of itself
suffices to assure you that his future relation with a woman will be
all that one might imagine desirable for it to be?
The question is an open one. And not only is it open but a number
of remarks can be made in this regard. If little Hans is destined for
heterosexuality, this guarantee might not be enough to make us
believe that this heterosexuality would be sufficient in and of itself to
ensure a full consistence, so to speak, to the female object.
You see that we are compelled to move forward by a concentric
nudge. We have to stretch the canvas, and the picture upon it, over
the different poles at which it is attached if we are to be sure of its
normal tethering, if we are to be sure that this is the screen upon
which we are to pursue this particular phenomenon, namely the
development of the phobia, which is correlative with the develop-
ment of the treatment itself.
A simple example of this kind of panting aspect of Hans's father
comes to mind, to get our investigation moving again. After Hans's
long explanation of his love for his father - they have spent the
morning on this - they have breakfast together and, when the father
gets up from the table, Hans tells him, ycz//j., rc## mz.r #z.cfo/ dczvo#./
The [French] translation bears the overwhelming stamp of good-
ness knows what that the translator has cooked up, but all the
same her rendition is not wrong here -Papcz res/c./ Ive f 'c# v¢ pal czw
galop! |Stay Daddy! Don't go off at a gallop.r| The falther notes that
he was struck by his saying rc7€". It's rather, Do#'f race o#/z.kc /feczf./
One might even add, because in German this is allowed, Do7t'j rczcc
ojr/ro77i me /j.kc /fecz/./ We are bringing the question of the analysis
of the signifier to the level of the hieroglyphic decipherment of the
mythological function, but this doesn't mean that paying attention
to the signifier isn't first and foremost a matter of knowing how to
read. Obviously this is the precondition for being able to translate
correctly. This [French] translation is regrettable given the sound
resonance that Freud's oeuvre ought to have for French readers.
So, here we are with the father. Already, we have practically
inscribed onto our chart the place that he must occupy. It is through
him, through the identification with him, that little Hans ought to
be able to find the normal path to the larger circuit onto which it
is now time for him to pass. There is so much truth in this that it is
Permutations 315
confirmed by what is in some sense a doubling of the consultation

of 30 March.
The consultation of 30 March is the one to which Hans
brought by his father. In my opinion this is an illustration
the doubling, or indeed the tripling, of the paternal function on
which I have been insisting as crucial to any comprehension of
the Oedipus complex and of analytic treatment itself, to the extent
that the Name-of-the-Father must come into play. Hans's father
brings the child before Freud, which allows for a representation of
the supra-father, the symbolic father. I must say that when Freud
simply prophesises the Oedipal schema, not without a touch of
humour which he points out himself, broaching it at the outset,
little Hans's harkens to this with a sort of amused interest, with an
overtone Of How can he know all this? The Professor is surely not
God's co#Lfic7cz7!/./ The humoristic relation, properly speaking, that
sustains little Hans's relation with the remote father that Freud
represents is exemplary and marks out also the necessity of this
transcendent dimension. Moreover, how wrong one would be to
seek always to embody it in the style of terror and respect. It is
no less fruitful in this other register where its presence allows little
Hans to unfold his problem.
However, as I said, many other things come to pass in parallel
with this, which have a great deal more weight for little Hans's
progress. Read the observation and you will see that on this day
of Monday 30 March, when he is taken to see Freud, the father's
account points out two things. The exact function of these two
moments is slightly obfuscated due to the fact that he reports them
in the preamble, even though the second was a remark that Hans
made following the consultation, but he certainly doesn't minimise
their importance.
So, the first item. I remind you that it's a Monday, just after the
Sunday when they took a slightly more complicated route to the
grandmother's house, first going for a stroll in Sch6nbrunn.2 Hans
recounts to his father a fantasy of a transgression. You can't call it
anything else because it's the very image of a transgression. There
can be no finer than this utterly unmitigated transgression desig-
nated by a rope under which the two of them crawl together. The
father explains that this is the rope they had seen in the Sch6nbrunn
gardens, preventing them from crossing a stretch of lawn to see the
sheep. Hans had observed that it would be quite easy to slip under
the rope, to which his father had replied that respectable people
don't crawl under ropes. So, Hans's doesn't fail to respond to this,
later, with the fantasy in which they perform the transgression
together, zws¢mmc#. The fact of doing it together is the important
cheneTit. And then we told the policeman at the end of the garden, and
he grabbed hold of us , uns z:"saLmmengepeck+.
The importance of this fantasy seems to be amply graspable from
its context. Surely what is at stake is to pass over to the register
of the father and for them to do something together that will get
them taken off, zc45czm7"c#gcpczckf . This allows for a clarification of
the missed embarkation. Of course, the schema has to be taken in
reverse to be understood. It is in the very nature of the signifier to
present things in a strictly operational fashion. The whole question
revolves around embarkation - it's a matter of knowing whether he
will set off with his father. Now, setting off with his father is out of
the question, precisely because the father cannot make use of this
function, at least not the embarkation that is made a reality in their
being carted off together. We are going to see what use each of little
Hans's successive elaborations have when it comes to getting closer
to this goal that is both desired and impossible, but what is already
initiated in this first fantasy, just before the consultation with Freud,
is already amply indicative.
Here, now, is the second fantasy, which comes as though we
simply must make sure we don't overlook the reciprocal function of
the two circuits - the small maternal circuit and the large paternal
circuit. This fantasy gets even closer to the goal. Returning from
Freud's office in the evening, little Hans will give himself over to
another transgressive fantasy. He says to his father, J wejtf wJ./fo yow
in the train, and we smashed a window. You can't do much better
than that when it comes to the signifier of a breakout. Yet again,
they are m!.fgc#ommc#, taken off, by a policeman. And once more
this is the full stop, the terminus, of the fantasy.
On 2 April, that is, three days after the consultation, there is the
¢rs/ z.mprovemc#f, which moreover we may suspect to have been
overstated because no sooner was Hans seemingly in remission than
the father was revising his judgement, writing to Freud that the
inprovement perhaps was not so complete as I may have represented
z./. Even so, the lifting spirits that little Hans is starting to show
manifest themselves in his being able to stay a little longer in front of
the fr¢wS/ore, the street-door. Let's not forget that in the context of
the time, the street-door has the function of representing the family's
propriety and decorum. When circumstances force the Gide family to
seek a new home, moving a few floors up is of little consequence, but
the porfc-cocfeGrc is another thing altogether. Gide's aunt instructs
his recently widowed mother that leaving the building is out of the
question - rw /c /e c7oz.a,. /w /c doc.a d fo#¢/a.3 So, the street-door is no
small matter in the topology of what relates to little Hans.
As I told you last time, this street-door and the borderline that
Permutations 317
it marks is something that is duplicated point-by-point by what

stands a little farther off, perhaps not as close by as I said it was
last time, but still within view of the main facade of the station
on the local Vienna line, the one that regularly takes them to the
grandmother's.
Indeed, trusting in information I had gathered with some care,
last week I drew up a schematic map on which the parents' apart-
ment lay behind the Customs House, on Hintere Zollamtstrasse.
That was not quite right. I realised this thanks to something that
reveals yet again how blind we are to what is right under our noses,
and which is called the signifier, the letter.
In the very diagram that we have in the observation that Freud

has given us, the name of the street is there, Untere Viaductgasse.
Lagerhaus
Verladungsrampe
- q= EZEwagen _.`
Hofraum \
I I:::;:
UntereViaductgasE'srfeaTn_°r_._
There is a hidden street, which allows us to suppose that on one

side of the byway there is a building, which indeed is indicated
on the maps of Vienna, that corresponds to what Freud calls a
Lagerhaus. It's a special depot for the Oflice for the Taxation of
Food-Stuffs. This accounts for all the different connections that
converge here - on one hand the Nordbahn with the little truck that
will play a role in Hans's fantasy, and then on the other the possibil-
ity of having right opposite their apartment the depot that Freud
speaks about, while still keeping the station entrance in full view of
their street-door.
So, the stage-set is in place in which the drama is to unfold.
Hans's poetic spirit and, if you will, his tragic spirit, will allow us to
follow its construction.
How are we to manage to conceive of the fact that the passage to a

wider circle was a necessity for little Hans?
I have already said often enough that everything hinges on the
stranglehold, the deadlock, that has arisen in Hans's relationship
with his mother. We find constant indications of this. The ground-
ing of the child's crisis, insomuch as his mother is the one who until
then had ensured the propping up of his insertion into the world,
is something that we can grasp at face value in the anxiety that
prevents him from roaming beyond a particular radius that cor-
responds to the sight of his home.
Obsessed as we have been with a certain number of supervalent
significations, it so happens that we have often overlooked what
has been set out in the clearest way in the text, articulated through
a symptom as close to the level of the signifier as the phobia is. His
fa;ther writes o£ Ha,ns.s venturing outside the house but not going
away from it ..., turning round at the first attack of anxiety . He is
turning round to look at their house. Why not try to understand
that we merely have to translate this in the same way that Hans pre-
sents it to us? What he is afraid of is not simply that one person or
another might no longer be at home when he comes back, especially
given that his father - and it seems that the mother also has a hand
in this -is not always in the circuit. What is in question at the point
Hans has reached is, as is expressed in the cart fantasy, that the
whole house might just decamp. What is essentially at stake is the
house. The house has been the main issue since he first understood
that this mother can be missing and at the same time is completely
united with him. What he fears is not to be separated from her but
Permutations 319
to be led goodness knows where with her. We scent this element

coming to the surface in the observation from one moment to the
next. To the extent that he is joined to his mother, he no longer
knows here he is.
I shall simply cite one episode here. It's the occasion I highlighted
earlier, on 5 April, when little Hans mentions the outbreak of his
nonsense. In a somewhat arbitrary fashion, he says that it arose
when he was out with his mother, just after they bought the waist-
coat. They saw a bus-horse fall down. These bus-horses are the large
horses that used to pull the omnibuses. When the horse falls, Hans
thinks. Now it'll always be like this. All horses in buses'll fall down.
To allow the Japanese flower to come back to life in the water of
the observation, let's ask ourselves, by simply following the father's
line of curiosity, what significance this moment during the day spent
with his mother might have. His father asks him, Wrfecrc c7j.d)/ow go
w./fe A4lwmm); ffocz/ c7a);?, and Hans lists the day's programme. They
went to the skating rink, then to the Kaffeehaus, then to buy the
waistcoat, and from there they went directly to the Zuckerbacker,
the cor\f\ectioner's shop. Huns says, dann beim Zuckerbdcker mit der
Mammi, then to the corfectioner' s shop with Mummy. This coatlalsts
sharply with what came before. Given the fact that he had been
with his mother the whole day, this seems to indicate, not a hole
or a censure on the child's part, but certainly that something had
happened at that point for him to underscore in this way that he had
indeed been w./fe A4lwmmj/. He underscores that he had been with his
mother, and not with someone else who might have been around.
This 777z./ c7cr 114lcrmmj. carries altogether the same value of accen-
tuation in his discourse as what he said at the start, IVz.cfe/ mz.f der
Mariedl, ganz allein mit der Mariedl. I.t suldy plays the siLme role.
The overtone of the father pressing his questioning rather far and
then abandoning it fairly suddenly allows us to perceive a trait that
is confirmed no less by an earlier occurrence when, talking with little
Hans who had just come into his bed, the child said, W7!c# }7ow're
away, I'm af raid you're not coming home. Eti]s fa;ther reptiles, And have
I ever threatened you that I shan't come home? Not you. says Hal"s,
but Mummy. Mummy's told me she won't come back. V\lholoupon, to
caulk the gap, his father says, Sfec s¢z.d /Acz/ bccczztse };ow wcrc #czngA/j;.
Indeed, you can see very well what is going on. Without pushing
the character of a police investigation any further, it is right here
that we have something that for little Hans calls into question the
solidity of his parents' marriage, which in the catamnesis of the
observation we learn has come completely undone. It is around this
point that revolves the anxiety of being carried off with the maternal
love, which has shown its presence since the very first fantasy.
While the horse is there with its property of representing the fall
that threatens little Hans, on the other hand there is the danger
expressed by the horse's biting.
To the extent that the deepening crisis is commensurate with Hans
no longer being able to satisfy his mother, oughtn't we to be struck
by the fact that this biting is the retaliation for the fall? One might
see some implication here of what is brought into use in a confused
way in the idea of a return of a sadistic impulsion - an idea that, as
you know, is so important in Kleinian themes - but this isn't really
what I have been indicating for you. I said that it was a matter of
the child quashing his disappointment in love. Conversely, if he
in turn is disappointing, how could he fail to see that he is equally
within reach of being consumed? This has become all the more of a
threat in view of the privation, and all the more ungraspable because
he cannot bite back. The horse is what represents both falling and
biting. These are its two properties. I am pointing this out to the
extent that, in the first circuit, we can see the element of biting only
in an elusive way.
Anyway, let's move on and punctuate now what ensues from
a certain moment forth. We will have to pick out how this thing
arose, even if it means going back over the sequence of little Hans's
fantasies one by one. This sequence includes a number of further
fantasies that punctuate in some way what I have called the sequence
of mythical permutations.
Here at the individual level the myth certainly cannot, due to all
sorts of characteristics, be fully restored to a kind of identity with
the developed mythology that lies at the base of any social seat,
anywhere in the world, wherever myths are functionally present.
And don't imagine that even where they appear to be absent, in our
scientific civilisation, they are not there somewhere. Nevertheless,
even if this identity cannot be restored, there is one characteristic
of mythical development that is maintained at the individual level
and this is its function as a solution to a situation that is in dead-
lock, in impasse. This is little Hans's situation between his father
and mother. The individual myth reproduces on a small scale the
fundamental character of mythical development such as it presents
wherever we can get a sufficient purchase on it. All in all, it's a
matter of how to face up to an impossible situation through the
successive articulation of all the different forms of the impossibility
of a solution.
It is in this respect that mythical creation responds to a question.
It roams, as it were, around the full circle of what presents both
as a possible opening and an opening that it is impossible to take.
Once the circuit has been run through, something has become a
Permutations 321
reality, signifying that the subject has placed himself at the level of
the question. It is in this respect that Hans is a neurotic and not a
Pervert.
There is nothing artificial about distinguishing in this way the
direction of Hans's evolution from another possible direction. This
direction is indicated in the observation itself, as I am going to show
you next time, but I can already point out that all these goings-on in
relation to the mother's drawers indicate in negative the path Hans
could have taken on the side of what culminates in fetishism.
The little pair of drawers is there for no other reason than to
present to us the resolution that Hans could have taken, of becom-
ing attached to these drawers behind which there is nothing. but
upon which he might have depicted what he would have wished.
It is precisely because little Hans is not a mere nature lover, but
a metaphysician, that he conveys the question to its proper place,
that is to say, right where there is something that lacks, and where
he asks what the reason is - in the mathematical sense of r¢z.so#,
the common difference - behind this wanting being. And he will
conduct himself, just like the collective mind of a primitive tribe,
with the rigour we have come to expect of him, doing the rounds of
the possible solutions and making certain choices so as to constitute
a battery of signifiers. Never forget that the signifier is not there to
represent signification. It is there much rather to stand in for the
gaps in a signification that signifies nothing. It is because the signi-
fication is literally lost, because the trail is lost as in the fairy tale of
Hop-o'-My-Thumb, that the white stones of the signifier surge up to
fill this hole and this void.
Today I shall content myself with zooming in on the ensuing
sequence of fantasies that follow on from the three examples I gave
you last time - the fantasy of the cart by the loading dock, the
fantasy of the missed stop at Gmunden, and the fantasy of setting
off with the Lainz grandmother and returning with the father, in
spite of its evident impossibility.
We are now going to see another series of fantasies that, when we
know how to read them, cover in a certain sense, and modify, the
permutation of elements.
The first fantasy in the series will show you straightaway where the
point of passage is to be found. It lies at a moment that is somewhat
further on in the progressing dialogue between little Hans and his
father, on 11 April. It is the fantasy of the bathtub, which everyone
pores over with a kind of addle-brained tenderness, as though some

familiar face were to be found here, while they are still utterly inca-
pable of saying which.
The bathtub fantasy runs as follows. Hans is in the bath, and
I've told you enough for you to have a sense of how this z.# /rfee bczffe
is something that lies as close as can be to the z.# /fee carf that is at
issue here, in other words the fundamental I.# ffee Ao#se. It has to do
with a connection, a link, with this thing that is already poised to
slip away, namely the plateau of maternal support. And so, here we
have someone different making his entrance, a certain form of the
eagerly awaited third party, the Scfo/osscr, the fitter who unscrews
the bathtub. Nothing more is said about him. He unscrews the bath,
and then, with his Boferer, his gimlet, he bores a hole in Hans's belly.
In a footnote Freud introduces the possibility of an equivoque with
gcborc#, bor#, without resolving it.
With the usual methods of interpretation that we make use of,
people have raced headlong into a forcing of matters, and Lord
knows all that is to be found in this fantasy. Hans's father, at any
rate, can't help but relate it to the scene that is regularly played out
in the mother's bed, when little Hans chases his father away and
supersedes him in some way, so that here in the fantasy Hans is the
object of his father's aggression. All of this is not necessarily tainted
with error, but to stay strictly at the level of the elements themselves,
we shall say that if the bathtub corresponds to something that has
to be overcome, namely this unison between little Hans and his
mother, it is quite certain that the fact that it is unbolted is surely
something to be noted.
More to the point, the fact that in his fantasy little Hans is the one
who has a hole in his belly is something that we should also take note
of as corresponding to what we may conceive of within the system of
a permutation in which ultimately he is the one who takes on board,
in his person, the mother's hole. This hole is precisely the gulf that is
the crucial and ultimate point in question, the thing that cannot be
looked at, the thing that floats in the shape of the blackness that is
forever ungraspable around the horse's head, and precisely around
where the horse can bite. Somewhere in this vicinity is this thing into
which he was not to look. When I say that he was not to look there,
you will see when you refer to the episode of the mother's drawers
that little Hans says as much himself.
Questioned by his father, who flies in the face of good sense, little
Hans brings in two elements, and two alone, to counter the father's
suggestions. I will tell you about the second element next time, when
we shall be coming back to the analysis of this moment, but the
first is as follows. Hans dictates that his father should write to the
Permutations 323
Professor to say that. When I saw the yellow drawers I said Ùgh!
That makes me spit!' and threw myself down and shut my eyes and
cJi.c7#'/ /oak. In the bathtub fantasy, little Hans doesn't look either,
but he takes on board the hole, the maternal position. Here we are
precisely at the level of the inverted Oedipus complex, and from a
certain perspective, that of the signifier, we can see just how far it is
necessary, how it is literally a phase of the positive Oedipus complex.
What happens next? In one of the following fantasies, on 22 April,
we come back to another position, that of the so-called Wczgcr/, the
little truck. Little Hans, who is perfectly recognisable in the guise
of the young street-boy who has climbed onto the truck, spends
the whole night there gcz#z #czck/, qwz./c #akcd. This is something
altogether ambiguous, both a desire and a dread. It is tightly bound
to what immediately precedes it, when Hans says to his father, in
the dialogue that I have pointed out as a crucial one, dzt Jo//sf cI/s
Nackter, you've got to be naked.
In the article I mentioned, Robert Fliess underscores how the
texture of the child's idiom acquires cz crosS-f4reczc7z.#g /feczJ j.a a/mos/
bjb/I.ca/ in its force, and indeed this does disconcert everyone to the
point that they rush to plug up the hole by inserting a parenthesis
-cr mc!.#/.. bar/#/I.g, Ae mccz#s `bczrc/oo/'. Fliess argues quite rightly
that the style of the term cz/s IV¢ck/cr is noteworthy, falling strictly
in line with Hans's invocation dw /wf/ cz/cr#. He's asking his father
to do hisjob, to do this thing that ultimately cannot be seen, namely
how the mother is satisfied. So /one czs sfec j.a, cz7!cJ)/ow'rc /Ac o#c wAo
must do it. It must be done . LrL othf3I words, be a true father .
It is just after he has come out with this formula, thereby showing
what is being appealed to in reality, that little Hans foments his
fantasy of spending the whole night on the truck, on the wider plane
and circuit of the railway. He spends a whole night there, when thus
far the relationships with his mother have essentially been sustained
gescfet4;z.#c7, czr greo/ speec7. Up to that point, this was what he had
wished for. He explains to his father, still in the same dialogue of 21
ALpr{l, You've got to knock your foot up against a stone and bleed, and
then 1'11 be able to be alone with Mummy for a little bit at all events.
When you come up into our foal 1'11 be able to run away quick so that
j;ow c7o7€'f see. We find here again the rhythm of what we might
ca+i the primal game of transgression with the mother, which is only
sustained clandestinely.
In the fantasy of 22 April, little Hans spends the whole night on
the little truck, and the next morning, 50,000 Gulden -which at the
time of the observation was a tidy sum - are given to the guard so
that the boy can go on riding on it.
Another fantasy, on 2 May, seems to be the last in the line, its
summit and terminus. Little Hans ends by saying that this time, not
merely the plumber but c7cr J#s/cz//czfcctr, the fitter, which accentu-
ates the aspect of unscrewing, comes with a pair of pincers. It is
quite wrong to translate Zo#ge as Scforcz#be#zJ.cAer on the grounds
that it is a pointed instrument. A Zcz7!gc is a pair of pincers, not a
screwdriver. What is unscrewed is Hans's behind, so that another
can be fitted.
So, here we have another step being taken. The superposition of
this fantasy onto the previous one of the bathtub is highlighted well
enough by the fact that the relations of size between the behind and
the bathtub are articulated in the most precise and complete way
by little Hans himself. It so happens that in the small bath that they
used to have at home, his little behind filled it. J fcrf z.# /Acz/ o#e. I
cow/c7#'/ /j.c dow# !.# j./, z./ was Coo owcz//. In the small bath, he is hefty.
This is the whole question -is he or isn't he hefty enough? He fills
the little bath, and even has to sit in it, but wherever there are baths
that do not offer such guarantees, the fantasies of being engulfed
resume. These anxieties mean that whenever he had to have a bath
elsewhere, like in Gmunden, he would pro/ef/ w.ffe pass;.omcz/c Jcczrf.
Without there being any equivalence of signification, there is
a superposition of the schema of the unscrewed behind onto the
bathtub that was previously unscrewed. This is also something that
we can place at the level of an opening, where what is at issue is a
correspondence - and at the same time something that has changed
-with the fact that the cart drives off or doesn't drive off, at higher
or lower speed, from the dock to which it is momentarily hitched.
To conclude the last fantasy, it is said that the fitter tells little
Hans to turn around, and instructs him, £ef me see };owr w.dd/er.
This widdler is the insufficient reality that has not succeeded in
seducing the mother. With that, everyone completes the interpreta-
tion by saying that the fitter unscrews the widdler so that Hans can
be given a better one. Only, this is not in the text. Nothing indicates
that little Hans has run through the castration complex to the end
and in a significant way.
If the castration complex is anything it's that, while somewhere
there is no penis, the father is capable of furnishing another one.
We shall further say that, insomuch as the passage to the symbolic
order is necessary, the penis always needs to have been removed to a
certain extent, then to be given back. Naturally, it can never be given
back, because all that is symbolic is by definition quite unable to be
given back. The drama of the castration complex revolves around
the fact that it is only symbolically that the penis is removed and
given back.
However, in a case like this one, we can see that it is symbolically
Permutations 325
removed but is not given back. Therefore, it's a matter of knowing

to what extent the fact of having completed this round might suffice
for little Hans.
One can say that it's equivalent to the exam perspective, that
Hans has done an extra circuit, and the mere fact that this is a cycle
and a circuit suffices to turn it into something that ensures the rite
of passage, lending it a value that is equal to what it would be if it
had been fully completed. At any rate, the question has been posed.
It still remains that we cannot move forward in our comprehen-
sion of symptomatic formations if we stray outside of this strictly
bounded terrain of the enumeration of the signifier. Before I take
leave of you, and because I always try to end with a remark that will
amuse you, I want to show you this by pointing something out to
you.
What are these pincers? Where do they come from? In the end,
they are never referred to anywhere else in the case history. The
father has never said, Jf wj.// be scrcwcc7 back z.#/or }Jow. Yet again,
by staying at the level of the signifier there can be no doubt that
what the fitter uses to unscrew the behind is a pair of pincers, or
long-nosed pliers.
It so happens that long ago I happened to learn that these large
teeth with which a horse could bite the finger of the likes of little
Hans used to be called, in nearly every language, pz.#ccrs. Not only
are teeth called pz.#ccrs, but the front of the hoof with which the
horse makes his little Krczwcz// is also called a Zc}nge in German. This
word carries the same two meanings as the word pj.#cc in French.
I shall also tell you that in Greek, x7A" has exactly the same
meaning. I didn't come across that by flipping through the Greek
smithery handbook, which doesn't exist. I chanced upon it in the
prologue to Euripides' @oj'vzcrcraz.
Jocasta, before telling the story of Antigone, offers a very curious
detail concerning what occurred at the time of the death of King
Laius. With as much care as I have devoted to the construction of
these little Viennese avenues and rail networks, she explains how the
routes of Laius and Oedipus led them to the same spot. They were
each making their way to Delphi when the quarrel broke out over
who had right of way, the one on the great chariot or the other on
foot. There is a to-do, but then Oedipus, being the stronger, walks
on in front. It is then that Jocasta takes care to note - and this is
a detail that I have found in no other version - that the quarrel
revives because 7rd)Aoj Jg vzv %7Actrf 7€vovraf €€€¢oz'vzocrov 7rofov, one
of the horses' hooves bloodies the tendons of his feet, the ankles of
Oedipus.
So, for Oedipus to meet his fate, it was not enough that his feet
should be swollen from the iron pins that had been driven through
his ankles, it also required this injury to his foot, just like the father
of little Hans, made precisely by a horse's hoof, which in Greek, as
in German, and as in French, is called pz.77ccr, because %7Arf desig-
nates pincers or tongs.
This remark is intended to show that there is nothing exaggerated
in my telling you that in the sequence of little Hans's fantasmatic
constructions it is always the same material that is in service and
turning around.
15 May 1957
XX
TRANSFORMATIONS
Phallus dentatus
Unloading the signifier
Anxiety of movement
Biting then falling
The penknife in the doll
Of Children bound in Bundles
0 cities of the Sea! In you I see your citizens -both females and
males -tightly bound, arms and legs, with strong withes by folks
who will not understand your language. And you will only be
able to assuage your sorrows and lost liberty by means Of tearful
complaints and sighing and lamentation among yourselves; for
those who will bind you will not understand you, nor will you
understand them.'
This short passage, which I extracted a few months ago from the
IVofcbooks a/Lco#czrdo cde Vj.#cz. and then completely forgot, strikes
me as apt to introduce our lesson today.
This rather magnificent passage is to be heard allusively, of course.
Today we are going to resume our reading of the observation on

little Hans by trying to hear the idiom in which he expresses himself.
Last week, I pointed out for you a certain number of stages in
the development of the signifier. Its enigmatic centre is the signifier
of the horse that is included in the phobia, and the function of
this signifier is that of a crystal in a supersaturated solvent. The
mythical development that is the constituent factor in the case

history of little Hans branches out in a sort of immense arbo-
rescence around the signifier of the horse. It is now a matter of
immersing, so to speak, this tree-like network in the pool of what
little Hans has experienced, and to see what the role of this arbo-
real development has been. I'm going to indicate right away what
the report on little Hans's progress that we are going to establish
will tend towards.
Since what is at stake here are object relations considered in
terms of a progression, I will say that throughout the period when
little Hans lives out his Oedipus complex there is nothing in the
observation to suggest that the results should be deemed fully
satisfying.
If there is one thing that is accentuated by the observation at the
start, then it's something or other that could be termed ffec preco-
cz.ows mcz/wrz./}; of little Hans. It cannot be said that at that moment
he is ahead of his Oedipus complex, but surely he is at its point of
dissolution. In other words, the way in which little Hans experiences
his relation with the young girls already possesses, as is underscored
for us in the observation, all the characteristics of an advanced
relationship. We won't call it czc7ct//, but it has something about it
that allows Freud himself to recognise him in a luminous analogy
that presents little Hans as a kind of blithe seducer, even a tyrannical
Don Juan. This complex term, which I came out with here a couple
of months ago, to the outrage of some, is characterised through and
through by little Hans's precocious stance, indicative of his entry
into a sort of happy adaptation to a real context.
However, what do we see, on the contrary, at the end of the
observation? It has to be said that at the end we meet again the same
little girls inhabiting little Hans's inner world, but if you read the
observation you cannot help but be struck by how they are not only
more imaginary, but radically imaginary. They are now fantasies, to
whom little Hans talks. Moreover, his relation to these girls is pal-
pably different, because they are much rather his children. I would
even say that if this is where we are to ascertain the matrix, left by
the resolution of the crisis, of Hans's future relations with women,
then we can further say that while from the surface viewpoint the
result of heterosexuality has been amply acquired by little Hans,
these girls will still bear the stigmata that marked the way they
entered his libidinal structure. We will even get to see him treating in
detail how the girls came into it.
The narcissistic style of their position in relation to little Hans is
irrefutable, and we shall be seeing in greater detail what detemines
and locates this. Certainly, little Hans will be a lover of women, but
Transformations 329
they will remain fundamentally bound to a sort of testing out of

his power. This is also why everything indicates that he will always
dread them. They will be, so to speak, his mistresses. They will be
and will remain the girls of his mind. Not only that, but as you will
see, they have been robbed from the mother.
These remarks are intended to show you, or at least to suggest,
the interest of research such as this. Naturally, in order to be con-
firmed, it will require that we resume our trail. Since we have taken
the phases of the signifying structure of little Hans's myth as our
point of reference, we need to chart the different stages of his pro-
gress in relation to these phases. Furthermore, since we have been
speaking about object relations, we will ask what the objects are
that come to the fore in succession and hold little Hans's inter-
est across these different phases in the shaping of the signifying
myth. All in all, what progress arises correlatively in the signified
over the course of this particularly active and fruitful period when
little Hans's relationship with his world is undergoing a sort of
renewal or revolution? In parallel to this, are we going to be able to
grasp what these successive crystallisations punctuate in the form
of fantasies?
These are, without any doubt, the successive crystallisations of
a signifying configuration. Last week, I showed you its cluster of
figures. At the very least, I allowed you to perceive how the same
elements permute with the others in these successive figures so as to
refresh each time the signifying configuration while still leaving it
fundamentally the same.
On 5 April, we have the theme that I called fAc /Acme a/rcfwr#.
Of course, this label doesn't explain the essence of the fantasy, but
it does denote what it possesses as a base. It's the theme of what we
could call a departure, or more exactly an anguishing solidarity,
with the cart, with the Wczgc# that stands at the edge of the loading
dock. The fantasy develops this solidarity, because it doesn't present
in this form at the outset. It requires the questioning from Hans's
father to facilitate the avowal of these fantasies and at the same time
to talk them through and to organise them, in order to reveal them
to himself just as we are allowed to perceive them.
On I I April, we see the fantasy of the unscrewed bathtub appear,
with little Hans inside it bearing the large hole in his belly, onto
which we have been focusing an approximate profile. What has
happened between 5 April and 1 1 April?
On 21 April, we find the fantasy that we may call /eczvz.#g ¢#ew
wj./fe /foe/czzAer. It's a fantasy that is manifestly represented as fan-
tasmatic and impossible. Hans sets off with his grandmother before
his father arrives. When the father joins him, we don't know by
what miracle little Hans is there. This is the order in which these
things present.
On 22 April, it's the little truck in which Hans goes off by himself.
And then, something else will probably mark out the limit of what
we can come to today.
What is at issue before 5 April? Between 1 March and 5 April,
what was at stake was essentially and solely the phallus. It was in
connection with the phallus that his father had suggested the motive
behind his phobia, telling little Hans that the phobia arises to the
extent that he touches himself, to the extent that he masturbates.
The father goes even further, suggesting an equivalence between
what little Hans fears and the phallus, to the point that he draws
out of him the retort that a phallus - or rather a Wz.wz.mczc%er,
which is the exact term by which the phallus is inscribed into Hans's
vocabulary -c7ocs#'/ bi.fe. This was back on 1 March, at the start of
the series of misunderstandings that govern the dialogue between
little Hans and his father.
A phallus is very much what is at issue in what bites and injures.
This is so true that someone to whom I gave this observation to
read, someone who is not a psychoanalyst but a mythologist, and
who has penetrated quite far into the topic of myths, told me how it
is quite striking to see that what underpins the whole development
of the observation is the function, not of the vczg!.#a c7e#fafo, but of
the pfecz//ws dc#fa/ws. Except that, of course, the observation devel-
ops wholly in the register of misunderstanding. I would add that this
is quite ordinarily the case in any kind of generative interpretation
between two subjects. Indeed, this is how one should expect it to
develop. It's scarcely anomalous. And it's precisely in the gulf of this
misunderstanding that something else will develop that will have its
own fruitfulness.
So it is that, when his father is speaking to Hans about the pballus,
he is speaking to him about his real penis, the one that Hans has been
touching. He is certainly not wrong, because when the possibility of
erection arises for this young subject, along with everything that it
brings with it in terms of unfamiliar emotions, the deep balance of
all his relationships with what until then had constituted the stable
point, the fixed point, the almighty point of his world, namely his
mother, is incontestably altered.
On the other hand, what is it that plays the supervalent role in the
fact that all of a sudden this fundamental anxiety arises which makes
everything waver, to the point that anything is preferable to this,
even the forging of an anguishing image that in itself is completely
uncommunicative, like that of the horse, and which at the very least
traces out a limit, a reference point, within this anxiety? What is it in
Transformations 331
this image that opens the door to the attack, to the biting? Well, it's
another phallus, the imaginary phallus of the mother.
It is by way of the mother's imaginary phallus that the intolerable
phobia opens up. What had hitherto been a game of showing or not
showing the phallus consisted in playing with a phallus that Hans
had long known to be perfectly inexistent, yet which for him was
the main stake in his relation with his mother. This was the plane
on which the game of seduction was established, not only with his
mother but with all the young girls as well. He also knows full well
that they don't have any phallus either, but he keeps up the game of
their having one. Up to that point, the whole fundamental relation-
ship, not simply of the lure in the most immediate sense, but his
p/cz);I.77g cz/ ffez.f /wrj.#g, hinged precisely on this.
The introductory part of the observation, prior to the declaration
of the phobia, ends with a fantasy. Moreover, this is a fantasy on
the limits of what a fantasy is, because it's a dream. It is modelled
on a game of forfeits. One person hides the forfeit in his hand, and
the one who declares that it is his is condemned to do something. In
Hans's version, he has the right /a gc/ o#c o//fee gz.r/a /a wz.cJd/c. It is
underlined in the observation that the dream has #o vz.swcz/ co7z/e#f
wfecz/socver. It is of fAc pwre/}7 czwc7z./or}; type, even though it concerns
a game of showing or seeing, and is the grounding of the first scop-
tophilic relationship with the young girls. Isn't the spoken element,
the game that has passed over into the symbol, into speech, already
supervalent here?
Throughout this first period, the father's every attempt to intro-
duce something that concerns the reality of the penis, along with an
indication as to what should or shouldn't be done with it, namely
not to touch it, is met with the themes of the game being pushed
back to the fore by little Hans with automatic rigour. For example,
when he suddenly comes out with the fantasy that he sczw M#mm};
qwi.fc #akcd z.72 focr cAcmj.sc, and his father asks him whether he means
z.# fecr chemz.sc or gwj./c #czkcd, little Hans is not in the least ruffled.
She was in her chemise, but the chemise was so short that I saw her
w.czd/e7'. That is to say, one could just about see, and also not see.
You can recognise here the structure of the rim or the fringe that
typifies fetishistic apprehension. It's a matter of being at the point
where one could just about see what is to appear, yet one does not
see it. What is thereby educed as something hidden in the relation-
ship with the mother is the inexistent phallus, and he is playing at its
being there. So, Hans somehow accentuates the character of what is
at stake here, namely a defence against the destabilising element that
the father contributes in his insistence on speaking about the phallus
in real terms.
Little Hans calls upon a witness in this fantasy, a little girl called
Grete. She is a loan-element from his surroundings, from the holiday
home and the little girls with whom he pursues his imaginary rela-
tionships, but at this point they are perfectly real personages. There
is a point to this underlining of the fact that she is called Grete and
that she steps into this fantasy, because we will meet her again later.
In this fantasy, she is called upon as a witness to what he and his
mother are doing, because he introduces the fact that he touches
himself very quickly, almost stealing a touch.
For Hans there is a necessity of bringing back onto the ground of
the phallic relationship with his mother everything that is interven-
ing anew, not only due to the fact of the real existence of his penis
but also due to the fact that this is where his father is trying to drag
him. The resulting compromise-formation is something that struc-
tures the whole of this earlier period, prior to 5 April, such as we can
read it in the observation.
Of course, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything else. Indeed,
a second such element will appear on 30 March, the date of the
consultation with Freud. What appears on this date is not entirely
artificial because, as I told you, it is heralded by what is implicit in
the father's collaboration in little Hans's fantasies, in which Hans
calls on his aid.
So, between I March and 15 March, which is when the fantasy
of Grete and his mother arises, it's above all a matter of the real
penis and the imaginary penis. Between 15 March and the consulta-
tion with Freud, the father is trying to make the phallus pass over
entirely to the side of reality, telling little Hans that big animals have
big widdlers and little animals have little widdlers, which is surely
what leads little Hans to say that his widdler is/xcc7 I.#, and it will
get bz.ggcr ¢7td bj.ggcr. The same schema that I showed you earlier is
being reproduced here. Faced with the father's attempt to make the
phallus a reality, little Hans's reaction is not to approve what he is
nevertheless gaining access to, but yet again to forge a fantasy.
This time, on 27 March, it's the fantasy of the two giraffes, in
which what is essential becomes manifest, namely a symbolisation
of the maternal phallus, which is sharply represented in the little
giraffe. While little Hans is caught between his imaginary attach-
ment and the insistence of the real through the intermediary of his
father's words, the path he will now take will provide a punctuation,
and even a schematisation, of everything that will go on to be devel-
oped in the myth of the phobia. That is to say, the imaginary term
will become for him the symbolic element.
In other words, far from our being able to ascertain in the object
relation a path that would somehow lead directly to the passage to
Transformations 333
the signification of a new real, to an acquisition of a handling of the

real by means of a symbolic instrument, pure and simple, what we
see is, on the contrary - at least during the critical phase at issue
here, which analytic theory pinpoints as the Oedipus complex - that
the real cannot be reorganised into the new symbolic configuration
unless one pays the price of a reactivation of all the most imaginary
elements. A veritable imaginary regression is produced in relation to
the first inroad that the subject makes.
Here, in these first steps of little Hans's neurosis - his childhood
neurosis, I mean - we have both its model and its schema. To the
father who is the spokesperson for reality and the new order of
adaptation to the real, little Hans responds with a sort of imaginary
profusion that becomes reinforced in a way that is all the more
typical in that it is sustained by a pattern of profound disbelief.
Moreover, you will see little Hans pursuing the full sequence of
this, which will lead you in turn to perceive how it is laid out at the
start of the observation in a way that is almost materialised. This is
precisely what makes for the exceptional character, the heaven-sent
quality, of the observation. It shows us how little Hans himself real-
ises how this can be taken, namely how not only can one play with
this crumpled thing, but one can transfom it into balls of paper.
This first image of the little giraffe is already the beginning of the
solution, the synthesis, of what little Hans is learning to do. He is
learning how images can be played with.
He doesn't know what this thing is. He has simply been introduced
to it by the fact that he already knows how to speak, by the fact that
he is a little man, by the fact that he is in a pool of language. He is
very much aware of the precious value that the fact of being able to
speak affords him. Indeed, this is what he is constantly underscoring
on his own account. Whenever he says this or that, and he is told
that it's good or bad, he says, IVo mczf/cr, I./'s a/wcrys good bec¢c4sc j./
can be sent to the Professor.
There is more than one remark of this kind, where little Hans
shows his sense of the specific fecundity that has been opened up
to him by the fact that, all in all, he has found someone to speak
to. It would be quite astonishing were we to fail to perceive on this
occasion how this, right here, is all that is precious and efficacious
about analysis.
S"ch was this first analysis of a child.
The way that Freud brings in his Oedipus myth during the consulta-
tion of 30 March, in all its bluntness, fully constructed, without the
faintest attempt to adapt it into something that might present as
immediate or precise for the child, may be deemed to be one of the
most striking points of the observation. Freud deliberately tells him
that he is going to recount a big story that he has invented - Lo#g
before you were in the world, I knew that a little Huns would come who
would be so fond of his mother that he would be bound to feel afraid of
his father because of it .
The Oedipus complex is implied here by its author in an operation
that lays bare the fundamentally mythical character, the character
of an originary myth, that it carries in Freud's doctrine. He makes
use of it in the same way that people have always taught children
that God created heaven and earth and all kinds of other things,
depending on the cultural context in which one happens to be. It is a
myth of origins that comes ready made, and because one puts faith
in what it determines as an orientation, as a structure, as an avenue
for speech in the subject who is its depository, what is at stake here
is quite literally its function as a creation of truth. This is exactly
how Freud brings it to little Hans, and what we see is little Hans
responding with the same ambiguity with which he will assent to
everything that will ensue -J/'s vcr); I.#/ergs/j.7cg, he seems to say, I.J's
very exciting. How fine it is. He really irmst have gone off to speck to
the good Lord to frod something of that calibre .
What is the result of this? Freud articulates it very clearly
for us in h:Is own way - It was not to be expected that he should
be freed from his anxiety at a single blow by the information I
gclvc rfej.". At this moment in the observation, articulating it as we
have been articulating it here, Freud says that cz poss!b!./z./); food
now been offered him of bringing forward his unconscious produc-
/z.o#s, unbewuBten Produktionen vorzubringen, cz73d o/ w#/o/di.#g
foJ.J p¢ob!.a, und seine Phobie abzuwickeln. In short, it's an incite-
ment. It's a matter of implanting another crystal, as it were,
in the incomplete signification that little Hans is at this point
representing to himself, I mean in his whole Being. On the one
hand there is what has been produced all by itself, the phobia, and
on the other there is Freud bringing in, all of a piece, what this is
fated to culminate in. Of course, Freud doesn't imagine for one
second that the religious myth of the Oedipus complex that he is
broaching at this moment will bear fruit immediately. He expects
just one thing, and he says what this is. It's that it will assist, on
Transformations 335
the other side, the unfolding of the phobia. This clears the way
to what earlier I called the development of the signifier-crystal.
You can't put it any more clearly than does Freud in these two
sentences from 30 March.
All that one can say about the immediate effect of the consulta-
tion with Freud is that, even so, there is a mild reaction on the side
of the father. It won't last long. I mean that we don't really find the
father in the object relations until the end. As I said earlier, we are
seeking today to grasp the object relations across the different stages
of the signifying formation. It should come as no surprise that we
see the father coming to the fore in these object relations only right
at the end of the crisis. As I mentioned the other day, this arises just
before the fantasy of the little truck, at the time of Hans's confronta-
tion with his father in the Oedipal dialogue. Wky czrc );ow Jo/.ecz/OWJ?
asks Hans, or more exactly, he uses the term cross, cj/cr#. The father
protests, Bet/ /fecz/'f 7!o/ /rwc, and Hans insists, yow mws/ be. This is
the moment of encounter with the father which here represents the
shortcoming of the paternal position. What we find here, therefore,
is just a first apparition, a small confrontation, that is yielded by
the fact that, as we can see quite clearly, he is there in a way that is
altogether conspicuous, in the way that it is commonly said, fee wczs
conspicuous by his absence.
So it is that, the very next day [following the consultation with
Freud], little Hans reacts. He comes to see his father and tells him
he is frightened. Or more precisely, when his father asks why he has
come, he tmswels, When I'm not frightened I shan't come any more.
Huns sarys, When you're away, I'm afraid you're not coming home.
This will go a long way, because his father promptly asks, ,4#c7 A¢vc J
ever threatened you that I shan't come home? Let's pa;use here. Falced
with this fear of the father's absence, let's find out how to punctuate
what is truly involved in this fear.
All in all, it's a small crystallisation of the anxiety. Anxiety is
not the fear of an object. Anxiety is the subject's confrontation
with the absence of an object, where he is drawn in and where he
loses himself. Anything is preferable to this, up to and including
the forging of an object that is the strangest and least objectal of
all objects, the phobia. The unreal character of the fear that is at
issue here is manifested precisely by its shape and form, if we know
how to see it. It's the fear of an absence. I mean the absence of the
object that has just been designated for him. Little Hans comes to
his father to tell him that he is afraid of its absence. You should
hear this in the same way that I have told you that in anorexia
nervosa, what needs to be heard is not that the child doesn't eat,
but that the child eats #o/fez.#g. Here, little Hans is afraid of the
absence of the object that is the father, and which here he is start-
ing to symbolise.
Hans's father, on his side, is racking his brain to work out what
about-turn or backlash might have led the child to manifest a fear
that would merely be the nether side of desire. This is not entirely
wrong, but in a way it grabs the phenomenon only by its edges. In
fact, this is the beginning of the subject's realisation that the father
is precisely not what he was told he would be in the myth. He says
aLs runch to his father, Why did you tell me I'm f;ond Of Mummy . . .
ttJfec77 J'm/o#d a/)/ow? What Hans has just said here does not match
the myth. If I'm supposed to hate you, that's not right.
What is implicit here, beyond little Hans and what he is caught
up in, is that while it's altogether regrettable that things should
be like this, even so, it's no small matter to have been put on the
path that is really at issue and to be able to spot where there is an
absence in relation to this myth. This is something that is registered
immediately, something that the observation takes note of, and in
which, if you will, we need to hear a symbolisation. If we label the
signifier around which the phobia organises its function cczpj./a/ J,
let's say that something at this moment is s);moo/I.Jcd by what we
can label with a lower-case sz.gr7'!cz, and which is the absc#cc o/ /Ac
father, p° . This -
I (a pO)
This is not to say that this is the whole of what is contained in

the horse signifier. Far from it. As we shall see, the horse will not
suddenly vanish just because Hans has been told that he should
be afraid of his father. However, the horse signifier is certainly
unloaded of something, and the observation records this - Ivj.cA/
alle weifoen Pferde beifoen, Not all white horses bite. I:urhe Hzlrrs is
no longer afraid of all white horses. There are some that no longer
frighten him. Whereupon his father, despite the fact that he isn't
travelling along the path of our theorisation, understands that there
are some that are V¢f fj., Dadd)J, and when little Hans has a sense that
there are some who are yaf/j., he is no longer afraid of them.
Why is he no longer afraid of them? Well, because Ira/fi. is kind
through and through. This is also what the father understands
without quite fully understanding, without even mildly understand-
ing, through to the end. It's that the drama lies in the fact that V¢f/j.
is kind through and through. If there had been a ycz//;. to be truly
afraid of, everything would have followed the rules of the game, so
to speak. That is to say, a veritable Oedipus complex could have
taken form, the kind of Oedipus complex that helps you to untie
Transformations 337
from your mother's apron strings. However, since there is no Vcz/fj.

to be afraid of, since ycz//z. is too kind, this explains how evoking the
7rczf/z.'s potential aggressiveness in the myth leads the phobic signifier
of the I"7r7rog to be unloaded to such an extent. This is logged that
same afternoon.
I'm forcing nothing in what I'm telling you here, because it's in
the text, provided one shifts imperceptibly the point of perspective
so that the observation ceases to be a labyrinth in which one gets lost
and so that, on the contrary, its every detail can take on a meaning.
While it might look like I'm going fairly slowly here, and that I keep
going back to the start, I have to allow you to grasp how not a single
detail of the observation eludes this bringing into perspective. As
soon as you can see how the relation to the signifier is articulated -
which is reported in its raw state by Freud, along with the signified
ready to emerge - we can see it reverberating mathematically in the
functions of the signifier that is educed in a natural and spontaneous
state in little Hans's situation. In this same moment we can see these
effects of subtraction, of unloading, being immediately recorded to
the extent that the Father has simply been ushered in. This simple
fact has to be inscribed in a way that is almost mathematical, like on
a balance sheet.
So, there is a share of white horses that do not make little Hans
afraid, and Freud himself spells out how the anxiety is de#b/c-ecJgcd,
which further bolsters what I have just said. Freud distinguishes
between anxiety o/ the father, vor c7cm yczJcr, and anxiety /or or
czro#7td the father, #m dc# Vcr/cr. We need only take into account
the way that Freud presents this to find the exact two elements
that I have just described. The anxiety czrow#d this empty place,
this hollow that the father represents in little Hans's configuration,
seeks out its support in the phobia. To the precise extent that an
anxiety a/the father has been educed, even if only in the state of
a requirement for something to be postulated, the anxiety czrow#cJ
the father's function is unloaded. The subject can at last have an
anxiety a/something.
Unfortunately, this cannot go very far, because Hans's father,
even though he is there, is on no account capable of sustaining the
now established function that corresponds to the necessities of a
correct and limpid mythical formation with the full universal scope
that the Oedipus myth possesses. This is precisely what forces our
little Hans to fall back into his difficulty. As Freud had predicted,
after this his difficulty would start to unfold, to be embodied and
precipitated in productions that would develop out of his phobia.
We immediately start to see more clearly in this direction when
the first fantasy of 5 April appears. I began with this fantasy as
though it were a first term, the transformations of which we meet

many times over right through to the end. With everything that
surrounds it and everything that heralds it, this fantasy highlights
the weight of a question that little Hans had started to articu-
late very well the previous afternoon, regarding what makes him
afraid.
We start to see the four modalities in which the horse frightens
him. His father bucks up a bit and really performs an analysis here
in that, when from time to time he doesn't know where to turn,
this still allows him to find things. He lays them out, ¢, b, c, and
d. They are elements that bring a term into play that has a special
value for man, that is to say, for an animal who is fated to know
himself to exist, unlike the rest of the animals. This term shows its
most perturbing impact here when it is developed and articulated
by little Hans in the neo-productions of the phobia. This term is
movement.
Please understand that it's not a matter of uniform motion, which
is a movement that we have always known, or at least for a good
while. It's a movement in which one loses one's sense of oneself,
from wliich one tries to escape. It's already there in Aristotle, in the
discrimination between linear motion and circular motion. In more
modem language, one would say that there is acceleration. This
is what little Hans is telling us when he says that the horse that is
pulling something behind it makes him afraid when it starts moving,
and more so when it drives past quickly than when it trots up slowly.
The anxiety arises wherever the one who is not involved in this
movement, who has a minimum of detachment from life, can sense
the dead weight rocking into motion. It consists in what I have just
called k77owr.ng o#cse// /o cxj.a/, in being a creature who is conscious
of oneself, and who is caught in this movement that presents this
sort of inert force.
This is where the anxiety is to be analysed. It is as much the anxiety
of being dragged into motion as its inverse, namely the fantasy of
being left behind, of being left in the lurch. This introduction of
something that all of a sudden carries him along in a movement
represents for little Hans a hard fall. Profoundly modifying his rela-
tionships with the stability of the mother, it brings him into her
presence as something that by the same token truly overhauls the
very bases of this stability. Hans tells us this in the form of what
he says at this stage regarding the horse. It can win/a//e# z4J7d bej#e#
wz.rd, fall down and bite.
We know what the biting is linked to. It is linked to the surging
up of what is produced each time the mother's love happens to be
missing. When the mother effectively falls away, she is at the same
Transformations 339
time this thing that has no other outcome than what for little Hans
himself becomes the anxiety reaction by necessity, what is known
as the ccz/czf}rapfez.c reczc/!.oH.2 The first stage is the biting, the second
stage is the falling down and rolling around on the ground.
IVow i./'// a/wcz};s Z7e /z.ke /fo!.s, little Hans tells us when he is trying to
recreate, in a way that is completely fantasmatic, the moment when
he go/ ffec #o7tfc#scJ. He continues, and his wording bears a structure
that we must keep in mind. All horses in buses'llfall down.
This is the formula in which is embodied what is at stake for little
Hans, namely the calling into question of the very foundations of
everything that thus far constituted the seat of his world.
This brings us to 9 April. It's an elaboration around the theme of the

anxiety of movement. What can possibly temper this anxiety?
The father is utterly without effect, because nothing indeed can
resolve for a creature like man, whose world is structured in the
symbolic, this sense of becoming carried away, this thing that will
drag him along in a movement.
This is why, in his signifying structuration, little Hans has to
make the conversion that consists in changing the schema of move-
ment into the schema of substitution, stage by stage.
First of all there will be the introduction of the theme of the
detachable element. Next, with this, substitution will be produced.
These are the two schematic stages that are expressed in the bathtub
fantasy-formation.
In the first stage, the bathtub is unscrewed. As I said, its unscrew-
ing comes at a cost, because little Hans has to undergo something
from which we know one never gets off scot-free, whenever this
passage is performed. This is something that is not gone into suf-
ficiently in the observation, namely that not only does he undergo
castration, but it is formally symbolised by the borer, by this large
gimlet that makes a hole in his belly.
ThencomesthesecondstagewhenHanshassomethingunscrewed.
In its place, something else can be screwed in. Through its signifying
form, what is at issue in the subject's operation of transformation
from movement into substitution, from continuity in the real into
discontinuity in the symbolic, is what is demonstrated throughout
the whole observation as the very coursing without which its stages
and progress are incomprehensible.
What happens in the signified, in the confusion and pathos that
little Hans finds himself in? What is there between 5 April, when
there appears the schema of the fantasy of the cart that sets off,
with everything around the phobia that is attached to it, and the
fantasmatic unbolting of the bathtub on 11 April, when this sym-
bolisation of a possible substitution starts to be initiated? Between
the two there is a whole surrounding theme, the material of which
I am forced to put in a ready state. This is the lengthy passage that
will last almost as long as the time it takes for there to be pro-
duced for little Hans the only element from the previous situation
that could possibly introduce the detachable feature, this element
that is fundamental to his restructuring of his world. What is this
element?
It is very precisely the element that I told you we must introduce
into the dialectic of showing and not seeing, of the educing of who/
z's #o/, yet which is hidden, that is to say, the veil itself.
There ensue two days of anxious questioning from Hans's father,
who understands literally nothing and gives himself over to a
heavy-handed groping around, which as Freud underlines had the
consequence that the analysis bcgcz# /o be obscwrc a#cJ c/#ccr/az.#. No
matter, there remains enough for us to see not only what constitutes
the essential point but also what Freud himself takes care to under-
score as essential, namely all that happens around the veil, that is to
say, the little pair of drawers.
These little drawers are there in all their carefully polished detail,
the little yellow drawers and the little black drawers. We are told
that the black drawers are Jtc/ormfoosc", a novel garment for use
by women when out cycling. As we know very well, Hans's mother
likes to keep up with the cutting edge of progress. I think that a
few judicious extracts from the splendid comedies of Apollinaire, in
particular fcs Mame//cs dc rj.r6sz.czs, should help us to paint a closer
portrait of her. As it is put in this admirable play -
Elles sont tout ce que nous sommes

Et cependant ne sont pas hommes.3
The whole drama lies here. This is what everything has emanated
from, right from the first. It's not simply because little Hans's mother
is more or less a feminist, but because all in all what is at stake for
little Hans is the fundamental truth inscribed into the lines of verse
I have just quoted. Freud himself did not dissimulate for one second
the essential and decisive value of this truth when he made his varia-
tion of Napoleon's saying, 4#¢fom}J z.s dcs/z.#j;. This is precisely what
it at issue, but what do we see when little Hans articulates what he
has to say?
The father's vehement questions constantly interrupt little Hans,
Transformations 341
rendering the parsing of his responses a little difficult, but Freud

manages to sift out what is essential. What we see more clearly
from Freud's note is that there are two stages in which little Hans
recognises and differentiates the pairs of drawers, which project over
their duality confusedly, as though each could hold more than one
of the functions of the other. But what is essential is that the drawers
in themselves are linked for Hans to a reaction of disgust. Much
more than this, little Hans has dictated what should be written to
Frond - When I sow the yellow drawers I said Ùgh! That makes me
spit!' and threw myself down and shut my eyes and didn't look. This
reaction shows us that his choice has been made. Hans will never be
a fetishist.
If, on the contrary, he had recognised these drawers as his object,
namely as the mysterious phallus that no one could ever see, he
would have been satisfied and would have become a fetishist. But
fate has something else in store for little Hans. He is disgusted by
the drawers.
He does specify, however, that when his mother is wearing them,
it's another matter. In this instance, they are not at all repugnant.
This makes all the difference. When they are on offer as an object,
that is, o# /foeir ow czccow#/, he is turned off. They conserve their
virtue, so to speak, only when they are functional, when they
continue to sustain the lure of the phallus. This is the nerve that
enables us to apprehend the experience.
The reality of things has been highlighted by the long questioning
in relation to which little Hans tries to explain himself. If he does
this poorly, it's to the extent that he is being pressed in divergent
and confused directions, but what is crucial is the introduction,
through the intermediary of this privileged object, of the detach-
able element that we are going to meet in the next part, and which
thenceforth leads onto the plane of instrumentalisation. We are
going to see a formidable material array of instruments that will
become dominant from this point forth in the evolution of the
signifying myth.
I have mentioned some of these instruments, and have even
shown you just how far such singular things already find them-
selves inscribed into the ambiguities of the signifier, for example
the extraordinary homonymy between Z¢#gc as a horse's tooth and
Zo#gc as a horse's hoof. I could develop this much further still, by
telling you that the middle of the hoof is called the pz.#cc, and the
two sides are called mczmc//eJ.
When I spoke to you last week about the Schr¢wbe#z!.cfecr, which
means screwdriver, I told you that this is precisely not what features
in the fantasy of the fitter, namely that it's rather a pair of pincers, or
pliers, and that Freud pulls out his ScArcrwbe#zj.cfecr without having
noticed very well the value that this instrumentation was offering
him. Don't assume that this is a unique case. In the objects that will
progressively make themselves felt from here on in, you will see not
only the motherL{hild relations becoming apparent, but also this
fundamental detachability that is expressed for man in the question
of life and death. You are going to see these being introduced now,
and behind them the enigmatic, uncanny and burlesque character
of the stork.
Don't forget that the stork has a wholly different style. You are
going to see this Mr Stork - dcr SJorcA - arriving with his flamboy-
ant profile, his little hat and latch-key, not in his pocket because he
doesn't have one, but in his beak, which he also uses as a pair of
forceps, not to mention for ringing bells and picking locks.
By this point we are submerged with material, and indeed this
is what will characterise the rest of the observation as a whole.
However, to avoid leaving you with something imprecise, I shall tell
you what the axial moment is, what the turning point is, in what will
come to pass in relation to mother and child.
Next time we will be taking this up step by step and we will be
seeing precisely which signifying forms stand as intermediaries that
transfom this mother and child, while leaving them the same - the
cart becomes a bathtub, and then a box, and so on and so forth,
each nestling into the others.
However, at one point, which clearly was very fine indeed, when
sufficient progress had been made with the mother - and you will
be seeing what this entails - on 22 April, a very nice fantasy arises.
Little Hans takes a little rubber doll called, as though this were
quite random, Grete. His father asks him, W7!a/ were };oci p/a);I.#g
at with your doll? ALnd Ha,ns a,nswers, I said Grete to her. Why? alsks
his father. Bccawsc J s¢z.cJ Grc/c Jo Aer, replies Hans. If one has read
the observation carefully, one notices what seems to have rather
escaped the father's notice, namely that this is the same Grete who
was the witness in his game with his mother.
But by this point substantial progress has been made, since the
mastery of the mother has already been carried quite far. This term
mag/cr); needs to be employed in its most technical sense, and you
will see by whose intermediary he has learned to lead her by the rein,
and even to give a few whacks.
Little Hans pushes a small penknife through the doll, then
manipulates it to make the knife drop out. He is remaking his own
hole, but this time with a small penknife, which seems to have been
pushed in through the hole where the doll lets out its squeaking
voice.
Transformations 343
Little Hans has definitively found the last word, bringing down
the final curtain on the farce. The mother had kept in reserve, in her
head, a little knife with which to cut it off him. And he has hacked
the route by which to make it drop out.
22 May 1957
XXI
THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS
AND THE FATHER'S
SHORTCOMING
I,win/and the garment

Unscrewing the bathtub
Fuck her a bit more
A suppletion for the father
Unproductive maternal castration
The Jde¢ of Hanna
9 April the two pairs of drawers

I 1 April the bath and the borer
13 April Hanna's fall
14April thebigbox...
15April ... andthe stork
16 April the whipped horse
21 April the imaginary embarkation with the father
" the major dialogue
22 April the initiation rite on the little truck
" the penknife in the doll
24 April the lamb
26 April Lodi
30 ALpr.ll bin ich der vatti
2 May the fitter
Let's resume today a few of our remarks on little Hans, who for a
while now has been the object of our attention.
Iremindyouofthespiritinwhichthiscommentaryisbeingpursued.
What,essentially,isthislittleHans?Itistheprattlingofafive-year-old
child from 1 January until 2 May 1908. This, for the first-time reader,
is what presents as little Hans. If the reader is more prepared, and it's
not hard to be so, he will know that this prattling is of interest.
Mother's Drawers and Father's shortcoming 345
Why is this of interest? It's of interest because it has been posited,

at least in principle, that there is a certain relation between this
prattling and something that is utterly substantial, namely a phobia,
with all the inconveniences that it brings to the life of this young
subject, all the worry that it causes those around him, and all the
interest that it arouses in Professor Freud.
I consider the elucidation of this relation between his prattling
and the phobia to be of the utmost importance, and there is no
reason to go hunting this relation out beyond the prattling, because
no such beyond-zone is presented to us in the observation. Any such
zone only presents itself to our minds after the event, with the fully
imperious character of prejudice. By way of example, take the point
I left you with last time, the story of the doll through which little
Hans cuts a hole with a penknife.
Today I have drawn up a chronology. I think that you have now
had time to read and reread the observation on little Hans, and that
these indications should be vivid enough on their own.
Last week I concluded with little Hans's reactions to his mother's

drawers, with everything that is problematic about the exchanges
and questioning between the father and the child, and about the sort
of deep misunderstanding in which the dialogue unfolds.
I accentuated, as does Freud, what struck him as the most essen-
tial residue of this dialogue on the mother's drawers, namely Hans's
assertion, which was neither suggested nor induced by his father's
questioning, that the two pairs of drawers carry an absolutely differ-
ent sense depending on whether they are being worn by his mother
or are there on their own account. In this latter case, little Hans spits
and rolls around on the floor, remonstrates, and makes a show of
disgust, the key to which he doesn't yield, but which he desires should
be conveyed to the Professor in writing. When the drawers are on his
mother, he says that they have an altogether different sense for him.
Having accentuated this, I have since heard some people express-
ing some mild astonishment at my having eluded the connection
between the said fJose#, the mother's drawers, and the /win/
In little Hans's vocabulary, £almp/ is excrement. It goes by this
atypical name, just as it is exceedingly frequent in children that a
fortuitous name, if not a random one, should be ascribed to this
function on the basis of a first denomination linked to a certain con-
nection with the exercise of this function. We are going to see what
this is in the case of this /win/
So, it has been imputed to me that, due to goodness knows what

systems-inclined mindset, I have elided the anal stage that looms
up in our minds right on cue, just like when the button is pressed to
provoke some such conditioned reflex in Pavlov's dog. No sooner
have you heard mention of excrement than you're barking out -
4#cz/ s/czge./ ,4#cr/ sf¢ge./ j4#cz/ f/¢ge./ Well, let's speak about the anal
stage, because it's only right that things should pass out normally!
I would like you to stand back a little from the observation, and
to see how either way there is one thing that is never really indicated
throughout the process of this cure. Indeed, is there a cure? I cer-
tainly didn't say so. I said it was something that has a fundamental
function in our experience of analysis, as do each of Freud's major
case studies. To put it rapidly, the one thing that is never indicated
is any rhythm, or any mechanism, that could be inscribed into the
register of frustration.
Throughout the whole period of the cure, not only does little
Hans not undergo any frustration, but he is fully sated. Is there
regression or aggression? Without doubt there is aggression, but
it's certainly linked neither to any frustration nor to any moment of
regression. If there is regression, it's not in the instinctual sense, in
the sense of a resurgence of something from before.
If there is indeed one phenomenon of regression, it's in a register
that belongs to the realm of what I have indicated for you many
times as possible. It is effectively what occurs when, through the
necessity of the subject's elucidation of his problem, he requires, he
pursues, the reduction of such and such an element of his being-in-
the-world, of his relationships, from, for example, the symbolic to
the imaginary, and even sometimes, as is manifest in this observa-
tion, from the real to the imaginary. In other words, there is a change
of approach to the signifiers of one of the terms that is present.
This is exactly what you are going to see occurring over the course
of the observation when little Hans is pursuing his development.
Goodness knows how rigorous and even urgent this is. Indeed, this
is what characterises the signifying process of the unconscious, inso-
much as Freud defined it as unconscious, that is to say, as something
that occurs without the subject being able to account for it in any
way whatsoever, literally without his knowing what is he is doing.
It's enough for him simply to be aided, incited, in this development
of the signifying incidence that he himself has introduced as neces-
sary to his psychological sustenance. In managing to develop it, he
draws from it a certain solution that moreover is not necessarily a
normative solution, nor the best solution, but certainly a solution
that, in the case of little Hans, has the most evident effect of resolv-
ing the symptom.
Let's come back to the /win/

Freud refers the signs of disgust that are shown when little Hans
sees his mother's drawers to the fwm2/Zwfam7"c'J7fecz#g, the co#Je:xJ
o/ ffee /w7M/. His father has just posed a few questions that lead
in this direction, Hans having surely evinced how the question of
excrement was neither insignificant nor uninteresting for him. But
of course this /win/co#/c:¥f turns around. We can conversely say that
the /ztJ77/appears to have been brought in with regard to the drawers.
What is meant by this? It's not simply the fact that little Hans is
led to speak about these functions of excrement in relation to the
reaction of disgust that he shows when he sees his mother's drawers.
In what way do excrement and everything to do with anality enter
the fray of the observation? We are immediately told that this is not
unrelated to the background, that it is not unconnected with his
own exorener[+al function which had once afforded him a great deal
o/p/cczswre. However, what is surely at stake here is ffee c7csz.rc /or
sccj.7cg fez.s 777o/fecr c7o /#m/, to the extent that he tags on right behind
her whenever she is putting on or taking off her drawers.
Little Hans badgers his mother, and she excuses herself to his
father - who has resumed his little inquiry and who overlooks very
little of what is going on - by saying, fee gocf o# pcsrcrj.#g mc /j.// J
/c/ fez.in i.#. So, there is this game between little Hans and his mother,
of seeing and not seeing, and not only that, but also of seeing what
cannot be seen, because it doesn't exist, and little Hans knows this
full well. To see what cannot be seen it has to be seen behind a veil,
that is, a veil that has been held in front of the inexistence of what is
to be seen. It is precisely behind the theme of the veil, of the pair of
drawers, of this garment, that the essential fantasy of the relation-
ships between mother and child lies hidden. This is the fantasy of
the phallic mother. It is in relation to this theme that the /win/is
introduced.
Consequently, if I have been leaving this /win/ on its own plane,
that is, on a secondary plane, it's not because of some systematic
mindset, it's because in the observation it is only brought before us
in this connection. In other words, it's not sufficient in an analysis
simply to be breathing an unfamiliar air to find oneself by the same
stroke delighted at being back on familiar ground, to content oneself
with telling us that here we can get back in touch with the same old
tune, of the anal complex in this instance. Rather, it's a matter
of finding out at such a moment in the analysis what the precise
function of this theme is. If this theme is always important for us,
it's not merely because of this purely implicit signification, which in
itself is vague and linked to geneticist ideas that can constantly be
called into question in this particular case, at any moment of the
observation, but because of its connection with the complete system

of the signifier in so far as it is evolving, as much in the symptom
over the course of the illness as in the process of cure.
The /win/carries an extra meaning within this system on account
of its strict homology with the function of the drawers, that is to say,
the function of the veil. Both the /win/and the drawers are a thing
that can fall. The veil falls, and it's precisely in so far as the veil has
fallen that there is a problem for little Hans.
He lifts, if I may say so, the flap of this veil, because it is in con-
sequence of the experience of 9 April, of the long explanation about
the drawers, that we next see the bathtub fantasy appearing, that is
to say, something that bears the closest relation to the fall. The com-
bination of this dropping with the other term that is present, and
with which he is confronted in the phobia, namely the biting, yields
the theme of detachability, of unscrewing, which will be pursued as
an essential element in reducing the situation across the succession
of fantasies.
We need therefore to take a close look at this succession of little
Hans's fantasies and to conceive of them as a myth in develop-
ment, as a discourse. Furthermore, nothing else is involved in the
observation but a series of reinventions of this myth with the aid
of imaginary elements. It's a matter of comprehending the function
behind this turning progress, these successive transformations of the
myth which, at a deep level, represent the solution to the problem
for Hans, the problem of his own position in existence to the extent
that it has to be situated in relation to a certain truth, in relation to
a certain number of truthful reference points, where he can find his
own place.
Were some further proof required of what I'm telling you - and
I'm insisting a little given the objection that has been levelled at
me and, since I've come up against it, I want to see it through to
the end - I would bid you refer to the text to see what this /win/
ultimately turns out to be. When little Hans is coming back from his
grandmother's on the Sunday evening, on 12 April, Hans shows his
disgust at the black upholstery of the seats in the carriage, because
they are /win/. In the explanation that follows, what is it that comes
to be compared with the black, with the /wm# Well, a black blouse
and black stockings. The close relationship between the theme of the
/win/and the mother's garments, that is, the veil, is registered in the
observation by little Hans himself.
For that matter, what is this /win/ Where does it come from? Why
does little Hans call excrement /wm# We are also told in the observa-
tion that Lwm4/comes by association with stocking, S/r#7#p/, and
its dark colour.
Throughout the segment of the observation that we are pursuing in

an examination afforded by Freud's analysis, it is quite clear that the
/w77i/, the excrement, enters the fray here as a particular function of
the far more crucial signifying articulation - which in truth is the only
important thing for us to see -that is its relationship with the theme of
the garment, the theme of the veil, behind which is hidden the denied
absence of the mother's penis. This is the essential signification.
We alter nothing in the direction of the observation itself, and
not by any biased mindset, when we take this axis to understand
the progress of these mythical transformations through which the
reduction of the phobia is brought about in the analysis.
We came as far as 11 April and the bathtub fantasy.

I told you that the bathtub represented something that starts to
bring about the mobilisation of the situation, that is, the situation of
the stifling reality of the mother, the sole reality to which Hans feels
bound, for some unspecified reason, and which produces a maximum
level of anxiety. From the time that he feels that he is being delivered
up to her, threatened by her and annulled by her, this reality of the
mother represents a danger situation. Moreover, this is a danger that
in itself is absolutely unnameable, strictly speaking. It's a matter of
seeing how the child will manage to get out of this situation.
I remind you of the fundamental schema for the child's situation
vis-a-vis the mother, when he is at a moment of losing the mother's
love.
mother
S
mother's breast
R
This mother is the symbolic mother, the first element of reality

that is symbolised by the child in that she can essentially be absent
or present. When there is a refusing of love on her part, the com-
pensation for this refusal is found in the quashing brought about by
a real satisfaction, derived from the real breast. This doesn't mean
that an inversion is produced. Indeed, to the extent that the breast
becomes a compensation, it becomes the symbolic gift. The mother,
meanwhile, becomes a real element, that is to say, an all-powerful
element that refuses love.
The progress in the situation with the mother lies in how the child
has to discover, beyond the mother, what the mother loves. It is not
the child himself, but the I., the imaginary element, that is to say, the
mother's desire for the phallus. Ultimately, what the child has to do
at this level - which is not to say that he does do it - is to manage to
formulate i S (j.). This is what we are shown in the playful alternation
in the deportment of the child who is still a toddler, which accompa-
nies his playful occultation of the symbolic part.
For little Hans, this schema has been complicated by the intro-
duction of two elements that are real.
mother
S
Penls mother's breast Hanna

R
On the one hand there is Hanna, a real child who comes to com-
plicate the situation of the relations beyond the mother, and then on
the other hand there is something that belongs to him but which he
literally doesn't know what to do with, a real penis that is starting
to stir and which has received an unfavourable greeting from the
person on whom it functions. Little Hans comes to ask his mother
what she thinks of his widdler, an aunt having said a little while
balck, he has got a dear little thingummy. His mother, however, does
not extend such a warm welcome, and the question then becomes
very complicated.
To fathom this complication, you need only take the two poles
of the phobia, the two elements for which the horse is dreaded. As I
expidlned, the horse bites and the horse f alls.
The horse bites, that is to say -Since I can no longer satisfy mother
at all, she will take satisfaction, just as I did when she did not satisfy
me at all, biting me as I bit her, for this is my last line of recourse when
I cannot be sure of her love .
The horse falls, thfat is to say - It falls just as I do, little Haus, at
the instant when I ar'n left in the lurch, when there is no more but for
Haruna.
However, it is quite clear on the other hand that, in a certain way,
needs must that little Hans be eaten and bitten. Needs must, because
ultimately this is what corresponds to a revalorisation of the penis
that has been taken for nothing at all, that has been rejected by his
mother to the full extent that it has to become something, and this is
what little Hans aspires to. His being bitten, his being seized by the
mother, is something that is as much desired as feared.
The same goes for what is involved in the falling. The horse's fall
is also something that can be desired by little Hans. There is more
than one element of the situation that little Hans desires to see
fall, and the first of these, once we have introduced the category of
the dropping into the observation, will present in the form of little
Ha,r[r\al. Hilrs says, I thought to myself Henna was on the balcony
¢#c7/c// c7ow# ojff J.f. The father adds that the railing of the balcony
was designed in the most unpractical way, by a metal-worker of the
Scccssz.o#z.J/ 7#ovemc#/ -we are in the home of folk who stand at the
valrig"AId Of progress -and had big gaps in it which I had to have filled
w;./fe w!.rc #cf /z.#g, hideous as this must have been, so as to avoid little
Hans pushing young Hanna a little too vigorously through one of
the gaps.
So, the function of the biting, like the function of the falling, are
given in the most apparent structures of the phobia. They are its
essential elements. As you can tell, these are double-edged signifier-
elements. Such is the true meaning of the term czmbz.vo/e#ce. The fall,
like the bite, is not merely feared by little Hans. They are elements
that can also enter the fray in an opposite sense. From one side, the
biting is desired, because it will play a crucial role in the solution
of the situation, just as the fall is equally a desired element. While
the girl herself must not fall, one thing is certain and this is that the
mother will trace a falling curve, for the full run of the observation,
starting from the moment conditioned by the curious appearance of
the instrumental function of the unscrewing. This function appears
for the first time, enigmatically, in the bathtub fantasy.
As I said last week, what is in question here is an anxiety that con-
cerns not only the mother in reality, but the whole surrounding, the
whole milieu, everything that thus far had constituted little Hans's
reality, the fixed bearings of his reality, what last time I called /cJ
bczrczqcte, the whole shack. With the first fantasy of the plumber
coming along to unscrew the bath, this whole shack begins to be
dismantled in detail.
These connections are not in the least abstract connections. They
are wholly contained within the experience. Don't forget that the
observation discloses how baths had already been unscrewed in front
of little Hans, because when they went on holiday to Gmunden, cz
small bath had been packed in a box. On the other hand, we have
some notion of an earlier house move, though we can only regret
that the observation does not offer a precise date for this. It must
lie in the space of time covered by the anamnesis of the observa-
tion, namely the two years, prior to the illness, on which we have a
number of notes from the parents.
Moving house, like the transporting of the bath to Gmunden,
has already afforded little Hans the signifying material for what it
means to dismantle the whole shack. He already knows that this
can happen, and this was without any doubt an experience that had
already been integrated to a greater or lesser extent into his specific
handling of the signifier. The fantasy of the unscrewed bathtub is
tantamount to a first step into the perception of what presents first
of all with a character that is opaque, that is purely a signal of an
inhibition, an arrest, a frontier, a limit beyond which one cannot
pass, namely the phobia. This can only be mobilised in the phobia
itself, where there are elements that can be differently combined.
In other words, along with the horse's bite - which brings to
the fore these teeth, this pj.7!cc, the plural signification of which I
explained for you last time and which in French as in German and
in many other tongues, notably in Greek, is both what the horse
bites with and something that means pj.#ccrs or p/;.crs - there appears
for the first time the character who, with his pincers and pliers,
starts to come into play and to introduce an element of evolution.
This evolution is, I repeat, a purely signifying evolution. You're not
going to tell me how there are already instinctual traces in the child
that explain how his behind is unscrewed, how it's both the same
thing and in other respects something different. In other words, it
is nowhere else but in the signifier itself, in the human world of the
symbol, which also embraces the tool and the instrument, that the
development will unfold of the mythical evolution in which little
Hans is engaged through the obscure and fumbling collaboration
between him and the two protagonists who have been looking into
his case in order to psychoanalyse it.
I will pause for a moment on the fact that there are not only the
bathtub and the unscrewing in the fantasy, there is also at that
moment the borer, the gimlet. Here, as always, there is a very keen
perception, linked to the freshness of the discovery, which means
that the onlookers who are at the explorative forefront of the analy-
sis are in no doubt as to what this borer is. They say that it's the
paternal penis. Here again there is something vague about the text.
Is the target of this penis little Hans or his mother? I would say that
this ambiguity is quite valuable, and all the more so because we shall
better understand what is at issue.
Once more, you can see the proof of what I'm telling you, namely
that it's not sufficient to have in your minds the more or less complete
list of classic situations in analysis, including the inverted Oedipus
complex where, perceiving the parents' coitus, the child can identify
with the feminine role. That we find little Hans identifying here with
his mother, well, it's true, why not? But on one condition, which is
that we would not understand wdy it is true, because when one says
this and nothing more, not only does it not hold any interest, but it
doesn't match, to any degree, anything that represents the ins and
outs that come together in the apparition of the fantasy, where the
child imagines, and himself articulates, that something has come
along to make a big hole in his belly. This can take on meaning only
in the context, in the signifying evolution, of what is at issue.
Let's say that at this point little Hans is explaining to his father -
Just bloody give her it for once, right where it belongs . This is .rrrdeed
all that is in question in little Hans's relation with his father. All
along, we have a notion of this shortcoming and the effort that little
Hans is making to restore, I wouldn't say a normal situation - no
such thing has been in question since the father started playing the
role that he has been playing with Hans, namely that of begging
him please to believe that Daddy is not unkind - but a structured
situation. And in this structured situation, there are firm reasons for
little Hans, at the same time as tackling the ousting of the mother,
correlatively to provoke, and imperiously so, the father's function-
ing in relation to the mother.
I repeat that there are a thousand ways, a thousand angles, from
which such fantasies of passivity can intervene over the course of the
analysis of a young boy, sweeping him up in a fantasmatic relation
with the father in which he identifies with the mother.
To go no further than my own analytic experience, not so long
ago I saw a man who was no more homosexual than little Hans
could in my opinion have become, but who, even so, at one point
in his analysis voiced how, without any doubt, in his childhood he
had fantasised being in the maternal position, precisely so as to offer
himself, if I may say so, as a victim in his mother's place. His whole
childhood situation was lived in the shadow of a sort of importunity
of the father's sexual insistence, the latter being highly rambunctious
and, indeed, demanding in his needs upon the subject's mother, who
deflected him with all the force she could muster. The child perceived,
rightly or wrongly, that she lived through the situation as a victim.
This had been integrated into the development of the subject's
symptomatology, yet the subject was a neurotic. On no account can
we come to a standstill merely at the feminised position, or even the
homosexual position, represented functionally at a given moment of
the analysis by the outcome of this fantasy, because its context lends
it an utterly different sense. It even lies in opposition to what occurs
in the observation on little Hans.
Little Hans is saying to his father, /#ck fecr a bz./ more, while the
other subject, my patient, is telling his,/wok Acr a bz./ /css. Clearly it's
not the same, even though they each have to make use of the term,
fuck her , alnd eve;A. fuck me instead of her if need be . It is, thelefore,
the signifying connection of the term that enables us to appreciate

what is at stake.
In the way I have presented it, the situation that is thereby created
apparently has no way out, because the father doesn't step up. You
will tell me that the father nevertheless exists, that he is there. What
is the function of the father in the Oedipus complex? It's quite clear
that at some point, and regardless of the form in which the deadlock
of the child's situation with the mother might present, another
element has to be introduced.
These things need to be repeated. If we don't repeat them, we lose
track of them. This is why we are going once again to spell out the
Oedipus complex.
0f course, this won't be a re-articulation of the Oedipus complex

because by definition, if the Oedipus complex is fundamental, it
must be explained in a thousand different ways. Nevertheless, there
are structural elements that we find every time and which are the
same, at least with respect to their arrangement and with respect to
their number.
On one plane, the father comes in as a third party in the situation
between the child and his mother. If we take it on another plane,
he comes in as a fourth element, because there are already three
elements due to the inexistent phallus. This is the c#-sol., the j.#-i.fsc//
of the situation, if you will excuse this expression of which I'm
not especially fond but which I'm compelled to use in order to go
quickly.I I mean that, for the time being, I'm considering the father
insomuch as he must be in the situation together with the others,
independently of what will come to pass for the po#r-soz. of the
subject, his/or-Aj.77tsc//. Nor am I especially fond of this expression
because you can take this powr-soz. as something that is given in
the subject's consciousness, when in fact it lies for the greater part
in the subject's unconscious, to the extent that this has to do with
the effects of the Oedipus complex. I'm using the term, however, to
mark out the distinction that I am noting in the fact that the father
must be here c#-soz.. What should his role be?
I cannot rehearse the whole theory of the Oedipus complex.
Nevertheless, we can say that the father is the one who possesses the
mother, who possesses her as a father, with his true penis which is
an ample penis, in contradistinction to the child who is in the grip
of the problem of his instrument being both poorly assimilated and
insufficient, not to say spurned and disdained.
What does the analytic theory of the Oedipus complex teach us?
What is it that makes the Oedipus complex necessary in some way?
I'm not speaking about biological necessity, nor internal necessity,
but a necessity that is at any rate empirical because it was discovered
in the experience. If the existence of the Oedipus complex means
anything, then it's that the natural increase of the young boy's
sexual potency does not happen by itself, nor in one go, nor even in
two goes. If we take it purely and simply on the physiological plane,
it could effectively be seen to happen in two phases, but taking it
solely at the level of this natural increase does not suffice to any
degree when it comes to accounting for what is actually going on.
The fact is that for the situation to develop in normal conditions,
I mean in conditions that allow the human subject sufficiently to
maintain his presence not only in the real world but in the symbolic
world, that is to say, for him to tolerate himself in the real world
such as it is organised with its symbolic weft, he needs to have not
only this sort of perception of what last time I called movcme#/, with
its acceleration that carries the subject along and transports him,
but also a point of arrest, a fixing down of two terms. The true penis,
the recz/pc#z.s, the valid penis, the father's penis, has to be function-
ing on the one hand, while on the other the child's penis has to be
situated in a ycrg/c!.cAw#g with the father's penis, in a comparison
with the father's penis that will somehow meet up with its function,
its reality, its dignity and its integration as a penis, to the extent that
there will be a passage through the cancelling out that is known as
the castration complex.
In other words, it's to the extent that his own penis is momentarily
annulled, in a dialectical moment, that the child is destined to accede
to a full paternal function later on, that is to say, to be someone
who feels himself to be in legitimate possession of his virility. And it
appears that this /egz./j.mczfe is essential to the felicitous functioning
of the sexual function in the human subject, Without this register,
everything that we have to say about the determinism of premature
ejaculation and the various disturbances of sexual function has no
meaning.
This has merely been an overall situating of the problem of the
Oedipus complex. It is important to bear in mind that the experience
has dictated this. Moreover, it was not to be predicted. Already,
in what I have just set out, the schema of the situation was not
necessarily predictable in itself. The proof of this is that the analytic
experience, which uncovered the Oedipus complex as an integration
into the virile function, allows us to push things further and to say
that the symbolic father, the Name-of-the-Father, is essential to the
structuration of the symbolic world.
The symbolic father is pivotal in this sort of severance that is

more essential than primordial weaning, and through which the
child exits the pure and simple coupling with maternal almightiness.
If the symbolic father is the mediating element that is essential to
the symbolic world, if the Name-of-the-Father is so essential to any
articulation of human language, then this is strictly speaking the
reason behind Ecclesiastes telling us that, 7lfec/oo/ Acz/fe s¢z.d I.# fej.s
Aear/, fAcrc z.$ 7co God.2 It is strictly speaking foolish to say in one's
heart that there is no God, quite simply because it is foolish to utter
a thing that is in contradiction with the very voicing of language.
You know very well that I'm not professing any deism here. There
is the symbolic father.
The experience teaches us that when it comes to the specific inci-
dence of the father's entrance in the assumption of the virile sexual
function, the real father is one that plays a role of essential presence.
To the extent that the real father is truly playing the game of his
function as a castrating father, his /a/Acr /w7!cfi.o7c in a form that
is concrete, empirical and, I was almost going to say, to a certain
degree degenerate - the personage of the primordial father in his
tyrannical and more or less horrifying form such as he is presented
to us in the Freudian myth - to the extent, in other words, that the
father, such as he exists, fulfils his imaginary function in what is
empirically intolerable about it, which even leads to revolt when he
makes his impact felt as a castrator, the castration complex can be
lived through, and solely from this angle.
What we have here is marvellously illustrated in the case of little
Hans. There is a symbolic father, and little Hans, who is no fool,
believes right away in this symbolic father. Freud is the good Lord.
You can well imagine that this is one of the most crucial elements
for balance to be established for little Hans. Naturally, he believes
in God right away, and he believes in him like we all believe in God,
namely, without believing in Him. He believes in Him because this
reference to a sort of supreme witness is an element that is essential
to any kind of articulation of truth. There is someone who knows
everything, and he's found him. It's Professor Freud. What luck!
The good Lord is here on earth. Not all of us are so lucky.
In any case, this will be of service to him, but on no account will
it make up for the shortcoming of the imaginary father, of the cas-
trating father. The whole problem lies here. Little Hans has to find
a suppletion for this father who persists in not wanting to castrate
him.3 This is the key to the observation.
It's a matter of seeing how little Hans will be able to bear his
real penis, precisely in so far as it is not under threat. This is the
fundament of the anxiety. What is intolerable in his situation is
the shortcoming on the side of the castrator. In fact, throughout the

whole observation, you will never see anything appearing that could
represent the structuration, the real-isation, even the fantasmatic
experience, of something that could be called a castration.
Yet some kind of injury is imperiously called upon by little Hans,
and anything can be turned to this purpose. Contrary to what Freud
says here, there is nothing in the experience of Fritzl hurting his foot
on a stone that is called of its own accord to make the connection
[with the horse falling down]. The wish that the father should be
exposed to this same injury, this kind of mythical circumcision, will
appear thereafter in the long dialogue of 21 April, when he will say
to his [athel, you've got to be naked, du sollst als Nackter. Ewe;ryoue
is so stupefied by this that they wonder what the child might mean.
They tell themselves that the child is starting to speak biblically.
Even in the observation, there is a parenthesis to say that he surely
means b¢rc/oo/. Yet little Hans is the one who is truthful here. It's a
matter of knowing whether the father will indeed prove himself, that
is to say, will confront the fearsome mother like a man, and whether
he, the father, has been through, or not, the essential trial by injury,
knocking up against the stone. This tells youjust how far this theme,
in its most fundamental and mythical form, is something to which
little Hans aspires with his whole Being.
Unfortunately, nothing of the sort occurs. It's not enough for
little Hans to have uttered what he uttered in the dialogue with his
father. He has only shown that he was burning with an imperious
desire for the wrath of a jealous God - cz/cr# is the German term
used in the Bzbc/ - namely a father who is against him, who wants
to castrate him. But he doesn't encounter this, and so the situation
takes a very different turn. I shall be telling you presently how we
can conceive of this.
Note that while there is no castrator, because we are on the side
of the father, we do have on the other hand a number of characters
who have come in the stead of the castrator. We have the plumber
who began by unscrewing the bath, then to bore a hole in him. Then
in a short while we shall see someone else, the coachman, who is not
strictly speaking implicated in the desired function of the father. In
any case, there is what little Hans himself calls the Scfe/osscr, the
fitter, in the last fantasy, on 2 May, which brings the situation to a
close. God does not carry out all of His functions very well, and so
in comes the c7c#s cx m¢cAz.#a, the fitter, to whom little Hans assigns
a share of the functions that he is there to fulfil.
Note how everything boils down to the following. Onejust has to
know how to read the text to see that it could not be more striking
than how it is in the final fantasy, which literally closes both the cure
and the observation, namely that what the fitter comes to change is
little Hans's behind, his rear. They started to dismantle the whole
shack, but it wasn't enough. Something had to be changed in little
Hans. Without any doubt, this is where we find the fundamental
schema of the symbolisation of the castration complex.
Yet it can be seen in the observation just how far even Freud
allows himself to be carried along by the schema. There is no trace
in little Hans's fantasy of a replacement for what he has on the front
side. The father is the one who says, fee grzvc )/ow a bi.gger wz.dd/cr, and
Freud falls into step with this fantasising. Unfortunately, there is
nothing of the sort in little Hans's fantasy. His behind is unscrewed
and he is given another. Then he is told to turn around, and that's
where it ends. The text has to be taken as it is. The specificity of the
observation on little Hans lies in this, along with the very thing that
ought to enable us to understand the full whole.
If, indeed, after coming so close, things didn't go any further, it's
because things couldn't go any further, because if things had been
able to go further, there wouldn't have been a phobia but a normal
castration complex and Oedipus complex instead, and there would
have been no need for all this complication. It would have taken
neither the phobia, nor the symptom, nor the analysis, to arrive at
this point, which is not necessarily the stipulated point, the typical
point.
All of this is intended by and large to locate the function of the
father in this instance, or more precisely to locate how he is both
incontestably there, active and helpful in the analysis, but at the
same time, due to the fact that he is there in the analysis - and this
is predetermined by the situation as a whole - his functions are
clearly incompatible with playing the role of the castrating father
effectively.
You will observe that, all in all, while there is castration to the
extent that the Oedipus complex is castration, it's no accident that
what has been perceived but dimly, yet perceived nevertheless, is
that castration bears just as much relation to the mother as to the
father. We can see in the description of the primordial situation how
maternal castration implies for the child the possibility of devora-
tion and biting. In relation to this anteriority of matemal castration,
paternal castration is a substitute that is perhaps no less terrible, but
which is certainly more favourable.
It is more favourable because it is open to development, whereas
in the case of maternal castration, with its engulfment and devora-
tion by the mother, it does not lead on to any development. With the
term of the father, there is the possibility of dialectical development,
namely a rivalry with the father, a possible murder of the father,
and a possible eviration of the father. On the side of the father, the
castration complex is productive in the Oedipus complex, whereas
it is not so on the side of the mother for the simple reason that it is
quite impossible to perform this eviration on the mother, because
she has nothing that could undergo such eviration.
Let's take things up at the point where we left our little Hans, who
is now standing at this crossroads.
We can already see an adumbration of the mode of suppletion by
which the primordial situation will be left behind, dominated as it
was by the pure threat of total devoration by the mother. Something
of this is already sketched out in what I'm calling /foe ba/A cz#d borer
/cz#/czs};. Like each of little Hans's fantasies, it's the beginning of an
articulation of the situation. There is, as it were, a return to sender,
that is to say, a returning of the threat to the mother. The mother is
the one who is ousted, and the father is the one who is called upon
to play his role of borer.
Once again, I note that I'm doing no more than taking literally
what Freud brings us. He is so riveted by the role of the borer that
he makes a remark without resolving it himself. He doesn't resolve
it for a good reason, which is that it has to be considered in the light
of philology, ethnography, myths, and so on. The remark bears
on the relation there might be between BOArer and geborc77, being
born. In fact, there is no etymological link between their respective
roots. This is the whole distance that lies between the Latin/crz.6, to
smite, and/cro, to bear. They don't share the same root, and when
one traces the derivations across the different tongues they remain
absolutely distinct. Then there is /orGrc, to bore, which clearly is
not the same thing as /ero. It is again to the term of bearing that
gcbore# is traced. The essential distinction between the two roots
can be found as far back as it has been possible to trace, but what
is important here is that Freud comes to a halt on this. He comes
to a halt on something that is literally an encounter of the signifier
with the purely signifying problematic that it posits, because ulti-
mately BOArer evokes Prometheus - Pr¢7„cz#/foc], etymologically /fee
borer.4 Meanwhile, gcbore# is /a bcczr, that is to say, the fundamental
bearing of child, bringing him forth into the world. And so there
are two distinct and even opposite elements. This is a parenthetical
remark to show you the importance that Freud himself attaches to
the signifying term.
Along what line will the ensuing part of the solution, of the sup-
pletion, brought about by little Hans develop? The solution is mere
suppletion in that he is somehow powerless to bring about a maturing
- allow me if you will to use this expression, though it's not about
instinctual maturation - that would press the dialectic development
of the situation in a direction that would not be a dead-end. It

has to be reckoned that he arrives at something, because there is a
development. At the very least, it's a matter of comprehending it,
and of comprehending it in its entirety. Today I can do no more
than indicate this.
By what means does the whole development unfold, starting from
the point we've reached, around mid-April? Hanna is introduced as
an element whose fall is possible and desired. The same goes for the
maternal bite, which is taken on as an instrumental element, as a
substitute for the castrating intervention. Moreover, it is diverted in
its direction, because it doesn't bear on the penis but on something
else, something that in the final fantasy culminates in a change. It
has to be believed that this change already has a certain degree of
sufficiency in itself, or at any rate a degree of sufficiency when it
comes to reducing the phobia. At the end, Hans has changed. This
is what is obtained. Next time, we will be seeing all the consequences
of this, which are absolutely crucial for Hans's development, and
quite intriguing to boot.
So, Hanna comes into play. She is the other inassimilable term
in the situation. The whole process of Hans's fantasies consists in
restoring this intolerable element of the real to the imaginary register
where it can be reintegrated, through stages that we are venturing to
describe one at a time.
Read, or reread, the observation with this key in hand. See how
Hanna is reintroduced in a completely fantasmatic form, as when
little Hans tells us that Hanna had already gone with them to
Gmunden two years ago, when in fact at that time she was still in
her mother's belly. Yet little Hans tells us that they had taken her in
a little box on the back of the coach, where she had a jolly time, and
even that they had taken her all the previous years as well, because
little Hanna has always been there. What is intolerable in the situ-
ation is that little Hans cannot envisage that there should not be a
Hanna during the holidays in Gmunden, and he makes up for this
in his reminiscing.
I'm employing this term very precisely, with its Platonic accent, in
opposition to the function of repetition and of the re-found object.
Hans turns the Hanna-object into an object that has always been
there. Just as Plato needed something to explain how we gain access
to the higher world, since we could purportedly enter it even though
we're not part of it, so too does little Hans reduce Hanna to some-
thing that is remembered as a permanent fixture. This reminiscence
is the first stage in the imaginification of this real, and it carries a very
different meaning from all those stories of instinctual regression.
After this, there is a second stage, when she becomes an Idea,
again in the Platonic sense of the term, even an Ideal. What does
little Hans have her do at this stage? This is also in his fantasy - he
has her ride on the horse. It's humorous and brilliant, mythical and
epic, all at once. At the same time, it displays all the characteristics
of those epic texts for which we've been going to great lengths to
describe the two states of condensation, the two states of the epic
poem, and to suppose all sorts of pundits, hecklers and charla-
tans who will expound on what, in epic and myth alike, has to be
explained as hinging at once on what happens in the imaginary
world and on what happens in the real world.
Little Hans cannot exclude the coachman here, while on the other
hand little Hanna has to be on the horse, and also holding the reins.
So, in the same sentence, he says, 7lfec coczcfemo# AacJ /fee rej.#f -
ZJ¢##cz feczc7 /foe rcj.#f /oo. There you have the vivid state of this kind
of internal contradiction which so often in myths leads us to suppose
that two registers are blending confusedly, that there is an incoher-
ent overlap of two stories, when in reality it's because the author,
whether he is Homer or little Hans, is in the grip of a contradiction
between two registers that themselves are essentially different.
You can see this coming alive here in the case of little Hans
through the intermediary of the sister, who becomes his superior
ego once she has become an image. With this key you can read the
signification of each of his appraisals which from a certain point
forth are voiced on the subject of little Hanna, including the admir-
ing appraisals. They are not merely ironic. They are essential to the
little other who is there across from him. He has her perform what
will enable him to start to dominate the situation. Once little Hanna
has been astride the fearsome horse long enough, little Hans will be
able to start to fantasise that he too is taming the horse. It is right
after this that there is the whipped horse. Little Hans is starting to
experience the truth of the forewarning issued by Nietzsche -- Dw
gehst zu Frauen? Vergifo die Peilsche nicht!
We are coming to a stop, but please don't read it as the essential
part of the lesson that I wanted to bring you today. It's merely a
cut-off point that was necessitated by the late hour to which this
disquisition has led us.
5 June 1957
XXII
AN ESSAY IN RUBBER-
SHEET LOGIC
Father in the Frigidaire

Sheaf and sickle
The paternal metaphor
The duplicated mother
An inaginary paternity
The academic year is wearing on, and we may hope that little Hans
is nearing his end.
I should remind you here at the outset that this year we have
set ourselves the goal of revising the notion of the object relation.
I think it will not be misplaced briefly to take a step back so as to
show you, not the ground that has been covered - one always covers
some -but rather, I trust, a certain effect of demystification to which
you know I am greatly attached in matters of analysis.
It seems to me that a minimum requirement in analytic formation
is to realise that while man has to deal with his instincts - instincts
that I credit, whatever some might say, including the death instinct
- what analysis has brought us is, even so, the awareness that not
everything can be summed up and encapsulated in a formula as
simplistic and sanctimonious as the one to which we can commonly
see psychoanalysts rallying, namely that, on the whole, everything is
resolved when the subject's relations with his fellow man are, as they
say, person-to-person relations and not relations with an object.
It is certainly not because I have been trying to show you here
the real complexity of object relations that I would be led to loathe
the expression ody.ec/ rc/cz/!.o#s. Why shouldn't our fellow man be
quite validly an object? I would even say, /Acz#k %eclve7!s /foczf fee z's
¢# oZJy.cc/, because, in truth, in what analysis shows us, at the start
he is commonly even less than an object. He is this thing that comes
to fill the place of the signifier in our questioning, if indeed neurosis
is what I've been saying and repeating that it is, namely a question.
An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic 363
An object is not such a straightforward matter. It's something

that is assuredly to be conquered, and indeed, as Freud reminds
us, it can never be conquered without first being lost. An object is
always a re-conquest. Only by taking up once more a place that he
initially dis-inhabits can man arrive at something that is improperly
called his wfoo/c#ess.
As far as the pcrso# is concerned, you surely realise that it is desir-
able that something should be established between our self and some
subjects who do indeed represent the plenitude of the perso#. Yet
this is precisely the terrain upon which it is hardest to advance. It is
also the terrain upon which every kind of sideslip and confusion sets
in. People commonly imagine that a pcrso# is something for which
we recognise the right to say J, as we do for ourselves. However, we
are clearly very much in a bind whenever it's a matter of saying J
in the full sense, as has been powerfully highlighted by the analytic
experience which has just what it takes to show us what we slide into
whenever it's a matter of thinking about the other party as someone
who says J. At such moments, we make him utter our own J, that is
to say, we induce him into our own mirages.
In short, as I underscored for you last year at the end of my
seminar on the psychoses, the hardest issue to come to grips with
when it's a matter of encountering the pcrso77 is not the J, but the
/foo%. Everything indicates that this /Aow is the limit-signifier. It's the
very thing in relation to which, when we're halfway to it, ultimately
we always have to halt. Nevertheless, it is from this /Aoct that we
receive each investiture. It was not without reason that I brought
last yea.r's serr\ina,I to a. chose on Thou art the one who wilt fiollow me
. . . or who wilt not follow me . . . or who wilt do this . . . or not do this.
If analysis is an experience that has shown us one thing, it's pre-
cisely that all inter-human relations are founded on this investiture
that comes in effect from the Other. This Other is already within us
in the form of the unconscious, but nothing can be accomplished
in our development if not through this constellation that implies
the absolute Other as the seat of speech. If the Oedipus complex
has a meaning then it's precisely that it yields, as the fundament
of our installation between the real and the symbolic, and of our
progress, the existence of He who possesses the Word, of He who
can speak, of the Father. To spell it right out, the Father concretises
the Oedipus complex in a function that, I repeat, is itself essentially
problematic. The question W':7!cz/ z.f /fee FczfAcr.? is ultimately a ques-
tion that is posed at the heart of our analytic experience as an
eternally unresolved questioning, at least for us analysts.
This is the point from which I should like today to take up Little
Hans's problematic in order to show you where and in what way he
places himself in relation to what the Father is and is not. The ques-
tion needs to taken up, however, from further back in the case history.
I shall start over by noting that the only locus from which a response
may be uttered in a full and valid way to the question of the Father
is the locus of a certain tradition. It's not the next room along, as
I often say about the phenomenologies, but rather the next c7oor
along.
If the Father is to find somewhere its synthesis, its full meaning,
then it's in a tradition that is known as a religious tradition. It's
not without reason that over the course of history we have seen
the Judeo-Christian tradition taking shape as the sole attempt to
establish accord between the sexes upon the principle of an opposi-
tion between potentiality and actuality, which finds its mediation
in a form of love. Outside of this tradition - 1et's put this carefully
- any relationship with the object implies the third-party dimension
that we can see articulated in Aristotle. It's a dimension that was
thereafter eliminated by what I might call the apocryphal Aristotle,
the Aristotle of a theology' that was attributed to him much later.
Everyone knows that the 7lfoeo/ogj.¢ 4rj.s/ofc/I.s exists and that it is
apocryphal. The crucial Aristotelian term with respect to the whole
constitution of the object, which stands in opposition to it, is
the third term of privation, crfep7crz€.
The whole object relation such as it has been established in the
analytic literature and in Freudian doctrine revolves around the
notion of privation. Indeed, you have seen this because it was my
point of departure at the start of the year. The notion of priva-
tion is absolutely central to this doctrine, and when we leave it out
of account we cannot understand how the progressive integration
into one's sex, as much for man as for woman, requires that one
acknowledge something that essentially amounts to a privation that
is to be taken on board for the one sex as for the other. This priva-
tion is to be taken on board equally in order fully to assume one's
sex. In short, Pc"j.s#ez.d on one side, the castration complex on the
other.
Naturally, all of this joins up with the most immediate experi-
ence. It is fairly peculiar to see people taking up in a more or less
camouflaged form, and which to a certain degree may be qualified
as dishonest, the idea that all genital maturation entails an oblativ-
ity, a full recognition of the other party, by means of which the
supposedly pre-set harmony between man and woman should be
established. Yet we can see very well that the day-to-day experience
of this is its constant failure.
Go and tell a wife of this day and age that she is potentiality - as
is said by the unknown theologian who went under the fictitious
name of Aristotle throughout the whole medieval and scholastic
tradition - and that you, the man, are actuality, you will receive a
swift response. IVoJ o# }Jowr /j/c./ she will tell you, do );ow fczke me/or
cz pwsAovcr? And this is surely quite clear. Woman has fallen into
the midst of the same problems as us. There's no need to tackle the
feminist or social aspect of the question. It's enough to cite the fine
quatrain that Apollinaire fashioned for the profession of faith that
comes out of the mouth of Theresa-Tiresias, or more precisely her
husband, who says furtively to the policeman -
Je suis une hom6te femme-monsieur

Ma femme est un homme-madame
Elle a emport6 le piano le violon l'assiette au beurre
` Elle est soldat mihistre merdecin2
Certainly we need to be standing on our own two feet on the ground

of our experience and to perceive that if analytic experience has
made some headway into the problem that is most fully presentified
by our whole experience of the development of life, even of neurosis,
then it's precisely to the extent that it has been able to locate the rela-
tions between the sexes on their different echelons of object relation.
But what does this mean? It means, as has been noted - and after all,
not to see this amounts truly to nothing more than drawing over it
a sort of veil of the lowest form of modesty, a false modesty -that if
analysis has led to progress in one thing, then it's very precisely on
the plane of what needs to be called by its name, crofj.c!.Ism.
It is on this plane that the relations between the sexes do indeed
come effectively to be elucidated, in so far as they are to be found
on the path of something that is a fusion, a realisation, a response
to the question posed by the subject regarding his sex, and in so far
as he is both something that has entered the world and that, as for
the rest, he is never satisfied by it, namely the infamous and perfect
oblativity in which the ideal harmony between man and woman is
purported ultimately to be found. We only ever find this on a distant
horizon that doesn't even allow us to name it as one of the goals to
be accomplished in analysis.
To afford a wholesome prospect on what is involved in the pro-
gress of our investigation we need to see that in the relation between
man and woman, once it has been established, a gap still lies wide
open. Something of this must ultimately remain admissible in the
eyes of the philosopher, that is to say, the one who always plays his
cards right. It's that, after all, woman, namely the w/c, essentially
holds the function that she held for Socrates, to wit - the test of his
forbearance, his forbearance of the real.
To enter more vividly into what is set further to punctuate what
I'm asserting, and which will bring us back to little Hans, I'm going
to share with you a titbit that one of my most excellent friends
spotted and brought to my attention. It's a small news item that
reached us a fortnight ago from the depths of America concerning a
woman bound to her husband by a pact of eternal love, and you're
about to see how.
Since her husband's death, this woman has borne, every ten
months, one of his children. This may strike you as rather surpris-
ing, but it's no parthenogenetic phenomenon. On the contrary, it's a
matter of artificial insemination. Vowed as she was to eternal fidel-
ity, by the time a fatal illness had led her husband to his last breath,
she had accumulated a sufficient stock of seminal fluid to allow her
to perpetuate the race of the deceased at her own discretion, and, as
you can see, in the shortest possible time frame, at regularly repeated
intervals.
We were made to wait for this little piece of news, which doesn't
sound like such a big deal, though we might have anticipated it. In
truth, it's the most riveting illustration we could possibly find of
what I've been calling the x of paternity, because I think that you
are quite able to form a grasp of the problems that such a possibility
introduces. Here you have an illustration of what I've been saying
when I've been telling you that the symbolic father is the dead
father. However, the novelty that is here introduced, and which has
just what it takes to highlight the importance of my remark, is that
in this case the real father is the dead father as well.
From this moment forth, it really would be very interesting to ask
oneself what becomes of the Oedipus complex in such a case. On
the plane that lies closest to our experience it would be easy to come
out with a few quips on what lies behind the term/rz.gz.c7 womcz#. As
the la.ttel-dray say.rr\8 goes, femme froide, mari refroidi. Frigid wif e,
Awsbcz"c7 o# z.ce. I might also mention in this connection a slogan one
of my friends came up with for a TV advertisement. It's true that
he had considerable difficulty getting the slogan accepted by British
minds, but this is precisely where its worth lies. Picture a coolly
attractive housewife, and then the voiceover, rr¢cc}; Aos a/rz.gz.d a!.r,
before the shot cuts to her Frigidaire. This is very much how matters
stand in the previous case.
The question that is wonderfully illustrated here is that the real
notion of the father is not to be confounded in any case with the
notion of his fecundity. We can clearly see here that the issue lies
elsewhere, and surely we cannot help but see it when we ask our-
selves the question of what becomes of the notion of the Oedipus
complex. I will leave it to you to extrapolate. Once one has commit-
ted to this path, in a hundred years' time we will be making women
the mothers of children who are the direct sons of the men of genius
alive today, who will have been carefully preserved in little jars. The
question arises, therefore, if something of the father has been cut
out in this instance, and in the most radical way, by cutting out his
speech, then how and by what path, in what fashion, will the speech
of the ancestor be inscribed into the child's psyche? Ultimately, the
mother will be the sole representative and conveyer of this speech,
so how will she give voice to the bottled ancestor?
As you can see, this is not science fiction. It simply has the advan-
tage of laying bare for us one of the dimensions of the problem. This
is being said as a parenthesis, because just now I was speaking on
the theme of an ideal solution to the problem of marriage, at the
next door along. It would be interesting to see how, now that this
problem of posthumous insemination by a consecrated husband has
been made present, the Church will find a means of taking a position
on this. In truth, were the Church to refer to what it pushes to the
fore in similar cases, namely the fundamental character of natural
practices, it could be remarked that such a practice has been made
possible precisely to the extent that we have managed to set Nature
apart from all that is not Nature. From this point forth, perhaps the
term #cz/wrcz/ ought to be given greater precision, and of course one
would then come round to accentuating the great artifice of what
thus far has been known as Nature. In a word, we might not be
unhelpful at this moment as a term of reference. By the same token,
perhaps our good friend Francoise Dolto, or one of her students,
will even become a Church Father.
The distinction between the inaginary, the symbolic and the real
might not suffice to posit the terms of this problem, which, now that
it has been engaged in reality, doesn't appear to me to be all that
close to resolution. However, this story will make it easier for us
to formulate - which is what I desire to do today - the term under
which may be inscribed, not in itself, but for the subject, the sanc-
tioning of the function of the father.
Once we have let in this gust of air that strips the decor from the
columns, it becomes apparent to us that any kind of introduction
to the paternal function belongs to the realm of metaphorical

experience. I am going to illustrate this for you, not by overbur-
dening you with new items, but by recalling for you the heading
under which last year I introduced what here I've been calling
metaphor.
Metaphor is the function, the use of the signifying chain, which
unfolds not in its c'o#7?ecfj.ve dimension - in which any metonymic
usage of the signifying chain is installed - but in its dimension of
sctbs/z./wfj.o#. I didn't go any further when hunting out my example
than something that is within everyone's reach, the Quillet diction-
ary, from which I took the first example listed, namely the line of
versetry Hugo. Sa gerbe n'6tait point avare ni haineuse.3
You will tell me that fortune is favouring me, after what has come
our way in my demonstration, like a ring slipped onto a finger. I
would reply that any metaphor could serve as an analogous dem-
onstration, but I'm going to repeat this one because it's specifically
what leads us back to our subject of phobia.
What is meant by metaphor?
It is not, as the Surrealists say, the passing of the poetic spark
between two terms that are as imaginarily remote as can be.
Admittedly, this definition sounds right, because it's quite clear that
it's not a question of this poor sheaf being ¢v¢rc or feczj.#ewse. Indeed,
it's about the very human strangeness of explaining oneself in this
way, by relating subject to attribute though the intermediary of a
negation, a negation that stands, of course, against the backdrop
of a possible affirmation. To spell it right out, it's not a question of
the sheaf being neither ¢vczrc nor feczz.#cwse, because me¢##eus and
fe¢/c/w/#css are attributes that belong to Boaz no less than to the
sheaf. Boaz turns one and the other to use, suitably employing these
properties as he does his merits, without asking their opinion or
their feelings.
The two things between which metaphorical creation is produced
are what is being explained under the term s¢ gcrbe and the term for
which s¢ gcrbc is substituted, namely the gentleman who has been
spoken of just a moment before in balanced terms, and whose name
is Boaz. The gerbe, the sheaf, has taken his place, a somewhat cumu-
lative place where he is already endued with these qualities of being
neither czvarc nor fecz!.#c"x, having cleared out a certain number of
negative virtues. This is where the sheaf comes in his stead and liter-
ally cancels him out for a moment. Here we meet again the schema
of the symbol gzM death of the thing. It's even better here, because
the name of the protagonist is abolished and his sheaf comes as a
substitute for him.
If there is metaphor here, if this has a meaning, if this is a phase
of pastoral poetry, then it's very precisely because his sheaf, that is
to say, something that is essentially natural, can be substituted for
him. And then Boaz reappears, after having been eclipsed, occulted,
abolished, by the fecund splendour of the sheaf. Indeed, it knows
neither meanness nor hatefulness, and is purely and simply a natural
fecundity.
This bears its meaning in the following part of the poem. What is
at issue is to herald and to announce to Boaz, in the ensuing dream,
how despite his advanced age - as he says himself, he is over eighty
years old - he is soon to be a father. He dreams that he
vit un chene
Qui, sorti de son ventre, allait jusqu'au ciel bleu ;
Une race y montait comme une longue chaine ;
Un roi chantait en bas, en hout mourait un dieu.4
Any creation of a new meaning in human culture is essentially

metaphoric. It's a matter of a substitution which at the same time
maintains what it is substituting. In the tension between what is
abolished or suppressed and what is substituted for it, this novel
thing comes about that introduces so visibly what is being developed
by the poetic improvisation. The new dimension that in this instance
is manifestly incarnated by this Boazian myth is the function of
paternity.
Admittedly, the aging Hugo is, as usual, far from walking always
the meticulous path. He dodders somewhat left, right and centre,
but what is quite clear is that
Pendant qu'il soryrmeillait, R:uth, une moabite,

S'6tait couch6e oux pieds de Booz, le sein rm,
Esp6rant on ne sait quel rayon incormu,
Quand viendrait du r6veil la lumiere subite.5
The style of this extract lies in an ambiguous zone where the realism
blends with some sort of gleam that is a little too intense, even
turbid, redolent of the chiaroscuro in Caravaggio's paintings which,
with all their popular starkness, are perhaps still in our times what
can afford us most frankly a sense of the sacred dimension.
So, a little further on, the same thing is still at stake -
Immobile, ouvrant l'a!il a moiti6 sous ses voiles,

Quel dieu, quel moissomeur de l'6ternel 6t6
Avail, en s'en allant, n6gligemment jet6
Cette foucille d'or dons le champ des 6toiles.6
Neither in my teaching of last year, nor in what I have recently

written on the sheaf in the poem about Boaz and Ruth, did I push
the investigation up to the final point to which the poet develops
the metaphor. I left the sickle out of account because, outside of the
context of what we are doing here, readers might have found it a little
forced. I think, however, that you cannot fail to be struck by how the
whole poem points towards one image, the intuitive and comparative
character of which has been a cause of wonder for nigh on a century.
It has to do with the first waxing crescent of the moon, but you
cannot help but notice that if this thing carries weight, if it is some-
thing more than a lovely stroke of paint, a touch of golden yellow
on the deep blue sky, then it's very precisely in so far as this sky-
bound sickle is the eternal sickle of maternity, the one that has
already played its role between Cronus and Uranus, between Zeus
and Cronus. It's the potentiality I was speaking about earlier, which
is fully represented in woman's mystical expectancy.
With the sickle that is lying around in her arm's reach, this gleaner
will effectively cut the sheaf in question, the one from which the
lineage of the Messiah will spring forth.
Our little Hans, in the creation, development and resolution of his
phobia, can inscribe himself properly into the equation only on the
basis of these terms.
Note if you will that here in the Oedipus complex we have some-
thing in the place of x, where the child stands, with all his problems
in relation to the mother, M. In so far as something will be produced
that is set to constitute the paternal metaphor, this signifier-element
can be placed which is so essential in all individual development and
which is called /Ac cflf/rczfz.o7t camp/cx. As I have said, this holds as
much for woman as for man.
Therefore, we have to posit the following equation -
(+) M - J + s
P is the paternal metaphor.
The x is more or less elided, depending on the case, that is, depend-
ing on the moment of development and the problems to which the
preoedipal period has led the child in relation to the mother, M.
It is in the link of the Oedipal metaphor that, with the phase that
is crucial to any concept of the object, we can thus inscribe a crescent
C or a sickle - its constitutive castration complex - plus something
that is precisely the signification, s, that is to say, that in which Being
finds itself again, and where x finds its solution.
The formula situates the essential moment of the crossing of the
Oedipus complex. This is exactly what we are dealing with in the case
of little Hans. As I explained, having reached a particular degree

of development, there arises the insoluble problem constituted by
the fact that the mother is something as complex as the following
formula, with all the complications it brings with it -
(M + ap + cl)
This, which is to be reed Mother plus phallus plus a for Henna,

designates the impasse that Hans has reached. He cannot get out
of it because there is no Father. There is nothing to metaphorise his
relations with his mother. To spell it right out, there is no way out
on the side of the sickle, on the side of the capital C of the castration
complex. There is no possibility of a mediation, that is to say, of
losing his penis then to find it again.
On the other side of the equation, he finds only the possible biting
of his mother, which is the same mordaciousness with which he
rushes up to her voraciously whenever he misses her. There is no
other real relationship with the mother besides the one that is being
highlighted by the whole of the contemporary theory of analysis,
namely the relationship of devoration. In so far as he has arrived at
this deadlock, he knows no other relationship with the real besides
the one that is called, rightly or wrongly, oral-sadistic. This is what I
am writing with a lower-case in. Indeed, it is in plus everything that
is real for him at this moment, in particular the real that comes to
light and which cannot help but complicate the situation, namely H,
his own penis. This is set out in the following formula -
(M + p + a) M - in + H
Once the problem is presenting itself to him in this way, it is neces-

sary for this element of metaphorical mediation to be introduced
~ for there is no other - in the form of the horse, noted '1 [for
77z7rof] with its spz.rl.fws cz5pcr. The inauguration of the phobia is thus
inscribed into the same formula I have just laid out -
M - in + 11
This will be the equivalent of something that will not for all that
be any the more resolved, namely the mordaciousness insomuch as
for little Hans it is the chief danger in his whole reality, and most
especially the reality that has just come to the surface, namely his
genital reality.
This might seem superficial to you. Don't believe it. Start by making
use of these formulae and you will see afterwards whether they can
indeed be helpful. I can show you umpteen facets across which they
are immediately applicable, and in particular the following.
The horse is said to be at once what bites, what threatens the
penis, and also what falls. According to what little Hans himself
tells us, this is why the horse has been brought into play. It was
brought in first of all as the horse that, standing in front of the cart
that was to take Lizzi's luggage to the station, turns its head and is
capable of biting. It was then, on I March, that Hans told us he gof
/fee 7co#sc#sc. At another point, on 5 April, Hans also tells us that he
got the nonsense when, out with his mother, he saw a bus-horse fall
down. More exactly, that which is fej./cfecd already has a signification
for Hans, yet has also been retained by him as something that goes
far beyond any signification, as something that he sanctions through
a kind of aphorism or definitional assertion, IVow j./'// cz/w¢;;I bc /I.kc
this. All horses in buses'll fall down.
The function of the fall is precisely the term that is common to
everything that is at issue in the lower portion of the equation. We
have underscored the element of the mother's fall, the mother's
phallus, p, which is what is no longer tenable. It's no longer in play,
and yet Hans does all he can to keep up the existence of this game. In
the end, little Hanna is very essentially the thing whose fall is most
wished for, even if it means giving her a little push.
So, the horse fulfils in an efficient way, as an image that is somehow
active, each of these functions of the fall united in one. It is in this
respect that it starts to be introduced as an essential term, as the
term of the phobia in which we can see an asserting and a positing
of what truly are objects for the human psyche.
They may indeed warrant the name ofy.cc/, but one cannot over-
emphasise the special character of this qualification as an object
which it is necessary to introduce once the objects we are dealing
with are phobias or fetishes. We do know how far they exist as
objects, because they will constitute veritable milestones in the sub-
ject's psyche. They are milestones of desire in the case of the fetish,
milestones of the subject's displacements in the case of phobia. The
object is therefore very much in the real and at the same time mani-
festly distinct from it. On the other hand, it is in no way accessible to
conceptualisation unless through the intermediary of this signifying
formalisation.
Let's state it clearly. Thus far, no more satisfactory conceptualisa-
tion has been given. While I might seem to be presenting the formula
for the object in a slightly more complicated shape than has ever been
done before, I point out to you that Freud speaks of it no differently
at the end of his life's work. Looking afresh at phobia in ffcmmw77g,
S}Jmp/om ##c7 4#grf, he plainly states that the horse - because he

takes little Hans again as an example - is an object that has been
substituted for all the images and all the addled significations that
have been rather poorly isolated and into which the subject doesn't
manage to decant his anxiety. Freud makes it an almost arbitrary
object, and this is why he calls it a sj.g7ccl/. Thanks to this, in this field
of confusions, limits will be defined that, however arbitrary they may
be, introduce no less the element of delimitation that will ensure,
at least potentially, the beginning of an order, the first crystal of an
organised crystallisation between the symbolic and the real.
This is in effect what will be produced over the course of Hans's
progressing analysis, if indeed we can call what occurs in Hans's
case an ¢#¢/}jsz.s in the full sense of the term. The psychoanalysts
don't yet seem to have understood -at least not when you read Dr
Jones - that Freud had a few reservations about the case, saying that
it was quite exceptional in that the child's father was the one who
brought it about and saw it through, although steered by Freud.
As a consequence, Freud was to ground very little on the possible
extension of this method. The analysts seem to be surprised by
Freud's diffidence here. They would do better to take a closer look
and ask themselves whether, given the fact that the analysis was
conducted by the father, it might not present specific features that
exclude, at least partially, the specifically transferential dimension.
In other words, isn't the usual yarn proffered by Miss Anna Freud,
to the effect that no transference is possible in child analyses, appli-
cable precisely in this case, because the father is involved?
It is only too evident that in any child analysis practised by an
analyst there is well and truly a transference just as there is in adults,
and perhaps a better one than elsewhere. Something rather particu-
lar is at issue here, the consequences of which we shall be led to show
in the next part.
Be that as it may, the formula allows us to scan in the most rigor-
ous way the full progress of the father's intervention.
I think I will be able to show you next time how this formula
really allows us to grasp why some of the father's interventions
do not bear fruit while, on the contrary, others rock the mythical
transformation into motion.
Across its development, the case of little Hans displays the transfor-
mations of this equation, while its possibilities of progress and its
implicit metaphorical richness are made manifest right away. For
today, I shall content myself with indicating its furthest and final
extent, such as it is written into the same formalisation. I've already
told you enough for you to be able to conceive of its scope.
What we see at the end is certainly a solution that establishes little
Hans in a register of object relations that is liveable. Is it fully suc-
cessful from the standpoint of Oedipal integration? Before coming
back to this more closely next time, we can already see in what way
it is and in what way it isn't.
If we read the text where little Hans formulates his position at the
end.he tex]s us, now I'm the Daddy, jetzt bin ich der Vatti. V\Je dor['t
need to ask ourselves how it can be that he should have had this
idea, given the father whom he is forced to stimulate throughout
the observation, begging him to do his job as a father. The final
and very fine fantasy that is produced with the father shows him
somehow catching up with Hans on the train platform when in
reality Hans had raced on ahead some time hence, having set off
with whom? As if by chance, it was the grandmother.
The first thing that his father asks him is, W7!o/ woct/d}7ow /z.kc /a
do z/);ow were Dczc7dy? The reply comes straight out, J'c7 /z.ke /a /czkc
)/ow /a Lczz.#z evcr}; Sw#chay, to see the Lainz grandmother. Nothing
has changed in the relationship between father and son. We may
presume, therefore, that this is not an altogether typical realisation
of the Oedipus complex.
Indeed, if we know how to read the text we can see this very
quickly. All the bonds with the father are a long way from being
broken. They are even being strongly tied through all of this analytic
experience. However, as little Hans puts it very well, his father is
now to be the grandfather. He says this, but when does he say it?
Read the text carefully. He said it when he had begun by saying that
he, Hans, was the father.
The term gro#d/a/foer stands utterly apart here. First the mother is
mentioned, and we are going to see what sort of mother she will be.
Then another woman is mentioned - the grandmother. But there is
no link whatsoever between this grandfather and this grandmother
from little Hans's perspective in itself.
Freud is surely not wrong to underscore, with a satisfaction that
is far from offering us full relief, that the question of the Oedipus
complex has been resolved by the little chap, now making himself the
mother's husband and sending his father back to the grandmother.
It's an elegant and even humorous way of sidestepping the question,
but thus far nothing in all that Freud has written indicates that this
solution, however cogent it might appear, could be regarded as a
typical solution to the Oedipus complex.
What we can see is that little Hans maintains a certain continuity
in the order of lineages. Had this point at least not been reached,
little Hans would have resolved nothing at all and the function of
the phobia would have been null. In so far as he conceives of himself
as the father, little Hans is a function of something that is inscribed
approximately as follows -
p (M) (M')
It's the mother and the grandmother. At the end of the process,
the mother is duplicated. This is a very important point. Little Hans
has recognised something that allows him to find a three-legged
equipoise, which is the minimum upon which the relation with the
object can be established. The thirdness that he has not found in
his father is now found in the grandmother, whose absolutely deci-
sive and indeed overwhelming value in the object relations he has
spotted only too well.
It's precisely insomuch as, behind the mother, a second is added,
that little Hans establishes himself in a paternity. What sort of
paternity? Well, an imaginary paternity.
What does Hans tell us next? Who will have children? Well, he
will. He says it very clearly. But when his father, putting his foot in
it, asks him, W'l!.// }7ow fo¢ve cfej./drc7t w./fe Mwmmy? Hans replies, IVo/
at all. What's this all about? You told me that the father carmot have
children on his own, and now you want me to have some.
There is a moment of wavering in the dialogue between the child
and his father, which is quite striking and which shows the repressed
aspect, for little Hans, of everything that belongs to the realm of
paternal creation as such, when what he voices on the contrary
from this moment forth is precisely that he will have children, but
imaginary children.
He says in the most precise and articulate manner that he wishes
to have children, but on another side he doesn't want his mother
to have any. Hence the assurances he wants to secure for the
future. For the mother not to have any more children, anything is
thinkable, up to and including the bribing - despite everything we
are in the presence of a sprog of capitalists - of the great genitor
par excellence, the stork, who cuts such a strange figure. Next
time we shall be seeing what place and what function ought to
be ascribed to the stork and what his true face is. Hans would go
so far as to bribe the stork so that there would be no more real
children.
The paternal function that the child takes on board is an imagi-
nary one. The mother has been replaced and he will have children as
she does. He will look after his imaginary children in the way that he
has managed completely to resolve the notion of the child, including

the notion of young Hanna.
In what does all of his fantasy consist, with the box, the stork, and
little Hanna who already existed long before her birth? It's a matter
of imaginarising his sister, of fantasmatising her. So, he will have
fantasmatic children. He will become a character who is essentially
a poet, a creator in the imaginary order.
He will give the last of his imaginary creations the name foc7z..
The father takes great interest in this. frow dz.d)/ow fo!.f wpo# ffee 7.¢mc
Lodi? he asks. Perhaps you mean a Schokolodi? No, raphes Haws,
a Sczjrcz/oc7z.. Indeed, S¢#cz/oc7j. relates back to S¢#cz/¢cJj., a kind of
saveloy sausage. The phallofom character of the image indicates
very well the imaginary transmutation that has been brought about
by the phallus that is both unretumed and eternally imagined by the
mother. We see it reproduced at the end in the shape of little Lodi.
For Hans, woman will never be anything other than the fantasy of
these little sister-girls around whom his entire childhood crisis is set
to revolve. This is not altogether a fetish, because equally this will
be the true fetish, if I may say so. He won't stop at what is inscribed
on the veil. Rather, he will find again the typical heterosexual form
of his object, but this will not prevent his relationship with women
being thenceforth and doubtless forever marked by the narcissistic
genesis in the course of which he has found a way to place himself
in an orthoposition in relation to the female partner. To say it all,
the female partner will not have been generated on the basis of the
mother, but on the basis of the imaginary children that he can make
with the mother and who themselves are heirs to the phallus around
which revolved the whole primordial game of the love relation, of
the captivation of love in the mother's regard.
So, in reference to our equation, we ultimately have on the one
hand the assertion of Hans's relationship as a new father, as the
Vcr/fj., with a maternal lineage, and on the other band little Hanna
riding the horse and taking a dominant position in relation to
the whole convoy, in relation to the whole train, to everything that
the mother trails behind her.
Indeed, it is through the intermediary of little Hanna that little
Hans has come to do what we said he was doing last time, that is
to say, to dominate the mother, not simply to whip her, but, as the
next part of the case history shows us, to see what she has in her
belly. Once the little castrating penknife has been extracted, she is
far more innocuous.
p (M) (M') -
This is the formula that, in contrast to the previous one, marks

the point of arrival of little Hans's transformation.
He will surely have every appearance of a normal heterosexual.
Nevertheless, the path he will have taken through the Oedipus
complex in order to arrive at this is an atypical path, linked to
the father's shortcoming. You might be stunned at how great this
shortcoming is, but the main thrust of the observation constantly
shows us the father's faults and flaws which are underscored from
one moment to the next by the appeals of little Hans himself. So,
there is certainly no need to be stunned at how this shortcoming
leaves the mark of a terminal atypia on the progress and resolution
of the phobia.
I ask you simply to keep these two furthermost terms in mind, so
as to see that it is possible and conceivable to try to articulate the
transformation of one into the other through a series of stages.
Doubtless we ought not to be overly systematic here. This brand
of logic is a new one. If it is to be pursued, perhaps it should merely
be to introduce a certain number of questions regarding its for-
malism. Does it share the same laws with what has already been
formalised in other domains of logic?
Freud, in the rrczctmde"/ct#g, had already initiated something that
tells us about the logic of the unconscious, in other words signi-
fiers in the unconscious. This is certainly not the same as the logic
that we are accustomed to handling. A generous quarter of the
rro#mdcw/##g is devoted essentially to showing a number of crucial
logical articulations. Ez./fecr/or, contradiction and causality, can be
transported into the order of the unconscious. This logic may be
distinct from our usual logic. Since topology is a rubber-sheet geom-
etry, here it's a matter of rubber-sheet logic.
R#bbcr-sAeef does not mean that everything is possible therein.
Until further notice, nothing allows us to unlink two interconnected
rings, even rubber ones. This remark is intended to show you that
rubber-sheet logic is not doomed to complete and utter freedom. It
requires us to define a certain number of terms and these definitions
will have to be provided.
In short, what we can see appearing at the end of the resolution of
little Hans's phobia is a particular configuration that is organised as
follows. Despite the presence and even the insistence of the paternal
action, little Hans inscribes himself into a matriarchal lineage of
sorts, or to be more straightforward, and stricter too, a maternal
duplication, as though it were necessary that there should be a third
person, and that for want of it being the father, it should be the
notorious grandmother.
On the other hand, what is it that brings him into relation with
the object that henceforth will be the object of his desires? I have
already underlined how we have testimony in the anamnesis of
something that attaches him essentially to Gmunden, to his little
sister, to the little girls, that is to say, to children insomuch as they
are his mother's daughters, but also his own imaginary daughters.
The originally narcissistic structure of his relationships with woman
is indicated on the way out, with the opening out onto the solution
of his phobia. What trace will remain of the passage through the
phobia? Well, something very curious - the role of the little lamb,
with which at the end he engages in some rather peculiar games, for
example being butted by the animal.
This is the little lamb onto which one day someone tried to put his
sister. That is to say, she was in the same position as the horseback
position that she holds in the fantasy of the DJ.g bojc, the last stage
before the resolution of the phobia. The sister had to dominate it
first, so that he, little Hans, might then treat the horse as it warrants
being treated, that is, by whacking it. At this point, the equivalence
between the horse and the mother is secured - to beat the horse is
also to beat his mother. The little sister sitting astride the little lamb
is a configuration that will remain through to the end.
I cannot forego the pleasure, nor decline you the enigma, of
showing you the work around which our master Freud made his
analysis of Leonardo da Vinci revolve, namely, not the Jrz.rgj.# a//Ac
Rocks, but The Virgin and Child with St Anne that is in the Louvre
and which was preceded by a cartoon that is in Burlington House,
this one here.
Freud's whole analysis of Leonardo da Vinci turns around this
Saint Anne, who has such a strangely androgynous figure - moreo-
ver, she looks like Leonardo's S/ /ofo# ffec Bay/I.s/ - around the
Virgin, and around the Christ child. Furthermore, as is stressed in
the study, unlike the London Cartoon, His cousin, namely John the
Baptist, is precisely a little lamb.
This highly singular configuration did not fail to attract Freud's
attention and it is truly the core of his demonstration in the very
peouhill stwly Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood. I
do hope that you will take the trouble to read it before the end of
the year, because I might manage to bring my seminar to a close
with this.
You cannot help but notice the incredibly enigmatic character
of the whole situation in which the term #crrc!.ssj.sin is introduced
for the first time and the almost insensate audacity of writing such
a thing at the time it was written. Since then we have managed to
scotomise, to misrecognise, the existence of such things in Freud's
oeuvre.
Read it, and you will realise just how difficult it is to work out
what ultimately it is he wants to manage to say. But also read it
to see the extent to which it holds water, in spite of all its errors -
because errors there are, but that's of no moment.
We will have to come back to this singular configuration, which
is there to present us with a fewm¢";.ss!.7"a rrj.#z.fd, a very human
trinity that is almost too human, in contrast to the dz.vz.#j.ssj.mo that
it substitutes.
What I wanted to present to you as a toothing stone is the peculiar

necessity of a fourth term, which here we meet as a residue in the
shape of the lamb, this animal term in which we meet again the very
term of the phobia.
19 June 1957
XXIII
`ME DONNERA SANS FEMME
UNE PROGENITURE'
From intersubjectivity to discourse

The object as a function of the signifier
Phobic metaphor
From biting to unscrewing
Hanna, mistress of the horse
Freud tells us that the truth about Hans was not fully obtaine`d.
What is to be done now is to formalise the observation slightly dif-
ferently, the sole interest of which lies in how it allows for a more
rigorous clasping and enveloping of what is going on.
There are, of course, all these French windows in the observa-
tion, and since it also has to do with a horse phobia one could for
example babble on endlessly about the horse, because it's a highly
singular animal, the same that crops up regularly in all mythology
and which can be validly compared with little Hans's horse.
Robert Fliess, the son of Freud's correspondent who occu-
pies an honourable place in psychoanalysis, has produced in the
jubilee issue of the /JP commemorating the centenary of Freud's
birth a worthy study under the title Ply/ogc#c/I.c Jrf. O#jogc#cfz.c
ExpcrJ.c#cc. Certainly, it is inordinately striking on account of its
character of manifest incompatibility. Since there are unresolved
riddles in the Hans case, he ventures to resolve them by contributing
to the file a vast extrapolation, the only completely unjustified draw-
back of which is that it assumes something to have been resolved
that precisely has not been resolved.
One of the most riveting things is to see how he focuses every-
thing, quite validly, on the infamous dialogue between little Hans
and his father, the one that I have called the mcz/.or dJ.¢/ogwc and
which culminates on 21 April. It's the one during which little Hans
appeals to his father to play his role as a father by saying, row mwf /
bc/.€cz/ows. One cannot help but think that his father has played a
` Me donnera sons femme une progchiture' 38\
role in the emergence of this sentence, which you can sense brewing
up in everything that precedes it. Whatever happens, and whatever
unnerved negations his father may utter, c7czf "zt/ wczAr scz.#, j+ mws/
be true.
These are the words that bring a dialogue to a close in which
little Hans develops the fantasy of his father who, before arriving
in the mother's bedroom, hurts his foot on a stone as did previously
little Fritzl. The father has to k#ock wp czgoz.#s/ cz f/o#e cz#c7 b/cec7.
Our author, Fliess, insists with great finesse on the use of words
that lend what little Hans is saying a I/}j/c sow!e#ct - in French in
the text - more sowfc>#w here than anywhere else. In this regard he
brings out clearly the inadequacies of the English translation. These
remarks, which surely have their value, show the sensitivity that
people from the first analytic generation have shown to the properly
verbal texture, to the accentuation of certain signifiers and their
crucial role, but the most interesting thing in his text is its rather
astute speculation on the father's role on this occasion.
Indeed, the father is the one who introduces for the first time
the word ScfoJ.m2/e#, which has been translated [into English] as
scold. Weshalb schimpf ich denn eigentlich? is rende;red as What do I
recz//}j sco/c7 );ow /or? Fliess rightly notes that this z.s j.#jccfcd j.#/o ffoc
conversation precipitately and from nowhere, a,nd specula.tes on wha.t
participation might be occurring on the part of the father in what at
that moment is assumed to be a co#s/z.fctc#f p¢rf of Hans's ego. All
of this does not add up to an overly brazen extrapolation, conveying
instead the need that the author feels to tell us that Hans's superego
is being constituted at that moment. Indeed, it must be like this
because it is already implied in a sort of preformed register that
has to be applied to the case. Either way, there is something here
that allows us to grasp, there and then, his hesitations in his way
of expressing himself. Fliess speaks of cz fctpcrcgo j.# sfczfw #czscc73c7j..
Certainly Hans's superego has not yet been formed.
The forming of the superego is something strange indeed. The
author refers to the work of Mr Isakower, who insisted a great
deal on the predominance of the auditory sphere in the formation
of the superego and who foresaw the whole problem that we have
been posing and constantly posing again with respect to the func-
tion of speech in the genesis of a certain normative crisis that we
call the Oedipus complex. He made equally interesting and perti-
nent remarks about how we can grasp the mounting of this kind
of apparatus, this network of forms that constitutes the superego,
perceiving it in elements in which the subject hears purely syntactic
modulations, in words that are strictly speaking empty because their
movement alone is at issue. He tells us that in these movements of
some intensity we can grasp, there and then, something that must
refer back to an altogether archaic element. The child integrates
the adult's speech, but will perceive only its structure and not yet its
meaning. All in all, it's a matter of interiorisation. This is purported
to be the first form of what will allow us to envisage what the super-
ego is, properly speaking.
It's another interesting remark and in a seminar context it could
be grouped together with the dialogue between Hans and his father,
but not in order to find therein something that would match up
neatly. On the one hand it's a matter of the integration of speech in
its overall movement, in its fundamental structure as the grounding
of an internal agency of the superego. On the other, there is the
precise moment of the dialogue with his father, which is wholly
externalised. The former can certainly not be matched fully to the
latter, even though one might believe that its paradoxes would
thereby be sealed over.
While we should always be seeking comprehensive references for
what we are describing, I will stress now the necessity of doing
something that brings out a point of progression in the handling of
concepts of the analytic experience, and of doing so by grasping as
closely as possible the movement of the observation on little Hans.
Everything that we have done thus far hinges on a number of pos-

tulates from our earlier commentaries, which are not czbso/w/c/};
postulates. These included a great deal of work of commentary and
reflection on what the analytic experience puts before us. One of the
postulates is that neurosis is a question posed by the subject at the
levct o[ his very exjTstence. What does it mean to be of the sex that I
am? Or What does it mean to be of one sex? What does it mean that
J ccz# cvc# czfk in);sc// /fej.s gwcs/j.o#? Indeed, the introduction of the
symbolic dimension means that man is not simply male or female
but that he has to situate himself in relation to something symbol-
ised that is called m¢/c or/cm¢/c.
While neurosis refers back to this, it does so in a way that is more
woeful still in obsessional neurosis where it is not only a matter of
the subject's relation to his sex but also of his relation to the very
[alct o[ e;xisting. What does it mean to exist? How can I relate to the
one that I am without being him, since I can somehow do without him?
While neurosis is thus a sort of closed question for the subject
himself, even though it is one that is organised and structured as a
question, it is quite certain that we can also form a finer understand-
` Me dormera sons femme une prog6niture' 383
ing of how symptoms are the living elements of this question that
is articulated without the subject knowing what he articulates. The
question is a living one, so to speak, and the subject doesn't know
that he is in the question. He is often an element of the question,
and can be situated at various levels - at an altogether elementary
and almost alphabetic level, but also at a higher syntactical level.
It is within this register that we may speak of the fo};p#apompJ.c
and A)/p#czgogz.c function. I On this basis, starting from the idea that
the linguists have given us - at least certain among them - we can
discern the two major aspects of the articulation of language. What
makes it hard for us to be wholly in keeping with the linguists in our
commentary on the observation is that we always have to refrain
from pitching in a way that is overly absolute for one or the other of
the two sides of what is put before us.
For there to be an observation we have to begin by analysing.
Since what is specific to the neurotic's question is that it is totally
closed, there is no reason for it to offer up anything more to he
who would merely make a sort of rubbing of this hieroglyphic text
that will remain undecipherable and enigmatic. This is why, before
Freud came along, observations of neuroses had been made for
decades without people even suspecting the existence of this lan-
guage. For neurosis is a language.
Therefore, it is always in so far as something intervenes that is the
beginning of a deciphement that we manage precisely to grasp its
transformations and to see the manipulations that would be neces-
sary when it comes to confirming that what is really involved is a
text, but a text in which we find ourselves by means of a certain
number of structures that become apparent only insomuch as we
grapple with it.
We can do this at the simple level of decoupage, as is done for
riddles. In some respects, this is how we proceed in particularly
impenetrable and enigmatic cases, not altogether unlike what we
find set out in 7lfec Ps}jcfeapa/Ao/og); o/Ever};d¢); £z/c, which reminds
us of common practices for deciphering telegrams, even when they
have been sent in a style that is coded or scrambled. One can even
tally the signs that recur with the greatest frequency, which allows
us to make interesting suppositions, namely that such and such a
sign corresponds to such and such a letter in whichever tongue is
supposed as the object language.
With the neuroses we are fortunately involved in operations of
a higher order, where we meet certain syntactical groupings with
which we are familiar. Yet the danger is always that one could go
wrong by entifying these syntactical groupings, pressing them too
heavily towards what might be called prayer/j.es o/ /fee sow/, even
pushing them a little too far in the direction of a sort of natural

instinctualisation. This would be to fail to perceive that what sud-
denly comes to dominate is the organising nexus that lends some of
these groupings the value of a unit of signification, which is com-
monly called a word. It was in this sense that I recently alluded to
the infamous identification of the boy with his mother, and I tell
you now that the general fact of an identification such as this can
only ever be made in relation to the overall movement of analytic
progress. As Freud points out emphatically in the observation on
little Hans - it's on page 3 19 of the German text - kcz## der Wag c7cr
Analyse niemals den Entwicklungsgang der Neurose wiederholen, the
course of the analysis can never follow that of the development of the
neurosis.
Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter. In our effort
of decipherment we must follow what has effectively been woven
into the text, and this text is itself subject to the use of an element
from the subject's past in a current situation, as a signifier-element
for example. Here we have one of the clearest forms of the x of a
condensation. It is quite certain that when we broach the signifier-
element we cannot at that moment cut ourselves off from the fact
that it breaks down into two terms, two points that lie very far apart
in the subject's history, yet we have to resolve these things in the
mode of organisation in which they currently stand. This is what
allows us and indeed compels us to seek out laws that are specific to
the solution of each of these organised discourses, in keeping with
whichever pattern by which the neuroses might present themselves
to us.
However, while there is organised discourse there is also some-
thing else that comes to complicate matters and this is the way in
which a dialogue gets under way so as to offer a solution to the
discourse. This cannot be done without us offering the place we hold
as the locus in which a share of the terms of this discourse must be
realised. In principle, simply by virtue of being a discourse, it entails
somewhere, initially in a virtual form, the Other that is in sum the
place, the witness, the guarantor and the ideal locus of its good faith.
It is precisely here that we place ourselves and it is on this basis
that we will see these elements of the subject's unconscious coming
to light, that is to say, terms that will take up the place we hold. This
is how we will be called into the revelatory dialogue. The meaning
of the discourse will be formulated through a dialogue that pro-
gressively decrypts it by showing us what function is held by the
personage whose place we occupy. This is what is called frcJ#s/crc#ce.
The said personage cannot help but change over the course of the
analysis, and this is how we try to uncover the meaning of the dis-
` Me donnera sons ferrune une prog6niture' 385
course. So, indeed, we are the ones, inasmuch as we are integrated as

a pcrso#, as a signifier-element, who are positioned, and lastingly so,
in such a way as to resolve the meaning of the discourse of neurosis.
It is crucial always to keep these two planes of intersubjectivity in
sight as the fundamental structure through which the history of the
decrypting will develop. This must always be situated at its proper
place in an observation.
In the case of little Hans, we had to highlight the complexity
of the relationship with his father. Let's not forget that his father
was the one who carried out the analysis. Therefore, this is the
real, actual father dialoguing with his child. So, this is already a
father who possesses speech, but beyond him there is the father to
whom this speech is revealed as witness to its truth. This superior
father is the almighty father who is represented by Freud, and this is
something that cannot help but lend the observation an altogether
essential characteristic that bears note. The structure involved here
is to be mapped out in any kind of relationship between the one
being analysed and the analyst. Likewise, this sort of higher agency
is so inherent to the paternal personage or the paternal function that
it tends always to be reproduced in one way or another.
This is precisely what makes for the specificity of the time when
the patient was dealing with father Freud himself. On that occasion,
the duplication didn't exist because the higher authority didn't exist
behind him, and the patient had a strong sense that across from him
was someone who had made a new universe of signification loom
up. This new relationship between man and his own meaning and
condition is precisely what he was faced with. And it was there to
be used by him. This explains what appears paradoxical to us in
the sometimes very stunning results that Freud obtained, and also
in the very stunning patterns of intervention he employed in his
technique.
This report enables us better to situate the direction in which our
focus is shifting. Over the previous years you have seen me devel-
oping the fundamental subjective schema of the symbolic relation
between the subject and this Other that is the unconscious person-
age who steers him and guides him, while the inaginary other, the
little other, plays an intermediary role, that of a screen. Our focus
has changed, little by little, and we have been led to reflect on the
very structure of the discourse in question, which presents problems
that are no less original and which are distinct from the previous
Ones.
Over the course of this year we have gradually shifted focus.
There are, of course, laws of intersubjectivity, which are laws that
govern the subject's relation to the little other and to the big Other,
but this is not the be-all and end-all of what we are dealing with.
The original function of discourse, where essentially it is language
that is at issue, warrants broaching step by step, Discourse too has
laws, and the relation between signifier and signified is something
else, something distinct from intersubjectivity, even though it can
overlap, as do the relations of the imaginary and the symbolic.
This is how in our movement this year with regard to object
relations we have seen coming into the open the originary place of
elements that are truly and verily objects, which lie at a stage that
is altogether originative and foundational and which even founds
objects, but these objects are nevertheless utterly different from
objects in the complete sense. At any rate, they are quite differ-
ent from real objects because it's a matter of using objects that,
while they may have been extracted from a subjective discontent, are
made to function as signifiers.
The first object that I isolated in its function as a signifier was the
fetish, and I won't be going any further from now until the end of
the year than a consideration of phobia.
Even so, if you have properly understood what we have been
trying to bring into play each time that we have spoken of little
Hans's phobia then this will have afforded you a mental model on
the basis of which any further progress can be conceived of as a
deepening or an extension into other neuroses, most notably hyste-
ria and obsessional neurosis.
This is particularly straightforward and exemplary in phobia.
Whenever you are dealing with a phobia in a young subject you
will notice that what is at stake is always a signifier that is relatively
straightforward in appearance. Of course, it won't be straightfor-
ward to handle once you've entered his game, but elementarily
speaking, it's a signifier.
This was the meaning of the formula I set out for you -
M
M + q, + cl
)
The terms under the bar represent what has progressively com-
plicated the elementary relationship with the mother, which was
our point of departure when I spoke to you about the symbol of
frustration, S(M), in so far as the mother is an alternating pres-
ence and absence. The child's relationships with his mother become
` Me donnera sons femme une prog6niture' 38]
established here over the course of development from one age to the
next.
The case of little Hans led us first to this extremely taxing stage
when the mother is complicated on account of all sorts of addi-
tional elements. First there is the phallus, p. I told you that this was
certainly the critical gap-element in any relation between the two,
a relation which in contemporary analytic dialectics is being repre-
sented as something exceedingly closed. We need on the contrary
to see the extent to which the child is himself in a relationship with
an imaginary function on the mother's side. Then, there is the other
child, a, who momentarily expels the subject, driving him away from
his mother's affection.
Here we have a critical moment that is typical for any kind of
subject that our discourse supposes. It is always in this way that you
will see a phobia appearing in a child. Something lacks, which at a
certain point comes to play the fundamental role in the way out of
the crisis in the child-mother relationship, which appears to have no
way out. There's no need to make hypotheses. The whole analytic
construction is built on the consistency of the Oedipus complex,
which can be schematised as follows -
(P) M -
If the Oedipus complex means something, then it's that from a

certain point on, the mother is regarded and experienced as function-
ing through the Father. Father warrants a capital P here, because
we suppose that this is Paternity in the absolute sense of the term.
It's the Father at the level of the symbolic father. It's the Name-
of-the-Father, which establishes the existence of the Father in the
complexity in which he presents to us. Each experience of psychopa-
thology breaks this complexity down for us as the Oedipus complex.
In the end, it is none other than this, and the introduction of this
symbolic element brings with it a new dimension that is completely
radical with respect to the child's relationship with his mother.
To fill out the second part of the equation we need to start from
the empirical data. These indicate the existence of something that,
in a nutshell and perhaps subject to commentary, can roughly be
established thus -
(P) M - (-p)
What I'm notating as H under x would be the real penis. The

(-p) is what stands in opposition to the child as a sort of imaginary
antagonism. This is the imaginary function of the father insomuch

as he plays the aggressive and suppressive role that is entailed by the
castration complex.
If we are to formalise the Freudian experience then we need to
take it literally and to accept it, at least provisionally, in that it
asserts the constancy of the castration complex. Regardless of the
discussions to which it might have thereafter given rise, we still
maintain it as a reference.
On the one hand, something happens in the relationships with
the mother that introduces the father as a symbolic factor. He is the
one who possesses the mother and who enjoys her legitimately. This
is a function that is both fundamental and problematic, and which
occasionally can crumble or weaken.
On the other hand, something holds the function of bringing an
essential articulation into the subject's instinctual play and into his
assumption of his functions. This essential articulation is a significa-
tion that is truly specific to the human genus insomuch as it develops
with the supplementary dimension of the symbolic order. The sexual
functions are struck by something that is well and truly something
of the signifier, something almost instrumental, which the human
subject has to take into account by bringing it into play so that it will
be present and experienced, and which is called cczSrra/z.o#.
Analysis represents castration in the most instrumental way, as
a pair of scissors, or a sickle, or a hatchet, or a cutter. It's some-
thing that participates, as it were, in the instinctual furnishing of the
sexual relation in humankind. Clearly we could then try to single
out some such furnishing in one or another of the animal species. It
is probable that the robin's coloured gorget could be regarded as a
signal-element both for mating dances and for intersexual clashes.
Either way, it's quite clear that an equivalent can be found in animals
for the constant character of this paradoxical element that in man is
bound to a signifier that is called the castration complex.
Here, then, is how we can write the formula of the Oedipus
complex with its correlative, the castration complex. The Oedipus
complex is itself something that is organised on the symbolic plane,
something that presupposes for the subject the existence of the sym-
bolic order behind it, as constitutive. However, there is something
else that we are going to see in the observation on little Hans.
At a certain point in the dialogue with his father, when the latter
is trying to nudge Hans towards a consideration of all sorts of physi-
ological explanation - though, timid as this father is, never pushing
things right through to the end - it becomes apparent that poor
little Hans doesn't have a good understanding of the function of the
female organ. And this swings around. When Hans comes out with
` Me domera sons f emme une progchiture' 3&9
this, his father ends up giving him the explanation in desperation,

when in fact the fantasies that had already been developed with
respect to the neurosis show quite clearly that the child knows full
well that everything gestates in the mother's belly, regardless of
whether she is symbolised or not by a horse or a coach. But what
the father doesn't see is that Hans comes to this conclusion after a
long talk in which he was interested only in a kind of genealogical
construction. That is what interests Hans the most.
This kind of interest is a normal moment in a subject's progress,
though it may be reinforced, as here, by the specific difficulties of
the neurosis. It's plain to see that this is normal and that little Hans
has only produced this long discussion, which arises when we are a
long way in to the observation, in order to construct the genealogi-
cal possibilities that exist, that is to say, the different ways in which
a child can be related to a father and to a mother, and what this
signifies.
He goes so far as to construct one of the most original sexual
theories, as Freud underscores because he has not come across
many of the like. Indeed, as in any observation, there are peculiar
features. At one point the child constructs a theory of reproduction,
saying bo}7s A¢vc gj.r/a a#d gz.r/5 Aczvc bo)/a. Don't imagine that this is
a theory that it would be impossible to find in the structure, in the
genealogical organisation. It's something that is consistent with the
elementary structures of kinship and so there is ultimately some
truth in this. It's because women make men that men then return
- in the symbolic order - this essential service of allowing them to
continue their function of procreation, provided of course that we
do consider it in the symbolic order, that is to say, in a certain order
that ascribes a regular succession of generations to all of this. As I
have set out for you on several occasions, in the natural order there
is no obstacle to all of this turning exclusively around the female line,
without any discrimination in what can come as a product, without
any discrimination or any impossibility of it being, in a nutshell, the
mother, commensurate with the possible duration of her fertility,
who produces the succeeding generations. Now, what interests little
Hans is the symbolic order, this being the gravitational centre of his
whole construction which is so extraordinarily lush and fantastical.
In other words, the questioning of the symbolic order emerges in
the child in connection with the capital P of Paternity - Wfe¢/ j.a a
/czrfeer? The Father is indeed the pivot, the fictive and concrete hub
that maintains the genealogical order, which allows the child to
energise the world in a satisfying way. However this world is to be
judged - culturally, naturally or supernaturally - this is the world
into which he is born. He makes his appearance in a human world
organised by this symbolic order, and this is what he has to face up

to.
The discovery of analysis is not, of course, to show us what the
minimum necessary requirement is from the real father for him to
give the child a sense of this notion of his place in the symbolic order
by communicating and transmitting it to him. It is likewise taken
as read that everything that occurs in the neuroses is designed in
one respect or another precisely to make up for a difficulty, even an
inadequacy, in how the child deals with this essential problem of the
Oedipus complex.
Something else comes to complicate the elements that are being
produced with further elements that are called rcgrcssz.o7!s. These
intermediate elements stem from the primordial relationship with
the mother and already include a certain double-edged symbolism.
Between this primordial stage and the moment when the Oedipus
complex properly speaking is constituted, all sorts of accidents can
arise that hinge on nothing but the fact that the child's other ele-
ments of exchange come to play their role in this relationship, in the
construction and comprehension of the symbolic order. To spell it
right out, all that is pregenital can be integrated at the Oedipal level
and can come to complicate the question of the neurosis.
In the case of phobia, we have something straightforward. No one
challenges that in the case of phobia the child has reached, at least
momentarily, what is called the genital stage, when the subject's
problems of integrating his or her sex are posed in their fullness. It is
at this level, therefore, that we have to entertain the function of the
phobic element.
This was plainly spelt out by Freud, who included the phobic
element as something homogenous with the so-called prj.mj./I.t;c func-
tion of the totem that had been isolated by the ethnography of his
time. This is something that probably is no longer tenable in light
of the current progress, in which structural anthropology is playing
a prevalent and axial role.2 Others will replace these things, but
for we analysts in our practical experience - and to the extent that
ultimately it was hardly on the plane of phobia alone that Freud
demonstrated how the totem took on its signification in the analytic
experience - we nevertheless have to transpose it into a formalisation
that would be less subject to caution than the totemic relationship is.
This formalisation is what last time I called the mefapAorz.c¢/ func-
tion of the phobic object.
The phobic object comes to play the role that on account of some
shortcoming - on account of a real shortcoming in the case of little
Hans -has not been played. So, we can see the object of the phobia
appearing, which plays the same metaphorical role that last time
` Me donnera sons femme une prog6niture' 39L
I tried to illustrate for you with the image -S¢ gcrbe #'6/cz!.f poz.#/
avare ni haineuse .
I showed you how the poet used the metaphor to make the pater-
nal dimension appear in its original dimension in connection with
this old man in his decline, in order to reinvigorate the old man with
all the natural spurt of the sheaf.
The horse has no other function but this in the living poetry that
the phobia is. The horse introduces something around which revolve
significations of various stripes which ultimately yield an element
that makes up for what was missing in the subject's development,
that is, in developments with which he has been furnished by the
dialectic of the entourage in which he is immersed. However, this
element is there only in a possible way, in some sense imaginarily.
What is at stake here is a signifier that is bare yet which carries
some tendency that has already been conveyed by the whole convoy
of culture that the subject drags behind him. In the end, the subject
didn't have to go any further than right where any kind of her-
aldry can be found, in a picture book. This means that they are
not mere images but images drawn by the hand of man, entailing a
whole history that is taken as given, in the sense that history is an
A;.sforz.o/c3 of myths and fragments of folklore. It was in his book,
right alongside the picture of the red boL¥ which is the red chimney
on which the stork is perched, that Hans came across the picture of
a horse being shod. Here we can put our finger on what is involved.
It's a horse represented.
Certainly, it is no wonder that such typical forms should always
appear in certain contexts, in certain connections and in certain
associations, which can elude those who are their vehicles, yet which
the subject chooses in order to carry out a function. This function
is the momentary allowing of certain states, and in the present case,
the state of anxiety. It has to transform this anxiety into a localised
fear, into something that presents a point of arrest, a terminal point,
or else a pivot, a stilt in the shallows that fastens what is bobbing
around and which runs the risk of being swept off by the whole inner
current of the crisis in the maternal relationship. It is at this point
that the horse plays a role in the case of little Hans.
The horse does admittedly seem to hamper the child's develop-
ment a great deal, and for those around him it is a parasitic and
pathological element. Yet it is also clear that once the analytic
process is in place we are shown that, further to this, the horse holds
a fastening role as a major point of arrest for the subject. It is a point
around which he can make something revolve that otherwise would
settle into an anxiety that would be impossible to bear.
Inthiscasethewholeprogressoftheanalysisconsistsinextracting,
in bringing to light, the potentialities that are offered by the child's

way of using this signifier that is so vital in compensating for his
crisis. It's a matter of allowing the signifier to play the role that has
been set aside for it by the child's fundamental relationship with the
symbolic in the construction of his neurosis. He has taken it as an
aid, as an absolutely crucial point of reference in the symbolic order.
This is what the phobia develops. It will allow the child to handle
the signifier in a particular way by drawing out possibilities of
development that are richer than those it contains as a signifier. In
itself, the signifier does not contain in advance all the significations
that we will make it voice. It contains them rather through the
place that it holds. To the extent that this is the place where the
symbolic father ought to be, and to the extent that the signifier is
there as something that corresponds metaphorically to the father, it
allows all the necessary transfers to occur on the level of everything
that is complicated and problematic on the lower line, namely the
mother, M, her phallic function, ap, and the other child, cL. This is a
relationship that on each occasion necessitates a distinct triangle in
relation to the real mother. For this, a term is required that cannot
be mastered by the child, that makes him fearful, and which is even
mordacious.
This is why on the other line we have written the other term, in.
'1
(M + ap + a) M ~ in + H
This term, 11, is what is most under threat, namely the child's
penis.
What does the observation on little Hans show us? It shows pre-
cisely that, in a like structure, it is futile to tackle its plausibility or
implausibility.
It's not by saying to the child that this is a nonsense, Dw77imfocJ./,
nor by making very pertinent remarks to him about the link that
surely exists between his touching his widdler and his deeper fears
over his nonsense, that one will seriously get things in motion. Quite
the contrary.
If you read the observation in light of the schema I have just set
out for you, you will see that these types of intervention, which
do have a certain effect, never have the direct suasive reach of the
primordial experience. This initial experience has the efficacy one
` Me dormera sons f emme une prog6niture' 393
might wish for, and the whole interest of the observation is that it
allows us to see how on such occasions the child reacts by reinforc-
ing the essential elements of his own symbolic formulation of the
problem. He persists in replaying the drama of the phallic hide-and-
seek with his mother -Docs sfec feczvc j./? Docsjc'/ sAe A¢vc ;.f? -clearly
showing that what is at issue here is a symbol, which he clings to as
such and which should not be thrown into disorder for him. Hence
the crucial importance of a schema such as the one we have set out
here.
What has to be done for the child is perhaps indeed to let this
schema evolve, allowing him to develop the significations that
pervade the system and which should enable him in turn not to
stick merely with the provisional solution of being a little phobic
child afraid of horses. Yet this equation can be resolved only in
accordance with its own laws, which are the laws of a determined
discourse, of one precise dialectic and not another. One won't get
anywhere if one doesn't take into account what this equation is
designed to support as a symbolic order.
This is how we are now going to be able to set out the comprehen-
sive schema for the progress that is involved here.
It was surely not fruitless for the father, the great symbolic Father
who is Freud, to have intervened, along with the little father, the
beloved father. The latter does only one wrong here, though it is a
sizeable one, that of not truly fulfilling his function as a father, not
even, at least for a while, his function of a father who is jealous, the
ez/er7c of young Hans's invective, as in the wrath of a jealous God.
While his father speaks to him with great affection and devotion,
he is unable to be more than he has been up to the present because
he is not a father who is fulfilling his function in the real, leaving
the child literally to follow his own whims with his mother. This
doesn't mean that the child doesn't love his father, but rather that
his father isn't holding for him the function that would allow for a
direct and straightforward way out of the situation, far from it. We
find ourselves faced with a complication of the situation. The father
starts by intervening directly on the term 11, in keeping with Freud's
instructions, which proves that Freud hasn't yet got things straight
in this regard.
At this juncture, we may delve in detail into the sorts of articula-
tion that would allow us to fomulate this in a completely rigorous
way, through a series of algebraic formulations, transforming one
into the next. I am somewhat reluctant to do so, for fear that your
minds might not yet be quite used to this, not yet disposed to some-
thing that I believe, even so, to belong to the future in the realm of
the clinical and therapeutic analysis of the evolution of cases. I mean
that in any case, at least in its crucial stages, it ought to allow of

being encapsulated in a series of transformations.
Last week I gave you an example of this, first writing up the initial
formula -
(M + ap + ct) M ~ in + H
then the terminal formulation -
M + ap + a M-in+H
and lastly -
p (M) (M,) -
All of this is taken up in a logicification, A.
(irli-:=Tx) M-in+H
Once it starts to be spoken of, once this A is caught between
the capital P and the lower-case p, we can provide a certain devel-
opment. We can ask ourselves on what occasion, at what major
moment, we might regard the transformation to have occurred.
That is to say, when does p step in here, in M ~ (in) H, and when
does P step in at the level of 'I? I have not as yet gone into its succes-
sive transformations, but even so, if we follow what happens in the
observation and how things evolve, we see that soon after the day
of Freud's intervention, there appears, on 5 April, a fantasy that
plays a major role and which thereafter will give rise to everything
that is placed under the sign of I/crkchr, that is, fr¢#£por/, with all
the ambiguity that this word carries.4 Something arises which allows
us to say that in a certain way the first term in our equation is being
incarnated here.
Indeed, the fantasy that Hans develops is that of seeing the cart
onto which he wanted to climb suddenly driving off with the horse.
The fantasy vouches for a transformation of his fears and consti-
tutes a first attempt at dialecticising the phobia. One cannot help but
be struck by the extent to which all it would take is to be subject to
something like this for what is written out here to become apparent.
I mean that the horse is clearly a dragging element, while little
Hans comes to place himself upon the same cart onto which sacks
` Me donnera sons femme une prog6niture' 395
have been loaded, which as the next part of the observation shows
represent all the possible and virtual children the mother can have.
He holds nothing in greater fear than to see his mother /oczc7cc7 wp
once again, be/¢de#, that is to say, big with child, carrying along,
carting around, the children in her belly like all these loaded carts
that give rise to so much fear in him. The rest of the observation will
show that the cart, and on occasion the bath, hold the function of
representing the mother. Therefore, the fantasy signifies -£4 Acczp a/
little children will be loaded on,1'11 pile them on myself, and they will
be driven off.
We can say that what is at issue here is a first exercise pictured in
an image that is truly as remote as can be from any kind of natural
assent in psychological reality, while being exceedingly expressive
from the standpoint of the structure of the signifying organisation.
We can see little Hans reaping a first benefit from the dialecticising
of the function of the horse which is the essential element of his
phobia.
We have already seen little Hans holding firmly to maintaining
the symbolic function, for example in one of his fantasies, the giraffe
fantasy. In everything that follows Freud's intervention we can see
little Hans testing out this grouping in every possible way. First he
is on the cart, among all the heteroclite elements which he fears so
strongly will be dragged off goodness knows where by a mother
who henceforth is nothing more for him than an uncontrollable
power that cannot be predicted. With this mother, there is no more
playing, or, to use a very expressive argotic term, );'¢ p/ws d'czmowr,
that is to say, love is no more, the name of the game has changed,
because others are entering the fray, and because little Hans is start-
ing to complicate the game by bringing in, not the symbolic phallus
with which he plays hide-and-seek with his mother and the little
girls, but a real little penis, which earns him a rap on the knuckles.
This complicates the task and shows us that while the child didn't
believe a word of what he was told by a certain gentleman who
spoke like the good Lord, he did find that the gentleman spoke well,
and the upshot of this was that little Hans started to speak, that is,
he started to tell stories.
The first thing he will do is to maintain a distinction between
the path of the real and the path of the symbolic. He will say to his
[arfuer, Why did you tell me I'm fond of Mummy . . . when I'm fond
a/}7oc4? He has taken things into full consideration, and after this he
will render unto the horse all its potentialities, all its possibilities.
The horse is something which can bite and which can fall. We
shall see what this is able to yield. This is where little Hans gets
the whole movement of his phobia under way. He starts to render
unto the horse everything he can, and this is why we have all these
paradoxes.
At the same time as the horse is the signifier that is teeming with
all the dangers that it is supposed to cover, this is the same signifier
with which little Hans, between 3 and 10 March, allowed himself
to play horsey, with great carefreeness, in the company of a new
nursemaid, which then provided the opportunity for him to give
himself over, with great unseemliness and impertinence, to threats
that he would undress her and so on. All of this is part and parcel of
the role of maids for Freud. You can see that at this point, Hans was
not in the least bit daunted by the horse.
Hans is so undaunted by the horse that he can take its place. We
find bin at once faced with maintaining the function of the horse
and, as it were, making use of every available opportunity to elu-
cidate and apprehend the problem, playing with the signifiers that
have been grouped in this way, but on the condition that the move-
ment be maintained, because otherwise none of this would make
any sense and there would be no reason for us to spend more time
scrutinising what the child is going on about. As I said, the abso-
lutely radical transformation is the one in which the child uncovers
one of the most essential properties of a situation such as this, once
the set has been logified, once it has been played out sufficiently,
once he has given himself over to a certain number of exchanges and
permutations.
The initial transformation, which will prove decisive, is no less
than the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the
bathtub, which is something utterly different, in particular for
the relationship between the protagonists. Voraciously to bite the
mother, as an act or an apprehension of her altogether natural sig-
nification, indeed to dread in return the notorious biting that is
incamated by the horse, is something quite different from unscrew-
ing, from ousting, the mother, and mobilising her in this business,
bringing her into the system as a whole, for this first time as a mobile
element5 and, by like token, an element that is equivalent to all the
rest. The whole system then presents as a large set of bowls from
which the child will try to reconstitute a tenable situation. Indeed, he
will even introduce new elements that will enable him to recrystallise
the situation.
This is precisely what happens at the moment of the bathtub
fantasy, which may for example be written out roughly as follows,
with a permutation that will give -
M + q, + ct H - M (-in)
` Me dormera sons feryune une prog6niture' 397
The symbol H represents the sexual function and the lower-case in

represents the way of bringing the mother herself into the dialectic
of the detachable elements, which will turn her, if I can put it like
this, into an object like any other, and which will thereby allow
him to handle her. It may be said therefore that all of this progress,
which is what the analysis of the phobia amounts to, represents
in some way the mother's waning in relation to the child and his
gradual mastery of her.
The following stage - which I shall have to conclude next time - is
focused entirely on something that will happen on the imaginary
plane, in relation to what thus far has been in a certain sense regres-
sive, but in a different way.
We will see little Hans bringing in his sister, this element that is
so hard to handle in the real, deploying in her regard this sort of
magnificent fantasia where she features in a stunning construction
that consists first and foremost in supposing that she has always
been there, in the bj.g bo:I:, almost since the beginning of time, we
might say.
You are going to see how this is possible and how it already
supposes an exceedingly advanced signifying organisation. Before
his sister came into the world, he reckons that she was already
there, but in what capacity? It is only too evident that this is an
imaginary capacity. We have Freud's own explanation, which is
that something presents in an imaginary form that is repeated indefi-
nitely, that is constant and permanent, in the form of an utterly
essential reminiscence. Little Hanna has always been there, and he
underscores that she is all the more there in that in reality he knows
full well that she wasn't. He insists that she was there in the world
precisely in the first year when she was not yet in the world, and that
she indulged in everything that he had indulged in himself, logically
and dialectically, in his discourse and in his games, over the course
of the first part of the treatment.
Imaginarily in his fantasy, not only does he articulate that his
sister has been there forever in the big box that travels either on
the coach or separately, depending on the circumstances, he also
tells us at another moment that she sits beside the coachman - 7l¢c
coachman had the reins, Hama had the reins too. I:rrele is some
kind of difficulty here when it comes to distinguishing reality from
imagination, an ambiguity that Freud notes between Wz.rfe/z.cfekc;+
and Pfecz#f¢fz.c, but little Hans continues his fantasy through the
intermediary of this imaginary child who has always been there, and
who moreover will always be there. He also indicates that through
the intermediary of this imaginary child a certain relation will take
shape that is equally imaginary, in which, as I underscored for you,
little Hans's relationship with the maternal object will stabilise, that
is to say, with the object of eternal recurrence with respect to the
woman to which this little man must accede.
In this imaginary game where he makes use of his little sister liter-
ally as a sort of Ego Ideal, she becomes the mistress of the signifier,
the mistress of the horse, which she dominates. And it is through her
intermediary that little Hans himself can come to whip the horse, to
beat it and dominate it, to become its master. So it is that henceforth
he will find himself in a relationship of mastery in relation to what
thereafter will be inscribed in the register of creations of his mind,
which will be developed in the ensuing part. The mastery of this
other will henceforth be for him any kind of fantasy of the feminine,
namely what I might call the girls of his dream, the daughters of his
mind. This is what he will always be dealing with from this point
forward as a sort of narcissistic fantasy in which the dominating
image is incamated. While it does resolve the question of the posses-
sion of the phallus, this image leaves the fundamental relation in an
essentially narcissistic relation, in an essentially imaginary relation.
To spell it right out, this relation is his domination of the critical
situation.
This is what will leave its mark of deep ambiguity on everything
that will ensue as an outcome or as a normalisation of the situation.
These stages are pointed out well enough in the observation. It is
after the playful development of his fantasies, after the reduction of
elements to the imaginary following their fixing down as signifiers,
that the fundamental relationship will be constituted that will allow
him to assume his sex. He will assume it in a way that, however
normal it may remain, can still be reckoned to bear the mark of a
deficiency.
I will only be able to show you all the traces of this next time, but
already I can say something that will give a good indication of where
the fault lies that the child has reached in order somehow to fill or
hold its place.
I think that nothing is more telling in this regard than what is
expressed in the final fantasy, the fantasy of the unscrewing, in
which the child's rear is changed and he is given a bigger one. Why?
Ultimately it is to fill this place which he has made far more manage-
able, far more mobilisable, namely the bath, on the basis of which
the dialectic of the falling can come into play and, eventually, be
evacuated. This evacuation is only possible once the bath has been
unscrewed. I would say that here too the atypical, anomalous and
almost inverted character of the situation can be seen.
In a normal formula, to speak only of boys, the child possesses
his penis only to the extent that he finds it again as something that
` Me donnera sans femme une prog6niture' 399
is given back to him, after losing it, after passing through the castra-
tion complex. In the case of little Hans, the castration complex is
called upon constantly by the child, and indeed he himself suggests
its formula. He clings onto its images. When he practically com-
mands his father to make him undergo this test, he foments and
organises the same test in a reflected way on the image of his father,
wounding him, wishing this injury to be inflicted. Isn't it striking
to see that after all these futile efforts for the subject's fundamental
metamorphosis to be achieved and overcome, what finally comes to
pass does not concern his sexual organ but his rear?
Ultimately it is his relation with his mother that allows him to
occupy this place, but at the cost of something that doesn't become
apparent to us from this perspective. What is actually involved here
is the dialectic of the subject's relation to his own organ. For want
of the organ itself being changed, at the end of the observation the
subject assumes unto himself a sort of mythical father, such as he
has managed to conceive of him. Goodness knows that this father is
a father like no other, because this is a father who in Hans's fanta-
sies is capable of engendering. As the husband says to the policeman
•m Les Mamelles de Tir6sias -
Revenez des ce soir voir comment la nature

Me dormera sans femme une prog6niture.6
It is in this respect that it cannot be said that everything has been

taken on board with regard to the relative position of the sexes, of
the gap that remains from the integration of these relations.
I want to insist on this. It's precisely in the paradoxical inversion
of certain terms, expressed through a notation with a plus or a
minus, that we can truly judge the result of a certain furtherance.
If therefore in the present case little Hans has not passed through
the castration complex, then he has passed though something that
had the capacity to transform him into another little Hans, as is
indicated by the myth of the fitter who changes his behind.
When Freud meets Hans again in his young adulthood, he sees
someone who tells him that he rcmcmbcrf #o/fez.#g of all this. Here
we have the sign and the token of a kind of moment of essential
alienation.
You know the story that is told of a subject who went off to an
island to forget something. Some people find him, go up to him and
ask him what it was he wanted to forget, and he is unable to reply.
As the end of the story has it -he has forgotten.
In the case of little Hans, I would say that there is something
that allows us to shift the emphasis, and almost the formula, of this
story. If to a certain degree Hans may indeed bear one of the scars of
the incompleteness of his analysis, and of the Oedipal solution that
was predicated by his phobia, it's for the following reason. After all
of these salutary turns, which from a certain point forth rendered
his recourse to the horse signifier needless and expendable, if the
phobia was made gradually to disappear, then it was on the basis of
something that allows us to say, not that Hans forgot, but that Hans
has forgotten himself.
26 June 1957
FAREWELL
XXIV
FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO
LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR
A way out via the maternal ideal

Little Hans, descendant of two mothers
The vulture was a kite
The Other become little other
Leonardo's imaginary inversion
Today is our last session of the year. I didn't care to sum up by

repeating myself, which, regardless of the effects it may have, is not
a poor method.
There are a number of things that I didn't get round to last week,
which meant that I was unable to push my analysis through to the
end.
I have produced a formalisation with some letters and have tried
to indicate the direction in which an effort can be made so as to
accustom oneself to writing out relations in such a way as to yield
fixed reference points - reference points that there is no need to go
back on in discussion. Once they have been set down they cannot be
passed over by taking advantage of everything that usually is a little
too flexible in the interplay between the imaginary and the symbolic,
but which is so important for our comprehension of the experience.
What I have initiated for you, then, is a beginning to this formali-
sation. I'm well aware that I haven't explained every last term. A
certain indeterminacy might therefore seem to have persisted in how
these terms link up with one another. You can't explain everything
in one go. In the article that is set to appear in the third issue of the
journal La Pst;cAcz#a/};sc under the title £'j.#s/o#cc de /a /c//re, you
will see what is perhaps a tighter justification for the ordering of
some of these formulae, notably those for metaphor and metonymy.
At the point we've reached, I believe that what is important is to
have suggested to you the possibility of using formulae of this order
so as to situate the relations between the subject and the different
404 Farewell
modes of the other, which, in sum, cannot be articulated otherwise,

given how language in the usual sense does not furnish us with the
necessary fundaments with which to do this.
So, I left some things trailing behind. And, after all, why shouldn't
I? Why, even in what is specific to the case of little Hans, would I
want to provide an absolutely complete formula for what little Hans
poses as a question?
You know that I mean to pursue my commentary within the
register of questions posed by Freud. Yet this doesn't imply that I
should want to turn each of his works, nor even his work as a whole,
into a closed system. What is important is for you to have picked
up sufficiently, and better so each day, on how Freud shifts the very
bases of psychological account by introducing a dimension that is
foreign to it. The foreignness of this dimension in relation to any
psychological fixing down of the object constitutes the originality
of our science and the basic principle on the basis of which we must
therein assess our progress.
Either way, to seal up once again Freud's examination, to reduce
it to the field of psychology, leads to what I shall call, with no further
formality, a delusional psychogenesis, the same psychogenesis that
you can see being developed from day to day, implicitly, in how psy-
choanalysts have been contemplating the facts and the objects they
deal with. This psychogenesis is so paradoxical, so foreign to all the
neighbouring conceptualisations, so shocking, yet at the same time
so well tolerated, that the mere fact that it is surviving needs to be
added to the main thrust of the problem, and ought to be resolved at
the same time in the solution that we will bring to the problem of the
Freudian dimension, that is to say, of the unconscious.
So, I left to one side everything that you are now about to follow.
You know the elements well enough to perceive on rereading the
text the whole mythical game that plays out in what I shall call /Ac
reduction to the inaginary of the sequence of maternal desire.1 wrote
this sequence out in the formula M.ap.cL, which is the notation for
the mother's relationship with this imaginary other that is her own
phallus, then everything that may arise in terms of new elements,
that is to say, other children. In this instance it is Hans's little sister,
Hanna.
The child's mythification in this imaginary game as triggered by
the, let's say, psychotherapeutic intervention, is something that in
itself makes manifest a phenomenon the originality of which ought
From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror 405
to be seized upon as a vital element of the ycrczrb€z.fw7!g of the whole

analytic progression. It's a dynamic and crystallising element in the
symbolic progress that constitutes the analytic cure as such.
While indeed I didn't push this any further, I should like, even so,
to reveal the elements that I didn't touch upon. Actually, I did sign-
post them in passing, but without explaining the exact function they
hold in relation to these mythical doings in which the child indulges
under the prompting of the analytic intervention.
There is one element that is correlative with the major mythical
invention relating to birth, especially the birth of young Hanna
and her constant presence for all eternity, so nicely fomented by
Hans in his mythifying speculation. This element is the mysterious
personage of the stork, who is truly worthy of the finest tradition
of black humour. The hatted stork comes when everyone is asleep,
knocks on the door and unlocks it with his key. He presents with
all these exceedingly quirky aspects. We need to know how to hear
what little Hans says. Hc pwfs jJcz##¢ I.# };octr bcc7, he tells his father.
In other words, the stork has come in his father's place. Then, Hans
corrects himself, IVo, ffec sforkp#J feer j.# her bc7d. Next, the stork goes
away again leaving no one any the wiser, until he comes back and
makes a bit of a din, just to wake up the household. In short, this
character who comes and goes, who is seemingly so imperturbable,
even uncanny, is surely one of the most enigmatic of little Hans's
creations. It would be worthwhile dwelling at greater length on this,
and indeed his place needs to be indicated in the overall economy of
the case at this point in little Hans's progress.
Little Hans cannot manage, under the suggestion of his psycho-
therapist father, himself groomed by Freud, to foment his imaginary
manipulation of the different terms that are present unless by isolat-
ing something that is well and truly heralded just before the major
mythical creation - Hanna's birth and, at the same time, the stork
- when we meet the theme of death, voiced by Hans and reported
word fo[ word by his [tLther. Once he knocked on the pavement with
fez.a sfz.ck -we don't know why he has one, since this cane has never
been mentioned before - and said: `1 say, is there a man underneath?
Someone buried?'
The presence of the theme of death is strictly correlative with the
theme of birth. It is crucial to pick out this dimension for the com-
prehension and furtherance of the case, but, in truth, this theme,
this potential of generation raised to its ultimate degree of mystery,
between life and death, between existence and nothingness, is some-
thing that poses particular problems that are distinct from that of
the introduction of the horse signifier. It is not its counterpart. It
is something else, which perhaps we shall look at next year. I'm
406 Farewell
leaving it in reserve. The heading that I will most likely choose for
what I shall develop next year is fcs/orm¢/z.o#s c7c /'j.#co7€scj.c#/.
I will also underscore once again that it is significant that little
Hans, at the end of the crisis that resolves and dissolves the phobia,
moves into something so imperative as the refusal of any further
births. A kind of treaty will be established with the stork and with
his mother. You will see the meaning of the passage that has to do
with his mother's relations with God with respect to the possible
arrival of more children, so elegantly transformed in the observation
by Freud's little footnote - Ce gwc/emmc vcci/, Dz.cot /e vcw/. Indeed,
this is just what Hans's mother had said when she declared that z/
she didn' t want it, God didn' i want it either .
On the other hand, little Hans says that he wishes to have chil-
dren, in this same move whereby he doesn't want there to be any
more. His desire is to have imaginary children, insomuch as the
whole situation has been resolved for him by an identification with
maternal desire. There will be his dream children, the children of
his mind. To spell it right out, he will have children structured on
the model of the maternal phallus, which ultimately he will turn into
the object of his own desire.
Yet it is fully understood, of course, that there will be none, and
this identification with the mother's desire as an imaginary desire
only constitutes in appearance a return to the little Hans that he
once was, the little Hans who played the primordial game of hide-
and-seek with the little girls, the object of which was his sexual
organ. On no account does Hans still think of playing hide-and-
seek, or more exactly, he no longer thinks of showing them anything
but, as it were, his fine stature as little Hans, that is to say, a person-
age who in some respect has become - and this is what I'm driving
at - something like a fetish object.
Little Hans places himself in a certain pacified position, and
regardless of the heterosexual lawfulness of his object, we cannot
regard this as exhausting the legitimacy of his position. In this
respect, he blends in with a type that will strike you as no stranger
to our era, that of the generation of a certain late nineteen-forties
style that we are familiar with, these lovely fellows who wait for tbe
initiative to come from the other side. To say it right out, they wait
for their trousers to be pulled down. This is how I see the future of
the charming little Hans, as fully heterosexual as he seems to be.
Hear me well. Nothing in the observation allows us at any moment
to think that it is resolved otherwise than through this domination
of the maternal phallus, in so far as Hans takes its place, identifies
with it, and certainly masters it. Everything that might correspond
to the phase of castration, or to the castration complex, is no more
than what we can see taking shape in the observation in the form
of the stone on which one can injure oneself. The image of this
that comes to the surface, so to speak, is much less that of a vc!gz.#cz
de7!fcz/a than that of a pfecz//ws dc7t/cz/ws. This kind of frozen object
is an imaginary object that makes a victim of any male assault by
causing injury.
It is in this sense that we can also say that little Hans's Oedipal
crisis does not culminate strictly speaking in the shaping of a typical
superego, I mean a superego such as it is produced in keeping with
the mechanism that is already indicated in what we have taught
here at the level of ycrwcr/w7cg, namely wfeczf A¢s bccH re/.ccfcd/ron
the symbolic and reappears in the real. This for"ula ±s the true key,
at a much closer level, to what happens after a ycrwcr/w#g of the
Oedipus complex.
Indeed, it is in so far as the castration complex has been come
through, but without it being able to be fully taken on board by a
subject, that he produces an identification with a sort of image of
the father in the raw, an image that carries reflections of his real
particularities in what is heavy and even overwhelming about them.
Here we can see once again a fresh instance of the mechanism of
rcczppcoro#ce I.# fAe rc¢/, but this time it's a real on the borderline
of the psyche, within the bounds of the ego. However, tbis is a real
that forces itself upon a subject in an almost hallucinatory way, to
the extent that at a certain point the subject has peeled off from the
symbolic integration of the process of castration.
Nothing of the like is manifested in the present case. Little Hans
is surely not to lose his penis because at no moment does he acquire
it. While little Hans has identified with the maternal phallus, this
does not mean that he can thereby retrieve his own penis and take
on board its function. There is no phase of penis symbolisation. The
penis somehow remains on the margins, disengaged, as something
that has only ever been reviled and reproved by his mother. Yet this
thing that is produced allows him to integrate his masculinity. This
occurs through no other mechanism but that of the shaping of an
identification with the maternal phallus, which also belongs to a
very different realm from that of the superego with its disturbing yet
also balancing function. Rather, it's a function that belongs to the
order of the Ego Ideal.
It is in so far as little Hans has a certain idea of his ideal, insomuch
as he is his mother's ideal, namely a substitute for the phallus, that
he takes his place in existence. Let's say that if, instead of having a
Jewish mother in the progressive movement, she'd been a devout
Catholic, you can see by what mechanism little Hans might have been
gently nudged towards the priesthood, and even towards sainthood.
408 Farewell
In a case like this, where the subject has been introduced into an
atypical Oedipal relationship, the matemal ideal is very precisely
what offers a certain type of way out and positioning in the relation
between the sexes. The outcome is produced through identification
with the maternal ideal.
This gives us a rough sketch of the terns in which I'm locating
what the case of little Hans opens onto. We have confirmative hints
of this throughout the observation, and those towards the end are
sometimes very moving.
When little Hans has become downright disheartened by the
paternal shortcoming - since he wanted his father to step forward
- he will somehow perform, himself, fantasmatically, his own ini-
tiation ceremony by placing himself gz#./c #¢kcd on the little truck
where he is due to keep watch all night, like a young knight, after
which, thanks to a few coins given to the guard - the same money
that will serve to abate the terrific potency of the S/orcrfe -little Hans
will be riding on the larger circuit. The matter has been settled. Little
Hans might not be anything other than a knight, a knight who is
more or less covered by social security, but a knight all the same.
And he will have no father. Moreover, I don't believe that anything
new in the experience of existence will ever afford him one.
Right after this, there is a somewhat belated intervention from his
father. The opening of the father's comprc#o!.re as the observation
wears on is not an uninteresting item in itself. After playing with an
open hand, firmly persuaded of all the truths he has learned from his
good mentor Freud, the further he advances in the wielding of this
truth the more he comes to realise that it is far more relative than
he was given to believe. When little Hans starts to produce his big
mythical delusion, he comes out with a sentence that is barely noted
in the text but which carries all its importance.
It has to do with the time when little Hans is playing up, contra-
dicting himself from one instant to the next, saying, J/'s /i'wc -Jf 's
not a bit true -It's just for fun -But it's actually quite serious. His
father, who is no fool and who learns from this experience, tells him,
Ever);ffez.#g o#c scz}js j.s a bz./ frwc. In spite of everything, this father
who has not succeeded in holding his position - he is the one who
ought to have been put through analysis - tries one more time, even
though it's too late. He says to little Hans, Pcrfeaps }7ow're #o//o#cJ
of Daddy .
This delayed intervention leads little Hans to the very nice gesture
that is given a special highlight in the observation. Just as the father
says this to him, Hans knocks over his little horse. The conversation
is out of date. The dialogue has expired. Little Hans has settled in to
his new position in the world.
Little Hans is now a little man with the power to have children,
capable in his imagination of engendering indefinitely and of deriv-
ing full satisfaction from his creations. This is how the mother lives
on in his imagination.
As I told you, to be little Hans is not to be the descendant of one
mother, but the descendant of two mothers.I This is a remarkable
and enigmatic point, on which last week I paused the observation.
Certainly, the other mother is the one whose potency he has had
ample occasion and reason to encounter -his father's mother. None
the less, that the subject should take on board the conditions of the
final equilibrium in this duplication or doubling of the maternal
figure still remains one of the structural problems posed by the
observation.
It was on this point that I concluded the lesson before last,
drawing a comparison with the painting by Leonardo da Vinci and
by the same stroke with the case of Leonardo. It is no accident that
Freud devoted such attention to it.
We will be dedicating the time that remains to this text. We cannot
alarm to exhaust Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood
in just a single lesson. This will be a short lesson for the end of term,
as is my wont in my teaching as a way of winding down, for a crowd
as attentive as you are, and I thank you for being so.
Let's leave little Hans to his fate. But before taking leave of him,
I will yet point out to you that when I alluded in his regard to
something deeply contemporary in a certain evolution in relations
between the sexes, to the 1945 generation, this was surely not to slip
inordinately into current affairs. I leave it to others to depict and
define what the current generation might be, to lend them a direct
and symbolic expression. There is Francoise Sagan for one, whom
I'm not name-dropping here for the sake of it, nor for the mere
pleasure of being topical, but rather as an opportunity to advise
you to read over the holiday period an article on two books from
this best-selling author, Bo#/.owr /rj.sfcsfc and U# ccr/czz.# sowr;.re.
The article is by Alexandre Kojeve in the August/September 1956
issue of Crj./j.gate under the title fe dcr#j.cr mo#c7c #owvcoai. You will
be able to see what a serious philosopher who is used to operating
exclusively at the level of Hegel and the highest political issues can
draw from works that at first blush seem so frivolous.
It will certainly enlighten you and, as they say, it won't do you any
harm. There's no risk involved. Psychoanalysts are not recruited
from the ranks of those who devote themselves wholeheartedly to
the world's fluctuations in psychosexual matters. You are, if I may
say so, too well oriented for that, even a trifle swotty in such matters.
Indeed, this is to lead you to a kind of immersion into current
410 Farewell
affairs, activating this perspective when it comes to what you do

and what you should be ready to hear sometimes from your patients
themselves. This will also show you something that we must take
into account, namely the deep changes in relations between men
and women that have come about during such a brief length of time
as the one that stands between us and Freud's era, when, as they
say, everything that was to become our history was in the process of
fomentation.
All of this is intended to tell you also that the last word on do#-
/.wa#z.smc, on Don-Juan-esque womanising, might not have been
spoken, whatever the analysts might have to say about it. While
they have made interesting contributions on this score, and while
something correct has been glimpsed in the notion of Don Juan's
homosexuality, this is certainly not to be taken in the way it is
usually taken.
I firmly believe that Don Juan is a character too far removed
from us in the cultural realm for analysts to have been able to
perceive him accurately. Mozart's Don Juan, if we take him as the
apogee of the character and as something that effectively signifies
the culminating point of a question, properly speaking, in the sense
I intend here, is surely quite distinct from the character that Rank
sought to construct for us as a reflection. It is certainly not from
the angle of the double alone that he should be understood. I think
that, again to adopt a counter-stance, Don Juan does not blend
seamlessly - indeed far from it - into the seducer who's got little
tricks that work every time. I believe that Don Juan loves women. I
would even say that he loves them enough to know on occasion not
to tell them so, and he loves them enough so that when he does tell
them, they believe it.
This is no small matter, and it reveals many things. It shows that
there is never any way out of the situation for him. I think that it's
in the direction of the notion of the phallic woman that we need to
look.
In Don Juan's relations with his object, there is of course some-
thing related to a problem of bisexuality, but it lies precisely in
the direction of this thing that Don Juan seeks out in woman, and
this is the phallic woman. Since he truly seeks her out and goes
after her, and is never content with attaining her or contemplating
her, he doesn't find her, or ends up finding her only in the form of
the ominous guest who does indeed lie beyond woman, whom he
doesn't expect, and who is, not without reason, the Father. Let's not
forget, however, that when he does rear his head, what is yet more
curious is that it's in the form of a guest made of stone. To spell
it right out, this is stone in its aspect of being absolutely dead and
closed off, beyond all the life of Nature. This, in sum, is where Don
Juan comes to a standstill and seals his fate.
The problem that Leonardo da Vinci will pose us is quite different.
That Freud should have turned his interest to Leonardo da Vinci is

not something that we need to question. In general, why one thing
came to pass instead of not coming to pass should be the least of
our worries. Freud is Freud precisely because he took an interest in
Leonardo.
What is to be done now is to find out how he became interested
in him and what Leonardo might have been for him. To find an
answer, there is no better than to read the K;.7!c7rfeez./serj.#73erc{#g. I
gave sufficient forewarning for some of you to have done so, and to
have noticed how deeply enigmatic this book is.
In 1910, Freud had arrived at what we might call the height of
fortune in existence. This at least is how things look from the outside
and, actually, he says as much himself. He had gained international
renown, and had not yet been through the sadness and drama of
the separations from his most highly esteemed pupils. This was just
before the major crisis points, but at this point he was able to tell
himself that he had made up for the setbacks of the previous ten
years of his life.
So, here is Freud taking Leonardo da Vinci as his subject. Of
course, Freud's background, his culture, his love of Italy and the
Renaissance, give us to understand that he must have been intrigued
by the character. What does he tell us in this regard? In what he
writes he evinces a considerable appreciation of Leonardo's profun-
dity, which he handles with great sensitivity.
It may be said that on the whole Freud's text on Leonardo is
an interesting read and is read with even greater interest with the
passing of time. By this I mean that, even though it is one of Freud's
most criticised works - and it's paradoxical to see that it's also one
of those of which he was most proud - the people who are always
most reticent in such cases, and goodness knows they might well be,
I mean the specialists in painting and art history, with the passing of
time, and even as the major faults in the text came to light, ultimately
came to realise how important it is. By and large, Freud's text came
to be almost universally rejected, scorned and even disdained by
art historians, and yet, in spite of all the lasting reservations that
have become only more intense with the appearance of new docu-
ments proving that Freud had made mistakes, no less a figure than
412 Farewell
Kenneth Clark, former director of the National Gallery, in a book

that is not all that old, acknowledges the great interest of Freud's
analysis of the painting that I showed you the other day, the Sf
j4##c in the Louvre, paired with the famous Cartoon in London.
These are the two works on which Freud based the in-depth study
he made, or believed he made, of the case of Leonardo da Vinci.
Well, I suppose I don't need to summarise for you the fate of this
little book.
First there is a brief presentation of the case of Leonardo, of his
ffr¢Hgc sz.de. This strange side, which we will be coming back to with
our own means, is doubtless accurately perceived, and everything
that Freud says most certainly finds a sure axis in the enigma of
the character. He then examines the painter's singular constitution,
even predisposition, along with his paradoxical activity. I'm calling
him a painter, though he was so much else besides. Let's say for the
time being a grccz/ p¢z.#/cr. Anyway, Freud turns to the fragment
that he pushes very much to the fore across all his developments, the
only childhood memory that we have from Leonardo, and which
has been translated as follows - J/ seems fA¢t J wczs cz/wcz};a c7cs/j.#cc7
to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for while I was in my cradle
a vulture came down to me. and opened my mouth with its tail, and
struck me many times with its tail against my lips.
Freud tells us that this memory is of ffoc a/r¢"gcs/ sorf , then segues
into something that will take us where he wants to lead us. We
follow him because we are used to this kind of sleight of hand that
consists in superposing in dialectics and reasoning what is very often
conflated in experience and in clinical practice, when in fact these
are very different registers. I'm not saying that Freud handles them
improperly. On the contrary, I believe that he handles them bril-
liantly, that is to say, that he goes to the heart of the phenomenon.
Yet we would be wrong to follow him with an idle mind, accepting
in advance everything he tells us, namely that this is a sort of super-
position, or superimposition, between the relation to the maternal
breast and fellatio, at least an imaginary act of fellatio. This is what
he posits at the outset and which is purported also to carry the
signification of a veritable sexual intrusion.
Freud lays this out at the start, and it's upon this base that he will
tease out an articulation of his construction, gradually leading us to
what is deeply enigmatic in the relation to the mother in the case of
Leonardo. Onto this he builds all the particularities of this strange
personage, namely his probable inversion first of all, then his alto-
gether unique and peculiar relation to his oeuvre, wrought by a
kind of activity that always lies on the limits between the realisable
and the impossible, as he himself writes in one instance - repeatedly
breaking off the different ventures in his life - this singularity that
sets him apart from his contemporaries and makes him a legend-
ary figure in his own lifetime, thought to possess every quality and
ability, a universal genius. From all this that surrounds Leonardo da
Vinci, Freud will deduce for us his relation with his mother.
As I mentioned, Freud takes as his point of departure the child-
hood memory. The vulture with the quivering tail that comes to
strike the child is, we are told, constructed as the screen-memory
of something that is the reflection of a fantasy of fellatio. Freud
doesn't hesitate for one second to set it out in just this way, yet all
the same it has to be acknowledged that for an unprimed mind this
is something that raises a problem. The whole interest of Freud's
investigation is to reveal that, until an age that may be tied down
to his third or fourth year, Leonardo very probably had no other
presence around him but that of his mother, and doubtless no other
elements of sexual seduction but what Freud calls i.##wmcrab/c pczf-
fj.o#cz/e kz.ffcs pressed onto the child's mouth by his mother, nor any
other object to represent the object of his desire besides the maternal
breast. Ultimately it is on the plane of fantasy that the revelation is
posed by Freud himself, in so far as it can have this informative role.
All of this hinges on one point, which is none other than the
identification of the vulture with the mother herself, in so far as she
would be the figure at the source of the imaginary intrusion.
Now, let's say it straightaway. It so happened that there was what
may be called a mishap or an error in this affair -but it's a fortunate
error. Freud only read this childhood memory in the version that
features in Herzfeld's translation, from which he lifts the passage.
That is to say, he read it in German, and what she translated as
Gel.cr, a vulture, was not a vulture at all. The fact has been pointed
out by several scholars, most recently by Professor Meyer Schapiro
in an article published last year in the Jowr#¢/ o//foe fJz.s/or); a/Jdeczs,
Vol.17, No. 2.2
Besides, Freud could have suspected as much because, as usual,
he carried out his work with the utmost care and the reference
from the manuscript folio from which the translation was made
is given in a footnote. As it happens, it comes from the Coc7cx
.4f/cz#/;.cws, which is a bound folder of Leonardo's drawings and
writings housed in Milan. It's been translated into practically every
language. In French there is a complete though inadequate transla-
tion under the title Cczr#c/I c7e £6o#czrc7 c7c yz.#cz.. You can read what
Leonardo left by way of manuscript notes, often in the margins of
his drawings. Freud could have taken a look at where this reference
is to be found in Leonardo's notes, notes which in general are five,
six or seven lines long, a half page at most, scattered amongst the
414 Farewell
sketches. This fragment is on a folio, just alongside a study of birds

in flight. Such studies crop up in different places in Leonardo's
oeuwre. LeoneLldo says, It seems that I was always destined to be so
cJeep/}; co#cer#cd w.ffe . . . not vw//wrcs, but precisely what he has
drawn alongside, kz.fcs.
That the kite should be particularly interesting for the study of
bird flight is something that had already been remarked upon by
Pliny the Elder. According to him, the kite's tail is of especial interest
to maritime pilots because its movement is particularly exemplary
for the steering of the rudder. Leonardo deals with the same thing.
It's very nice to follow the fortune of this kite's tail down through
the ages. The fundamental character of its tail has been known since
Pliny in Antiquity and has been taken up by several authors, some
of whom I shall be mentioning in passing in a short while. I've been
told that, in our own time, Mr Anton Fokker has studied first-hand
the movement of the hite's tail. Between the wars he concocted some
lovely little preparations for the handling of planes in nosedive, a
truly distasteful parody - I hope you share my opinion on this - of
natural flight. But then, we couldn't expect any better from human
perversity.
So, this is the kite, which, moreover, has just what it takes to
provoke such perversity. It's an animal that has nothing especially
attractive about it. Pierre Belon, who put together a very fine book
on birds, and who had been to Egypt and various other parts of the
world on behalf of King Henri 11, saw some in Egypt and described
the bird as sorc7z.dc & #o# ge#fz./, both vile and unpleasant.
I must say that for a minute I hoped that everything might fall
into place and that Freud's vulture, even if it was really a kite, might
actually turn out after all to have something to do with Egypt, and
that in the end it might be an Egyptian vulture. You can see how I
always desire to sort things out. Unfortunately this is not the case.
In fact, the situation is complicated. There are kites in Egypt and
I can even tell you that one day when I was having breakfast in
Luxor, I had the surprise of catching in my peripheral vision some-
thing that was flouncing around and which then darted sideways,
making off with an orange from my table. For a second I thought it
was a falcon, but then I quickly realised it wasn't. It flew up to perch
on the corner of a roof and set down the orange, to show that it was
just teasing. You could see it was a reddish creature of a peculiar
style. Soon enough, I could be sure that it was a kite. So, you can see
what a familiar and readily observable creature it is.
But there is something else. There is an Egyptian vulture that
looks very much like it, and this is what might have made things fall
into place. This is the one that Belon speaks about, which he calls the
Sczcrc Eg}J/?/j.c# and which since Herodotus has been known under
the name of the 'J€pa€. There are many in Egypt and, naturally, it
is sacred. Herodotus informs us that in Ancient Egypt it could not
be killed without getting its slayer into great trouble. It is of inter-
est here because it looks somewhat like a kite and somewhat like a
falcon. This is the one that in the Egyptian ideograms corresponds
roughly to the letter cz/c/which I speak about in my disquisitions
on hieroglyphics and their exemplary function for us. Here is the
vulture, that is to say, more or less the Egyptian saker falcon.
HEIR
Egyptian vulture hieroglyph
Everything would be just fine if it were this one that was used for
the Goddess Mut, whom you know Freud speaks about in relation
to the vulture, but that won't work. Freud really did get it wrong,
because despite all this effort towards a solution, the vulture that
was used for the Goddess Mut is this one.
a-=`._ -'
Griffon vulture ( G)/ps/w/vws) hieroglyph
Unlike the other one, this one doesn't have a phonetic value. It
serves as a determinative element, in the sense that it is added on.
Either it designates on its own the goddess Mut, and in this case a
little flail is added, or it is integrated into a whole sign that will write
Mut plus the little determinative, or else one is content to make it
equal to A4, yet adding a little f to phoneticise the term. It can be
found in more than one association, where it always has to do with
the mother goddess.3
This very different vulture, a true G)/ps, which doesn't resemble
in the slightest the previous one, the one that lies on the boundary
between kites and falcons and other related animals, is the one to
which refers everything that Freud reports of this tradition of the
bestiary type, for example what was recorded by Horapollo at the
416 Farewell
time of the Egyptian decline. Horapollo's writings, which moreover

are fragmentary and have come down to us through umpteen trans-
positions, transcriptions and distortions, formed the basis for a few
Renaissance collections, to which the engravers of the time added
little emblems that were supposed to provide us with the signifying
value of a number of major Egyptian hieroglyphs.
This edition here dates from 1519, and so was brought out, by
Aldus Manutius, in Leonardo's lifetime. It ought to be familiar
to you all because it's the one from which I took the drawing that
graces the cover of thejournal Lcz Ps}/cA¢#cz/};sc. Horapollo gives the
description that I can see written here - 7lf!c j.mczge a/cz# car sj.g7?z/ics
work to come.
We will not, however, allow ourselves to fall into the bad habits of
an era from which not everything is to be imitated.
It was from Horapollo that Freud took the reference stating that
the vulture carried the signification of mo/feer, but he also found a
far more interesting entry which leads him to take a step forward
in the dialectic, namely that this is an animal that exists only in
the female sex. This is an old zoological yam which, like so many
others, goes way back. It is attested in Antiquity, though not in the
finer authors, but was no less widely accepted in medieval culture.
One would be quite wrong to believe it, and all it takes is to open
up one of Leonardo's notebooks, which are there to prove it, that
his mind brought about a revolution within a certain perspective,
and did not partake of these medieval fables. Freud accepts that,
because Leonardo was widely read, he must know this story. This
is likely and has nothing extraordinary about it, because it's very
widespread, but it hasn't been proved. And it has all the less interest
in being proved in that a vulture is not what is at issue.
I'm passing over the fact that Saint Ambrose took the story of
the female vulture as Nature deliberately affording us an example
to foster the entry into our comprc#oj.rc of the virgin birth of Jesus.
Freud seems to accept uncritically that a/mos/ a// the Fathers of the
Church told this story. I have to tell you that I haven't been able
to check because I only found out this morning that it's in Saint
Ambrose. Actually, I knew it already, because a certain Pierio
Valeriano, who in 1556 brought out a collection of these captioned
images of the time, seemed to me to be a particularly important
source to consult in order to see what the kite might have been at
that time, along with a certain number of other symbolic elements.
He points out that Saint Ambrose mentions it, and singles out
Saint Basil the Great as well, but there is no mention of cz// ffec
F¢/fecrs a/ /Ae Cfowrcrfe, as the author to whom Freud refers seems
to Suggest.
Vultures were only female just as snails were only male. It was a
tradition, and it's interesting to compare one with the other given
that the snail is a creature that slithers over land while the vulture is
impregnated in the sky, offering her tail to the wind, as we can see in
one very fine image.
Where does all this lead us? It shows that the vulture story surely
does have a certain interest, like many others of this nature. In
truth, Leonardo's writings are teeming with such stories. He showed
a lively interest in different sorts of fables constructed upon such
stories. Many other things could be drawn from the kite. One could
for example note that it's an animal strongly given to envy, and
which mistreats its offspring. Imagine what the result would have
been if Freud had chanced upon that, and the different interpreta-
tion that we could give of the relation with the mother.
Am I to show you that nothing holds water in all of this, that
there is nothing worth keeping in this part of Freud's elaboration?
Well, no. That's not why I'm telling you this. I won't give myself the
easy advantage of criticising a great invention long after the event. It
often happens that, with all sorts of defects, the eye of the genius has
been guided by many other things besides these little investigations,
and has gone far beyond the supports that some happenstance has
afforded.
The question is what it means and what all this allows us to see.
Six years after the 7lferee Esscz};f o77 Sexwcz/j./}; and ten or twelve after
the first perceptions that Freud formed of bisexuality - in what he
had thus far extracted from the function of the castration complex
on the one hand, and of the importance of the phallus and the
imaginary phallus on the other, in so far as the latter is the object of
woman's Pc#z.s7cej.cJ - what is there that is new in Freud's essay on
Leonardo da Vinci?
He introduces very precisely, in May 1910, the importance of the
function of the phallic mother, the phallic woman. She is phallic not
for the subject herself, but for the child who is dependent upon this
subject. Here we have the point of arrest, the original element in
what Freud is bringing us here.
That the child is bound to a mother who in turn is bound on the
imaginary plane to the phallus qua lack is the relation that Freud is
introducing as crucial and which is utterly distinct from everything
he had said before then regarding woman's relation to the phallus.
This original structure is the one around which this year I have been
418 Farewell
making the fundamental criticism of the object relation revolve, in

as much as the object relation is designed to instate a certain stable
relationship between the sexes that would ostensibly be grounded in
accordance with a certain symbolic relation. I believe I have made
this abundantly clear - at the very least I think you have taken it
as such - in the analysis of little Hans. Here, we find testimony in
Freud's thought of this being something that in itself alone enables
us to gain access to the mystery of Leonardo's position.
In other words, the fact that the child, isolated through the dual
encounter with woman, finds himself by the same token confronted
with the problem of the phallus qua lack for his female partner, that
is, in this instance, for the maternal partner, is the element around
which everything that Freud constructs with regard to Leonardo
turns. This is what makes for the depth and the originality of this
observation, which moreover is Freud's first work, and not by
chance, in which the term #czrcz.ssj.sin is mentioned. So, this is the
start of the structuring as such of the register of the imaginary in
Freud's oeuvre.
We need to pause now for a moment on what I shall call the
contrast, the paradox, of the personage of Leonardo and pose the
question of the other term, which is not new but which appears here
with a particular insistence, that of swb/z.mafz.o#.
Every now and then Freud refers to a certain number of what
could be called Leonardo's #ewro/z.c frcI!.ts. I mean that from one
point to the next Freud is seeking out traces of a critical point
of passage, of a relation preserved in some kind of repetition of
terms, in sorts of obsessional lapses. Freud will also turn whatever
this paradoxical aspect is in Leonardo's thirst for knowledge, in his
cc{pJ.cJo scz.c#c7j. - this being the traditional designation for the curios-
ity that animated him - into an obsessional trait, because he calls it
a Grdr.bc/zwcz#g, a compw/sz.vc broodz.#g. It cannot be denied that there
is a certain such indication here. Nevertheless, Leonardo's personal-
ity cannot be explained in its totality by neurosis. And, as one of the
crucial outlets of what remains of the exhilarated and indeed fixed
infantile tendency at issue in the case of Leonardo, Freud brings
in the notion of sublimation that he had already introduced in the
Three Essays.
As you know, further to sublimation being a tendency that bears
upon objects that are not primordial objects but the most elevated
objects of what is offered to human and interhuman consideration,
it was only later on that Freud was to add a few complements
showing the role sublimation might play in establishing the interests
of the ego.
Since then, the term Jwb/j.mczfj.o# has been taken up by a number of
authors from the psychoanalytic community who link it to a notion

of the neutralisation and dis-instinctualisation of instinct. I must say
that this is something that it is very hard to credit. A de-libidinalisa-
tion of libido. A dis-aggressivation of aggressiveness. These are the
loveliest terms that we can most commonly find flowering up from
the pen of Hartmann or Loewenstein. They hardly clarify anything
when it comes to the mechanism of sublimation.
The interest of a study like Freud's Kz.#c7fecz.fserj.##crct#g is that we
can take a few ideas from it and at the very least initiate something
that will allow us to posit the term swb/z.777¢/j.o# in such a way as to
secure a more structured basis than the notion of an instinct that
dis-instinctualises, indeed of an object that, as they say, becomes
more sublime. For it would seem that, going by these ego psycholo-
gists, this is what the Sc}// of sublimation ought to be.
Leonardo da Vinci was himself the object of an idealisation, if
not a sublimation, which began in his own lifetime and which tends
to turn him into a kind of universal genius and, equally, a stunning
precursor to modern thought. This is what is maintained by some,
including highly erudite scholars, who have started to get down to
the crux of the problem, as indeed did Freud. Others have done the
same on other planes besides that of art. Pierre Duhem, for example,
says that Leonardo glimpsed the Law of Falling Bodies and even
the Principle of Inertia. A slightly more rigorous and methodical
examination from the standpoint of the History of Science shows
that this is hardly the case. Nevertheless, it is clear that Leonardo
made stunning discoveries and that the drawings he left us in the
realms of the kinematic, the dynamic, the mechanical and the bal-
listic, often evince an extraordinarily keen perception far in advance
of what was being done in his time. On no account does this allow
us to believe that there were not on each of these planes works that
were highly advanced in mathematisation, and especially those in
kinematics, for example.
Yet a remainder of Aristotelian tradition, that is to say, a tra-
dition founded on a certain evidential experience, meant that the
fairly advanced mathematical formalisation that had been made in
abstract kinematics had not yet been fully conjoined with the expe-
riential domain, the domain of real and existing bodies that seem
to be subject to the Law of Gravity, which so occupied the human
mind with its experiential prominence that they spent all the time of
which you are aware on striving to produce a correct formulation
for it. Think on the fact that we also find in Leonardo's drawings
and their attendant commentaries interpolations such as, a boc7y
/cz//f more gwz.ck/)/ /foe fecczvj.cr I./ I.a. We find this explicitly and more
often still implicitly. I think that you have retained enough of your
420 Farewell
secondary education to know that this theorem is deeply wrong,

even though experience, as they say - experience at the broad level
of common experience - does seem to impose it.
Nevertheless, what is it that constitutes the originality of these
drawings? I'm alluding to just one portion of what he left us,
as the work of an engineer, properly speaking, which so aston-
ished, interested and even fascinated both his contemporaries and
later generations. These are things that are often extraordinar-
ily advanced for their time but which cannot get beyond certain
bounds that had not yet been crossed in terms of the use, the vivid
entry, as it were, of mathematics in the realm of the analysis of
phenomena of the real.
In other words, what Leonardo brings us is often absolutely
admirable in inventiveness, construction and creativity, and it is
already quite enough to see for example the elegance with which he
determines the theorems that can serve as the basis for evaluating
the gradual change in the intensity of a force attached to a cj.rcwm-
vo/"bz./c body, this being the term he uses for a body mobile about an
axis. This force is linked to a spj.r!./wo/ czrm, and the arm turns. What
will the variation in the efficacy of this force be as the lever arm
turns? These are problems that Leonardo will excel in translating by
what I shall call a kind of overview of the field of force, determined
not so much by his calculating as by his drawing. In short, the intui-
tive factor, the factor of creative imagination, is tied in Leonardo
to a certain predominance accorded to the principle of experience,
which is the source of all sorts of dazzling and original intuitions
but which, despite everything, are partial at the level of the working
drawing of an engineer.
This is no small matter. As a scholar of the History of Sciences,
Alexandre Koyr6, tells us, here you have all the distance that lies
between a drawing and an engineer's blueprint. While a blueprint
can display on its own account all sorts of intuitive elements in the
relationship between certain quantities or values that are somehow
materialised in an image simply through the layout of which-
ever apparatus, it is not capable of resolving certain higher-level
primary-symbolic problems. Ultimately, we will see in Leonardo an
inadequate and even false theory of the inclined plane, which will
only be resolved with Galileo. With this rcvo/w/J.o# - to use another
of Koyr6's terms - the mathematisation of the real gets under way
when from a certain point forward it was resolved radically to purge
the method, that is to say, to put experience to the test of terms, to
the test of positionings of the problem, that roundly take the impos-
sible as the point of departure.
Understand that only when one has set apart the formulation of
those formulae that are to be submitted to hypothesis from any kind

of claimed intuiting of the real can one renounce something that
seems to be self-evident, like heavier bodies falling faster. Only then
can one start to elaborate on the basis of another starting point,
like the correct one of gravity, that is to say, a formula that in some
sense cannot be actualised anywhere because one will always be in a
condition that has too many impurities to make it a reality.
It is because one is starting with a pure symbolic formalisation
that the experiment can be realised in a correct fashion and a math-
ematical physics can start to be established. It may be said that
after wbole centuries of trying, they never managed to do so until
they resolved to make this separation between the symbolic and
the real at the point of departure. This was something that had
never been allowed in the string of experiments and fumblings that
researchers had been making from one generation to the next, and
which moreover are fascinating to read about. This is the interest
of a History of Science. Until then, they remained in a betwixt and
between, in something incomplete, partial and imaginative, some-
thing fulgurous that led Leonardo da Vinci himself - and this is
what I'm coming to - to formulate that his position was essentially
one of a relation of obedience to Nature.
The term IVcz/wrc plays an utterly important, utterly essential, role
in Leonardo's oeuvre. Nature is for him a presence that must be con-
stantly turned to account. Nature is the absolutely primary element.
Nature is an other against whom he pits himself, and whose signs
have to be deciphered as lines of verse. He makes himself Nature's
double and, as it were, co-creator. All these terms are in Leonardo's
notes.
This is the perspective from which he examines Nature in order to
arrive at a sort of fusing of the imaginary with an other that is not
the radical Other, that is not the one we deal with and which I have
taught you to situate as the place, the locus, of the unconscious.
What, then, is this other?
It's very important to see in this respect how insistent Leonardo is
in saying that there is no voice in Nature, and he gives such curious
and amusing demonstrations that it would be worthwhile taking the
trouble to see to what extent it might have become an obsessional
preoccupation for him, strictly speaking, to demonstrate that there
cannot be anyone who could respond to him, and who would be
what everyone then believed in, a spirit who speaks from somewhere
up in the air. He insists on this. He often comes back to it. And
indeed, there were people for whom to proclaim such a thing was an
almost scandalous truth.
Nevertheless, Leonardo examines Nature as an other who is not
422 Farewell
a subject but whose causes there is at the same time every reason
to read. I'm saying this because it's in Leonardo -IVczfwrc I.f /w// o/
infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.4
The paradox of this formula, if we take Leonardo, as is often
done, as a sort of precursor of modern experimentalism, is there to
show the distance that lies between him and us, and the difficulty
that lies in grasping only after the event, once a certain evolution in
thought has been achieved, what the thought of the one who is being
labelled a prccwrsor was actually engaged with.
Leonardo's position with respect to Nature is one of a relation to
an other who is not a subject, yet whose history, sign, articulation
and speech are nevertheless to be detected. It's a matter of grasping
the creative power of this other. In short, this other transforms the
radicalness of the alterity of the absolute Other into something that
is accessible through a certain imaginary identification.
It is this other that I would like to see you taking into considera-
tion in the Cartoon to which Freud refers, remarking on the fusing
of bodies that makes it hard to tell that of St Anne apart from that
of the Virgin, as though this were a riddle.
This is so true that if you reverse the drawing and you compare
it with the painting in the Louvre, you will notice that the legs of
St Anne are on the side where initially the legs of the Virgin were,
in the most natural pose and in almost the same position, while the
Virgin's legs are now where St Anne's legs were.
That this is a kind of twofold being, with the aspects of the one
peeling away behind the other, is not in doubt. That the Infant
in the London Cartoon extends His mother's arm, not altogether
unlike a glove puppet, is something that is no less striking. Aside
from this, however, note that the other woman, without our really
knowing which is which, raises alongside the Infant the pointing
finger that we find throughout Leonardo's oeuvre, and which is one
of its enigmas. It's in the Sf JOA# /Ac Bczpfz.s/, in the Bczccfows, and
in the I/j.rg!.7t a/ffoc Jtocks. This is also something that offers a very
fine image of the ambiguity between the real mother and the imagi-
nary mother, between the real child and the hidden phallus. I'm not
reading the finger as the symbol of the hidden phallus because it
roughly reproduces its outline, but because this finger, which is to be
found right across Leonardo's output, is the index to want-of-being,
the term of which is also inscribed everywhere in Leonardo's oeuvre.
What is involved here is a position that the subject takes in rela-
tion to the problematic of the Other, which is either this absolute
Other, the closed unconscious, this impenetrable woman, or else,
behind her, the figure of death which is the ultimate absolute Other.
The way in which a certain experience composes with this ultimate
term of the human relationship, the way in which it reintroduces

all the life of imaginary exchanges into this relationship, the way in
which it displaces the radical relation to a certain essential alterity
so as to cause it to be inhabited by a relationship of mirage -- this
is what is known as swb/j.mo/I.o# and this is what is exemplified con-
stantly by Leonardo's oeuvre on the plane of genius and creation.
It is also, I believe, what is expressed in the Cartoon in a sort of
singular cryptogram. This drawing is not unique, but merely the
double of another drawing for a painting he never made, for the
chapel in the Servite Monastery. Reproduced there is the theme of
St Anne, the Virgin, the Infant and the fourth term we spoke about,
namely St John, who elsewhere is the lamb.
In the fourth term of this four fold composition we ought clearly
to find -as on each occasion I have spoken to you about this, when-
ever the four fold relation is incarnated - the theme of death. Where
is it? Naturally it is everywhere. It passes from one to the other.
Death is also what will leave Leonardo's sexuality in a dead state,
because this is his essential problem, around which Freud predi-
cated his examination. Nowhere in Leonardo's life do we find any
attestation of something that would represent a true bond, a true
captivation that would be more than ambiguous and transient.
But ultimately this is not the impression that his story has left.
Rather, it is that of a dreamlike paternity. He was patron and pro-
tector to some young fellows whom he took in for their refined
background painting, a number of whom passed through his life,
yet without any major attachment really leaving its mark on his
lifestyle. If there had to be one who ought to be classified as homo-
sexual, it would rather be Michelangelo.
Is death there in this sort of double, the one who is there across
from the Infant and who is so readily replaced by the lamb?
On 3 April 1501, Pietro da Novellara wrote to lsabella d'Este5
that over two days all Florence had flocked to see the preparatory
cartoon for the high altar in the Santissima Annunziata, a work
which Leonardo was never to paint. Everyone lingered over the
meaning of this four fold scene in which the Infant is cz/mosJ/.#mpz.#g
out of his mother' s arms to seize hold of a lamb. Thory a,Il undelsta,nd
thf3 stign Of the draLma.. It looks as though St Anne, rising slightly from
her seat, wants to restrain her daughter from parting the child and the
little lamb; perhaps she symbolises the Church, not wishing to prevent
/fee P¢sfj.o7i o/Cferz.s/. It is here, in this aspect of His destiny and His
sacrifice, that the term of Leonardo's relation to his mother can be
situated, though it is his separation from her that Freud takes as
the point of departure for the whole dramatisation that followed in
Leonardo's life.
424 Farewell
The last character, the most enigmatic of all, is the St Anne,

restored and established in this purely female, purely maternal rela-
tion. This Other, with a capital letter, is necessary to lend balance
to the scene.
Of course, contrary to what Mr Ernst Kris tells us, this is far from
being a/mosf /fee/rsf such setting of these characters. Even Freud
didn't believe for a second that the theme of Anne, the Virgin, the
Infant and the fourth character that is introduced here, was an
invention exclusive to Leonardo.
The fourth character does indubitably pose a problem in the
history of religious motifs that is rather specific to Leonardo, but
when it comes to the representation of the set of St Anne, the
Virgin and the Infant, it is enough to have garnered the faintest
historical notion of what was going on at the time, by reading any
one of the historical accounts, to know that it was precisely in those
years, between 1485 and 1510, that the cult of St Anne was being
elevated in Christianity, in connection with the dogmatic criticism
of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. It was the outgrowth
of a spiritual theme, but of many other things besides spirituality,
because this was the time of the issuing of plenary indulgences, when
across Germany there was a wave of these little tickets with wood-
cuts of Anne and the Virgin and Infant, the purchase of which could
buy you ten or twenty thousand years of indulgence in the afterlife.
So, this is a theme that was not invented by Leonardo, nor is it true
that Freud imputed the invention to Leonardo. There is only Mr
Kris to tell us that Leonardo was alone in representing a trio of the
like, when in fact you have just to open Freud's study to see the
painting's theme represented with the title 4##cz Se/bc7r!.//, that is to
say, the Trinitarian Anne. It's the same in Italian -£4##cz A4:c//crz¢.
This function of the trinity of Anne lies in the fact that at what
was doubtless a critical moment, which we needn't revisit since we
can't allow ourselves to be swept too far into this historical schol-
arship on Christian devotion, we meet again the constancy of a
supra-Trinity, so to speak, that assumes its full worth when it finds
its psychological incarnation in Leonardo da Vinci.
I mean that while Leonardo was surely a man positioned in a
profoundly atypical stance with respect to his sexual maturation,
and this dissymmetry was tantamount to an encounter with a subli-
mation that reached exceptional degrees of activity and realisation,
nothing in the elaboration of his work - which he was constantly
starting over in a truly obsessional way - could be structured
without there being something to reproduce this relation between
the ego and the other.
This is inscribed, along with the necessity of the big Other, here
on the diagram to which I have been urging you to refer as a means

of charting these problems.
Leonardo's inversion
But what are we to make of the atypia brought about through the
especially dramatic engagement of this being along the pathways
of the imaginary? That he can draw on the prowess of his essential
creations only within this trinitarian scene ~ the same that we met
at the end of the observation on tittle Hans - is one thing. But quite
another thing is how this enlightens us on the matter of a perturba-
tion correlative with his own subjective position.
Leonardo's inversion, if indeed we can speak in terms of inver-
sion, is far from reducible to a paradox or an anomaly in his affective
relationships. At any rate, this is a register that apparently bears the
mark of a peculiar inhibition in this man endowed with every gift.
Besides, the case that there are no erotic themes in Leonardo has
perhaps been overstated. It might be going a bit too far, because
what is true is that in Freud's time they hadn't yet uncovered the
theme of Leda, that is, a very beautiful woman and a swan that all
but conjoins with her in an undulating movement no less delicate
than her forms. It is rather striking that once again it is a bird that
represents the male theme, and certainly an imaginary fantasy. But
let's press on because there's something else I must tell you.
If we stay at the level of the experience that we are able to have of
Leonardo, there is one element that we cannot eliminate, and this is
his manuscripts.
I don't know if you have ever had occasion to leaf through one of
the reproductions, but all the same it produces a certain effect when
you see all these handwritten notes in mirror writing. Then, when
you read them, you can see him constantly speaking to himself,
calling himself ffeow. For example, Sc// wfeaf };ow ccz##o/ fczkc wj./fe
you. Get from Jean de Paris the method of painting in tempera. Or,
You will go and get two sprigs of lavender or rosemary from the corner
sAap. They are things of this order, where everything is mixed in
together. It ends up becoming quite overawing and gripping.
426 Farewell
To spell it right out, the relationship of identification between

the ego and the other, the establishment of which appears to be
crucial for an understanding of how identifications are constituted,
and on the basis of which the subject's ego can move forward, the
idea seems to arise that, correlative to eacn sublimation, that is to
say, to the process of the de-subjectification or the naturalisation
of the Other which would constitute the essential phenomenon of
the sublimation to the very extent of its greater or lesser totality or
perfection, something always occurs on the level of the imaginary in
a form that is accentuated to a greater or lesser extent, namely an
inversion of the relations between ego and other.
Here, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, we truly have someone
who addresses himself and who makes comments to himself from
his own imaginary other. We have to take his mirror writing as the
bare fact of his proper position with respect to himself. Here we
have the same radical alienation that I posed as a question at the end
of the last session regarding the amnesia of Hans as a youth.
I shall pose the same question today, as to whether the process
that we shall call sublimation, or psychologisation, or alienation, or
egoisation, might not entail in its very steering a correlative dimen-
sion whereby a being forgets himself as an imaginary object of the
other.
Indeed, in the imaginary ego, there is a fundamental possibility
offorgetting.
3 July 1957
Note
The collective work cited in the opening chapter bears the title fcz
Ps};cfocz#cz/)/se c7'czw/.oajrcz'fewz. [a selection of the articles appeared
in Àmerican Adaptation' in the single volume Ps}7cfeocz#cz/}jsz.s a/
rodcz)/, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959]; further commentary
S:i::£Sr?,mE9cis,,g:Vpe:.;;8ìa6£;r,epc:£f:?mqelacureetlesprincipesdeson
The bulletin referenced in chapters IV and V is the Bw//c/z.#
d{:{t:Vu}:6=rdo?Ls:er£::°Bcrt3:t#sd(ce£S.PEScyr%:npa:::toe9S_dL£)3e]8tqueono.25,
It has not been possible to identify the painting alluded to on page

328. It may be that the painting is not by Titian, but Veronese: the
I/e#wS a#d A4:czr5 U#j./cd b); Love in the Metropolitan Museum in
New York. Nor has it been possible to identify the letter by Freud
mentioned on page 295.
A number of annotations in Lacan's own hand feature in the
typescript that was given to me. Thereafter, I was able to consult
notes taken down directly by Paul Lemoine; I thank my dear friend
Gennie Lemoine for allowing me to draw on these notes for the
G/czb/z.fsc773c#/ of the present Book, as for the Books of the Seminar
in their entirety.
I would also like to thank: Claude Cherki, who now manages
Editions du Seuil after Paul Flamand and Michel Chodkiewicz;
Evelyne Cazade-Havas, who has taken over from Francois Wahl as
copy-editor; she was the first reader of the [French] manuscript and
kindly accepted my request to check the charts of Vienna, which
Paul Lemoine had jotted down; and Jean-Claude Baillieul, who
went through the [French] text at the various stages of putting this
book together.
Lastly, I would like to give a word of thanks for the warm welcome
I received from the Library of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, 1
rue Huysmans, in the sixth arrondissement of Paris.
428 Note
Since the G/¢b/I.sse777c7I/ of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan is a

work-in-progress, I would be grateful for any possible corrections
and additions, which may be addressed c/o the editor.
J. A. M.
*
The sketches on pages 257 (`Giraffe with Widdler'), 304 (`The

Loading Dock') and 317 (Ùntere Viaductgasse') are taken from
Analyse der Phobie eines 5-Jdhrigen Knaben .Lr\ the seventh vofune of
the GCLrammc/fc Werkc of Sigmund Freud, published by S. Fischer
Verlag (©1941, Imago Publishing Co., London).
The map of Vienna (pp. 430-1) is taken from the 1905 edition
of the Baedeker handbook to Austria-Hungary; the title page is
reproduced on page 429.
J. A. M.
AUSTRIA-HUHGART
INO[UDIHQ
DAIIHATIA AND B0SNIA
HANDBOOK FOR TRAVELLERS
BT
Im RED-
Wl.I sO NAPS AND « PLAtl8
"TB DITioy, "vl.]O ibD LuOw]rmo
I.HPzlG : EARL BAEDERER, puBmexlER

LOHDOH! Donu AttD cO„ 87 SOBO aQu^tLB, w.
rzw TOBB I oBdiLm 8oBIBHRE4 cow.. 1coq rrFTB ^vE.
1905
Translator's Notes
I Introduction
1 Concerning si`/wa/j.o# ci#¢/}i/j.gwc, cf. 8. Fink's endnote (192, fl3) on page

412 of his translation of Book VJ// of the Seminar (Cambridge: Polity,
2015).
2 Note that in the late 1950s, Lacan uses /c#da#cc, on and off, to translate
:or:upd::vror£':e,#c#££.r£S:f.sèL?1):;::C5t;;?.%eu':ncdu]r]ede6tn':Sng:i:::Pteesn€:
ance, ce qu'il [Freud] appelle rrz.eb, [ . . . ].' In most instances, the present
translation renders fc#dcz#ce with the paraphrase `drive tendency'.
3 Lacan's regular use of the adjective ¢dGqw¢/ to qualify the object of
cognisance is in reference to the doctrine of Veri.fczs cs/ c}deq#¢/j.a rci. cj
{„c,i.„cef;„%haos:er]gedudb;:n:::TnasEfrT,::noa;.t:;t::apapc.[4S2g:1;3b4e,:a:::=:a
throughout, the present translation opts for `corresponding'.
4 It may be noted that at the time of the present Seminar, the only authori-
tative indication in English of the title of Lacan's paper was the indexical
reference: `The Looking-Glass Phase' in the J#fcr#ai/I.o#a/ Jowr#a/ a/
Ps);cho-,4#cI/)/si.a,1937,18(I): 78.
11 The Three Forms of the Lack of Object
1 Chocolat was the clown persona of the performer Rafael, of Afro-Cuban

descent. Between 1895 and 1910 he performed in a duo with the clown
Foottit, and their skits often featured `comedic slaps'. The expression
ètre chocolat' has passed into colloquial use in French, meaning `to be
taken for a ride' or `to miss out'. The mention of Chocolat and Auguste
is unattested in the authorially annotated typescript (cf. Jacques-Alain
Miller's Note, page 427) and so, as with the many subsequent editorial
interpolations (signalled below), may derive from the Lemoine notebooks.
2 Perhaps an allusion to Dranem and his hat, which he named `Poupoute'.
Dranem also popularised the song `Nous nous pmmes' (lyrics by Georges
isa£:::);e?hj::,.,:,a:3?c#r5.S2]%?`F°nctionetchampdelaparo|eetdu
3 The diagram reproduced at 000002.09 of the stenographer's typescript

is unattested elsewhere in the seminar typescripts. The variations on
the diagram, constituting the figures on pages 57, 85 and 202 of the
Seuil edition, are editorial. Of further note are Lacan's two thumbnail
sketches flanking the diagram in the authorially annotated typescript:
:g5t8h;iedftieaats;rh£:#;:t¥efrusi]°yne:;:led;E;:::m£:'£dc:y,es],°oP;fc;i:.#u5%r3?
on the right, the upper and diagonal vectors of the `L schema' (as cor-
responding to the imaginary triangle plM in the R schema).
4 Mention of Helene Deutsch and Melanie Klein is unattested at 000002.14
of the stenographer' s typescript.
5 Lacan seems to be confusing punishment for incest with the penance for
`sex with an elder's wife' listed as one of the `Penances for Grievous Sins
Causing Loss of Caste' in the Mo#wfmr/I.. Among the various alternative
penances is that the penitent should `cut off his penis and testicles by
himself, hold them in his cupped hands, and walk straight towards the
south-west until he falls down dead' (jl4l¢#w'5 Code a/ I,czw,. 4 Cri./f.ca/
Edition and Translation of the Mdnava-Dharmasdstra, tea,nsrdted dy P .
01ivelle, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 220).
Ill The Signifier and the Holy Spirit
1 This interrogative quip is unattested in the stenographer's typescript (cf.

000003.3).
2 The cla,use ..., par l'interm6diaire du message de l'Autre ,... 1s editorial
(p. 46 of the Seuil edition, unattested at 000003.11).
3 Freud writes `die Empfindung des Bedurfnisses als die der Befriedigung',
which James Strachey translates as `the experience both of a need and of
a, gra,tiELca.tion' (Penguin Freud Library 7 . p. 45n).
4 A thumbnail sketch in Lacan's hand just below this figure (square-
bracketed at the foot of 000003.14) links the two levels of signifier and
signified to the two levels of the graph to be developed throughout the
following year's seminar, where a retroactive vector rises, loops back,
and falls, thus to cross each horizontal line twice.
5 Lacan is overlooking the 1924 edition in the fifth volume of the
Gcsczmmc/fc ScAr!/fc#, which included further additions, in particular
the note added to the subsection on Àmbivalence' (in the second Essfty)
incorporating the findings of `Die infantile Genitalorganisation'.
6 Cf. Freud's remark: Ùnfortunately we can describe this state of things
only as it affects the male child' (PET 7, pp. 308-9)
7:dh££t:oenn,tj::as:t:::::ea?aoso%%eon3.]3n2te£¥:Laetetspeedsfctr°£;;ta)I.]yc(f?.E5c5„i,:,t:;.S:,ii:
p.155. 8. Fink translates somczfogrofj.c as àgnosia of somatic functions'.
IV The Dialectic of Frustration
1 The bibliographic reference to Alice Balint's 1939 article `Love for

the Mother and Mother Love' is supplied in deference to Lacan's
434 Translator's Notes
manuscript annotation (p. 63 of the Seuil edition gives the misreference

A4lo/fecr's Love o#cJ Love a/fAc Mo/Acr), though his spoken remark might
equally encompass her 1937 paper, `Handhabung der Ubertragung
auf Grund der Ferenczischen Versuche' (in J#fcr#¢fj.o#cz/c Zcz.fscArj//
/#r Psj;cAocz7ta/}7£c, 22: 47-58), mentioned by Michael Balint in Èarly
Developmental States of the Ego. Primary Object-Love' with respect to
Imre Hermann's notion of `clinging', there viewed from the perspective
of the mother. The interjection in the ensuing sentence . . . ¢w Jczrd;.# c7cS
ffcfpGrz.dcs . . . is unattested at 000004.10-11.
2 This notation is editorially supplied, in anticipation of the authorial
occurrence of the same in lesson XXIII (p. 386 below).
3 Cf. Freud's introductory lecture on `Femininity': `Her happiness is great
if later on this wish for a baby finds fulfilment in reality, and quite
especially so if the baby is a little boy who brings the longed-for penis
with him' (PF£ 2, p. 163).
4 In the Òbservation of a Phobia', Anneliese Schnurmann notes that the
brother is Sandy's elder sibling `Barrie', who, like Sandy, is a child of the
first couple formed by Mrs H. and her now deceased husband. Barrie
had been evacuated to live with his aunt where he stayed until the end
of the war. It is specified that the boy is just two years older than the
subject, not five years, though there is mention of an eleven-year-old
stepsister in the new household. Cf. (1949) Òbservation of a Phobia', in
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 4.. 2S3-]O.
V 0n Analysis as Bundling and the Consequences Thereof
1 The noun swbocJoraf!.o# is far less common than the already antiquated
French verb swbodorcr. Rarer still is its English cognate, with Charles
Talbut Onions citing just two attested uses of `subodorate', both from
the nineteenth century, with the signification `to smell or scent out' (.4
New English Dictionary of Historical Principles, Vol. IX, Part 11, Su-Th
(Oxford: Clarendon Press,1919), p. 38). Though Onions posits a Latin
derivation from swboc76rG/, the verbal stem swbodor¢rz. appears to be a
mid-sixteenth-century concoction by Denis Lambin (cf. Tournoy, G.
and Tunberg, T. 0., Òn the Margins of Latinity? Neo-Latin and the
Ve[r\a;oula.I La.ngua,ges' in Humanistica Lovaniensia.. Journal Of Neo-
£arfz.# Sfwd!.cS, Vol. XLV, 1996: 147) which, indeed, may derive from
the French, given an earlier attested use in Guillaume Briconnet's 1522
correspondence with Marguerite D'Angouleme: `seullement savourer,
subodorer et gouster nostre naissance celeste' (Martineau-Genieys, C.,
Veissiere, M. and Heller, H. (eds) Corrcxpo#cJcr#cc //j2J-jJ24J.. rome I,
A##6cs /52/-/522 (Geneva: Droz,1975), p.172. Lacan made previous
reference to the same report (remaining discreet as to whether it was
fae££gvae;:denb3s;3t:noar,y¥etrtt£:r;.:S,,::a:;i,o:nedte::£emg;vdoec;ff%:LOLe]ae:u::
telle subodoration de son sujet', which echoes the reflexivity of `se fiairer
r6ciproquement' from the preceding sentence. A. Sheridan renders the
formula with the equally bivocal `such a sniffing of his subject' (jc".fs,
j4 Sc/ccfz.o# (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 43), while 8. Fink prefers the
univocal `being smelled by his subject' (Ecr!.fs I.# E#g/j.sA (New York:
Norton, 2006), p. 221). Note also a similar reciprocity iquplied in the
later reference to the occurrence as an j.#Jc»rswbodorczfz.o# (Ecrz.fs, p. 337)
and its description as a technical device (Ecrj.fs, p. 482, n. I : `technique de
subodoration'). For further allusions to the report, see fcw./5, pp. 267,
464nd.
2 Lacan may be confusing Stendhal's Dc /'a7"owr with Reinhold Gtinther's
Kw/fcjrgescrfej.cAJc c7cr L!.ebc. E!.# VcrfwcA, Berlin: Duncker, 1900, which
on pages 366-7 mentions the German and Swiss practices of Fe#.g/crz.#
and :' Crfej.// gcAc#. The same observation had previously featured on
pa,ge 19\ of t\is Weib and sittlichkeit,. studien und darlegungen, Bertiln..
Duncker,1898.
3 Ruth Lebovici reports these two stages slightly differently (cf. Bw//cf I.#
d'activit6s de l'Association des psychanalystes de Belgique, 25 (\956).. 5).
In the first stage, ìl dessine des femmes accroupies en train d'uriner
ou bien il imagine qu'une femme le voit se masturber clans un urinoir,
qu'elle est tres excit6e et qu'elle se donne a lui' [`he makes drawings of
women urinating in a squatting position, or imagines to himself that a
woman can see him masturbating into a urinal, that she becomes very
aroused and offers herself to him.']. In the second stage, ìl se trouve
clans un w.c. dont la cloison interm6diaire avec un autre est perc6e d'un
trou ; il exhibe son sexe ; regarde uriner la femme qui se trouve a c6te ;
et souhaite embrasser ses organes g6nitaux' [`he finds himself in a toilet
cubicle that is divided from another by a partition wall with a hole in it;
he exposes his penis; watches the woman on the other side urinating; and
wishes he could kiss her on the genitals'].
4 Lacan here inverts the attributes of the two women as reported in the
case history (ibid.). The first, a fishmonger and a friend of his parents, is
the woman the subject had seen urinating when he was a child and who
features in the dream as the one with whom he wants to have sexual rela-
tions. The second, the fishmonger's maid, is the woman he had loved as
a child, and the sight of whom in the dream stops him in his tracks. The
subject adds that as a child he had been afraid of the maid's husband.
VI The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young Homosexual Woman
1 J. Strachey translates `Das typische MiBlingen der kindlichen Sexual-

forschung' as `Typical Failure of Infantile Sexual Researches' (PFL 7,
p.115).
2 Freud uses the French term demj.-mo#cJ¢z.#c to describe the woman's love
object.
3 J. Strachey chooses not to `stereotype' Scfowd.rwcrcj., instead rendering
variously as `devoted admiration', ìnfatuation' and àdoration'.
VII 4 Crfei./d i.a Bci.#g Bc¢fcH and the Young Homosexual Woman
1 A marginal note in the authorially annotated typescript here reads: `La

non plus, L. ne voit pas le probleme' (000007.14), and then a further note
436 Translator' s Notes
just below, indexed to ùn rapport duel, et donc ambigu', reads: `L. ici
n'a pas encore vu le probleme, qu'il vera dams V' (000007.15). Referring
to himself in the third person, these two notes anticipate Lacan's revised
reading of the second stage of the beating fantasy in the lesson of 12
February 1958.
2 Another note in the authorially annotated typescript here reads: `distinc-
tion qui n'est pas encore bien acquise. Sera clans [V]' (000007.18).
3 A further authorial apostil here reads: `Ce n'est pas ainsi que F[reud].
nous pr6sente la chose' (000007.27).
VIII Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman
1 A marginal note in the authorially annotated typescript here reads: `C'est

ici que surgit pour la lire fois le theme de la Verwerfung de la femme. Cf.
V' (000008.27), this being an anticipation of the lesson of 23 April 1958.
2 This sentence is editorial, seemingly prompted by Lacan's manuscript
note: ìci, Jakobson' (000008.30). The example is borrowed from the fifth
section of Roman Jakobson's 1956 essay, `Two Aspects of Language
and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances': `[. . .] in Wr4rr cz#d Pe¢cc the
synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" or "bare shoulders" are used [. . .]
to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong' (in
Fw#damc77fcz/a o/£cz#gwczgc, The Hague: Mouton,1956, p. 78).
IX The Function of the Veil
1 Here, /c sexc could also be understood as `the sexual organ'.

2 Altematively, /ow/es /cs /e#d¢#ccs may be intended in the sense of àll the
drive tendencies'. Cf. endnote 2 to Chapter I, above.
X Identification with the Phallus
1 Here and throughout, the terms `scoptophilia' and `scoptophilic' have

beenretainedover`scopophilia'and`scopophilic'.Thoughtheformerhad
even at the time been singled out as mistranslations of Freud's ScAaw/#sf
(c[. Ernest lones.s 1936 `Review o[ the Dictionary Of Psychology' , in IJP
17: 247), such were the terms then being used by the authors Lacan is
here critiquing and he respects their choice of vocabulary. See also J.
Strachey's later remark in his 1963 Òbituary of Joan Riviere', JJP 44:
229.
2 Assuming the stenographer's typescript to be an accurate transcription,
Lacan here misremembers the line from Wj./foe/in Mcz.a/era /Acczfrcz/i.schc
Sc#dw#g reproduced in Fenichel's article: `Die beiden waren bei ihm
geblieben, der Harfner, den er brauchte, und Mignon, den er nicht
entbehren konnte' (Book 6, Chapter 5). Goethe is describing how both
Mignon and the Harper have become indispensible for Wilhelm.
3 The 1921 edition of "¢sse#psj;cAo/ogr'c w#d JCA-,47!c]/ysc has òder etwas
spater', and the 1925 edition has `vielleicht sogar vorher'. Curiously,
the wording in Samuel Jankelevitch's 1921 translation `Psychologie

collective et analyse du moi' (the erroneous òu un peu plus tard')
finds a correlative formation in J. Strachey's 1922 translation `Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' (which gives, òr a little later'),
perhaps indicating that both translations were made from a same or
similar fair copy that differed from the corrected proof used for the first
print. The later translation by J. A. Underwood under the title `Mass
Psychology and Analysis of the "I" ' is more dependable here (in A4l¢ss
Psychology and Other Writings, Penguin, 2004).
4 A marginal note in the authorially annotated typescript here reads: `non !
erreur lie6 a la confusion I/11 ? La I est orale - 11 est anale (Safouan)'
(000010.20).
XI The Phallus and the Unfulfilled Mother
I Rea,ding renonciation a.nd renoncer a tor d6nonciation a,nd denoncer
fr:Cp°srydcehdana:I;?t:°e]n[.[49);6¢,fj;?;.i:,a;jp:n4Joe_][:.Posr:hna:ha:¥;iae]:€:Pea:;eon:
clans toute l'ceuvre de Freud, de ce terme [de frustration] la moindre
trace : car on y trouvait seulement occasion a le rectifier par celui de
Versczgw#g, lequel implique renonciation I. . .].'
2 In the stenographer's paginated typescript, Jc vows cz!. falls at the end of
page 13, and page 14 begins rc/c7/I.o#pr!.mz.Jz.vc de /cz mGrc, &c. The discus-
sion on cz#orexj.c mc#/a/e in the Seuil edition is thus an interpolation
based apparently on the conjecture that this lacuna must correspond to
an entire missing page. The interpolated material features in the present
translation as the text leading up to `. . . primary relation with the mother
. . .' in the following paragraph.
3 This sentence is unattested in the typescript. It may further be noted that
Lacan's question to L6vi-Strauss bears on the latent structure of the
communities, not on their manifest structure as patriarchies or matri-
archies (cf. the comment on androcentric political power in matriarchal
societies in the following paragraph). Compare also L6vi-Strauss's
comment on adopting the òpposite convention' and his allusion to à
few societies of a highly developed matrilineal type' at the close of his
1956 article `The Family' (originally written in English in H. L. Shapiro
(ed.) „a#, Cw/fwrc, a#d Socz.c/}J, Oxford University Press; later revised
in 7lfec Vz.cw From .4/czr, Basic Books, 1985). Of further interest is the
manuscript apostil at 000011.26: [Cf. Creswell], almost certainly a refer-
ence to Robert Cresswell's research on endogamy and kinship published
in English and French in the 1970s.
4 Lacan's textual source is the Sc/ec/cd Papers a/Kczr/ AbraA¢m published
in English translation by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey in 1927
(Hogarth Press).
XII 0n the Oedipus Complex
I This mention of a preceding lesson dedicated to the theme of castration

invites the inference of an error in the manuscript dates appended to
the stenographer's typescript, having led in turn to an inversion of the
scripts for sessions 12 and 13. This inference is supported tentatively by
the ensuing reminders of having dealt just previously with the retroac-
tive constitution of stages and the introduction of the Oedipus complex
(which seem to correspond to the discussion of regression and the preoe-
dipal stage on pages 215-20), and more persuasively by the reminder of
having in the previous lesson examined little Hans's anxiety and having
dealt with `material from the first few pages of the text' (the latter surely
corresponding to the commentary on pages 214-15, then 217-20).
2 Freud's comment that `the girl's Oedipus complex is much simpler than
that of the small bearer of the penis' was in fact from the 1924 article `The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex', and was not repeated thereafter.
3 This allusion to Sachs's 1927 paper, delivered at the lnnsbruck congress
and published in 1929 as Òne of the Motive Factors in the Formation of
the Super-Ego in Women', is unattested in the typescript.
4 In 1935 a first edition of Freud's case studies was published in French
translation under the title a.ng ps}JCA¢7ca/)/ses. Alongside the case reports
on Dora, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man, it includes the notes on
Schreber and the observation on little Hans, but not the case of the Young
Homosexual Woman. The collection has regularly been reprinted and
re-edited, such that its title has become a major reference in French psy-
choanalysis. In his Seminar, Lacan mentions the book by name, which in
the present translation is rendered by a paraphrase. Furthermore, in the
authorially annotated typescript, 000012.13 is headed by the manuscript
note: Ìmp[ortant] de souligner qu'ici, L. tient encore les S6m. -I et -2
pour partie de son enseignement.' The seminar held in Lacan's rooms
in 1951-1952 bore on the cases of Dora and the Rat Man; the seminar
of 1952~1953 bore, as Lacan mentions above, in part on the Wolf Man
case. These two seminars are not included in the canonical Books of the
Seminar, which begin with the 1953~1954 Seminar at Sainte-Anne.
XIII On the Castration Complex
1 This is a far from satisfactory attempt to render: ,4w /feet de 7io};cr /e

poisson, essayons au contraire de bien l'isoler. I,a privation, c'est la priva-
/z.o# ditpoisso#. The French idiom ;'2o};er /epoisso#, literally `to drown the
fish', means `to muddy the waters' or `to cloud the issue'.
XIV The Signifier in the Real
1 There is an omission here of the further possibility of `3 to 3', which in the

Introduction to `Le s6minaire sun "La Lettre volde" ' is also listed under
T9(#£Sr?,CS#:Z:et2;5inct°r#tefoalis:s¥:£8t:ftthheeerne#:Tth*ec#the
2 This reference to a painting by Titian is uncharacteristically vague and is

unattested in the stenographer's typescript, thus doubtless deriving from
the Lemoine notebooks. In the `Note' on p. 427, Veronese's yc#ws cz#cJ
jn4l¢rf U#z./c>d b); £ovc is mooted as an alternative. Given that the horse
on this canvas, standing behind the couple, not looming above, bears
neither on its mouth nor elsewhere the blackness in question, Veronese's
Vc##s cz7td A4lczrs w!.ffe C'#pz.d ¢#cJ cz fJorfc in the Turin Sabauda is perhaps
a more likely referent.
XV What Myth is For
I In this context, /e#cZcz#cz.a/ very probably carries the sense of `drive ten-
dency'. See again endnote 2 to Chapter 1, above.
2 The term `mytheme' has here been inserted in deference to Lacan's retro-
spective manuscript note (at 000015.14). The original English-language
version of L6vi-Strauss's 1955 article referenced in the following lesson,
`The Structural Study o£ Myth' (The Journal Of American Folklore,
68(270): 42844), did not carry the term. The first attested use of 777);/AGme
is in the French edition of the text, which was not published until
January 1958 (chapter 9 of L'cz#/Arapo/og!.c s/rwcJwrcz/e, Paris: Plon). The
second English-language version, in the 1963 S/rwcfwrcz/ 4#fferapo/og);
(New York: Basic Books, pp. 206-31), accordingly carries the term.
The mention of Polynices in the following paragraph is also an editorial
interpolation, explicitly matching Lacan's development here to its source
in the same article.
3 0n this occasion Freud uses the term ExkrcJ!.o#skomp/cx, èxcretory
complex'.
4 It is not clear what Lacan has in mind here. Wz.w!.mczcAcr belongs to
Hans's idiolect, and while the child does sometimes use Wz.wz. in isolation
to denote `wee', not once does he incorporate it into other linguistic
constructions. The more commonly heard infantile term in German is
Pzpj. mocAc#. Furthermore, the example of LrrfermacAcr (`watchmaker') is
editorially interpolated.
5 In a parenthesis here in the stenographer's typescript (000015.32), there
is a recurrence of the lines from Pievert's £'ap6ra cJef gz.rcz/cs previ-
ously quoted at the close of the eleventh lesson: £cs grcz#c/cs gz.rcz/cj' so#/
muettes I Les petites girafes sont rares.
6 Hans qualifies the fantasy of the plumber sticking a borer into his stomach
as something he imagined or recalled (ìch hab mir was gedacht'), not as
a dream.
XVI How Myth is Analysed
1 This phrase alludes to a proverbial locution, Àh! Le bon billet quà La

Chatre!' denoting an oath or pledge on which no reliance can be placed.
According to the (almost certainly fictitious) account penned under the
pseudonym `Monsieur 8*' (identified variously as Antoine Bret, Louis
Damours and Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Cr6billon), when the Marquis
of La Chatre was ordered to return to his regiment, he made his lover,

Ninon de Lenclos, sign a `bond of constancy' pledging her fidelity to
him. Two days later, she took another lover and, remembering the note
in the throes of her seduction, uttered the now infamous line (il4lGmoz.res
sur la vie de Mademoiselle de Lenclos, par Mr. 8**** , CoITectedEd:inon,
Part I, Amsterdam: Francois Joly, 1758, pp. 67-9). Voltaire, a former
acquaintance of Ninon, gives a shorter account in his remarks on the
Sowve#z.rs dc Modaimc dc Ccz);/us (`Le beau billet qu'a La Chatre!') and
reworked the phrase into his 1739 comedy Zfl Prwc7e: Ì.e bon Billet qu'a
la l'ami Blanford!' (Act I, Scene 3). Lacan will use the phrase again the
fo\lowing yea,I in Les Formations de l'inconscient.
2 Tbe reference to Angelus Silesius in the Seuil edition supplies an ellipsis
in the stenographer's typescript (at 000016.29). While there is indeed in
the transcript of the 16 February 1955 a comment on the wordplay in
the C4crwbz.#I.scAer Wro#dcrsma## on Or/ a#d Worf , it is a little too brief
to warrant being qualified as a `development'. The couplet in question
bears the title `Der Ort ist das Wort' (22.205):
Der Ort und's Wort ist Eins, und ware nicht der Ort
(Bei ew'ger Ewigkeit!) es ware nicht das Wort.
3 While Hans is clearly referring to a plumber's `grips' or `wrench',

Lacan's more expansive discussion on the signification and etymology
of the French pz.#cc and the German Z¢#ge in lesson XIX have led to
`pincers' being favoured for the present translation, as used previously
by J. Strachey in his translation of the case.
XVII The Signifier and Dcr W/I.fz
1 The barely disguised French word is co#.

2 The maiden issue of fcz Ps}jchcz#a/ysc, of which Lacan himself was
editor-in-chief, bore on its cover a figure from a French translation of
Horapollo's H!.crag/};pAi.ccz illustrating the (doubtfully sourced) lemma
to be mentioned in the final lesson a. 416): `The image of an ear signifies
work to come' (11, 23).
XVIII Circuits
1 The Seuil edition reproduces the hiatus in the stenographer's typescript

(000018.02). Perhaps the missing content is something along the lines
of ìn a good mood', as may be tentatively reconstructed on the basis of
Freud's letter of 6 August 1899 to Wilhelm Fliess: òn the next rainy day
I shall tramp on foot to my beloved Salzberg, where I actually unearthed
a few Egyptian antiquities last time. These things put me in a good
mood and speak of distant times and countries' (71foc Comp/c/c Lc'f/crs a/
Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, Ira,nstated by I . M. Ma,sson,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1985, p. 366).
2 Lainz is a little under seven miles from Wien Mitte (formerly the
Hauptzollamt station), while Vaucresson is some ten miles from central
Paris.
3 Initially used in dialects in Western France before becoming more wide-
spread in the early twentieth century, the informal term compre#oi.;.c and
its sister term comprc#c/fc denote the faculty of understanding or mental
grasp.
XIX Permutations
I The phrase Bo# Die#, gw'j./ /c /w!./ow/c is unattested in the stenographer's

typescript.
2 As Hans's father reports it in the observation, they went directly to the
grandmother's house on 29 March. The longer Sunday outing, taking
in Sch6nbrunn on the way to the Lainz, occurred the week before, on
Sunday the 22nd.
3 Dorothy Bussy translates this line from Sj. /c grcz!.# #c mewrf . . . as `You
owe it to yourself; you owe it to your son' (I/I./ Dj.c ..., London: Seeker
& Warburg, 1950, p.114).
XX Transformations
I This `fable' is extracted from the Codex Atlanticus, f. 393rTh (formerly

145rrd). Here on 22 May, and contemporaneously in the text `L'instance
de la lettre clans l'inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud' dated 14~26
May 1957, Lacan reproduces the Louise Servicen translation from
Cczr#crs dc £Go#c7rd de Vz.#cj., Tome 11, Paris: Gallimard, p. 400. The
English-language translation here is by R. C. Bell from 714e IVo/cbooks a/
Leonardo Da Vinci; compiled and edited from the original manuscripts by
/ecz# Pczc!/ Rz.cAfcr, Vol.11, Oxford University Press, enlarged and revised
edition,1939, p. 354. The original folio reads:
De'fanciulli che stanno legati nelle fascie.

0 citta marine, io vedo in uoi i uostri cittadini cosi femine come
maschi strettamente dai forti legami colle braccia e ganbe esser
legati da gente che non ltenderanno i uostri llguaggi, e sol ui potrete
sfogare li vostri dolori e perduta liberta mediante i lagrimosi piati
e li sospiri e lamentatione infra uoi medesimi, che chi vi lega, non

v'intendera, ne voi loro intenderete.
2 Kurt Goldstein coined the term K¢fos/rapAeJ?rcczkfJ.o# in 1934 in Dcr

Aufbou des Organismus: Einfuhrung in die Biologie unter besonderer
Bertlcksichtigung der Erfahrungen am kranken Menschen, The Ha;gue..
Nijoff, which was translated (anonymously) as `catastrophic reaction' in
The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological
Dcz/cr z.# Mcz#, New York: American Book Company, 1939. The French
translation was published in 1951. Lacan will use the term again in
Seminar VII and, more extensively, in Seminar X.
3 From Act I, Scene 9. Louis Simpson's 1961 translation (71fec Bre¢s/s
a/ r!.rcsj.¢s in M. 8. Gale and J. F. Deeney (eds), 7lrfec Jtoclf/edge
Drama Anthology and Sourcebook.. From Modernism to Contemporary
Per/orm¢#cc (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 214, gives:
They are just the same as we

Yet they're not men as you can see
Meanwhile, Maya Slater (714c „¢mm¢rz.es o/ rj.rcsj.czs in 714rcc Prc-

Swrrccz/I.s/ P/cz);f (Oxford University Press,1997), p.187) gives:
Though physically she's just the same

To call her man's not playing the game
XXI The Mother's Drawers and the Father's Shortcoming
I The two variants: e#-£oz., that which exists in itself, and powr-soj., that
which exists for itself, were popularised in Sartre's £'t;Jrc eJ /e #6cz7z/.
2 Theline:
Din7N rx i]7] 7]] izjN iii7
is from Psalms (13:1, and again 52:1) and not the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Lemaistre de Sacy's Bz.b/e dc Porf-RojJa/, like the Authorised Version
(where these psalms are numbered 14 and 53), translates the present
tense lDN as a past tense verb.
3 While the verb form sapp/Gcr (`to make up for' or `to stand in for')
has already occurred extensively in the present Seminar, this is the first
recorded use in Lacan's teaching of the nounal swpp/ga!#cc. The present
translation follows R. Grigg in using `suppletion' (7lrfec Scm!.#czr Book y,
Formcz/j.o#s a/ffee U#co#scz.ows (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), pp. 6,173, and
459, with a word of explanation from Grigg on p. 493).
4 Freud draws on Karl Abraham's 1909 book rr¢w" w7€d 114.};fAws, Ej.#c
Sf wdz.a zwr I/a./kerps}Jcfeo/ogz.c, Leipzig: F. Deuticke, which reproduces
the hypothesis that Prczmcz#fAcz means `forth-rubber', the bringing forth
(Hervorrcz.bc#de) by rubbing (Re!.bc#). Abraham is apparently drawing
in turn on Adalbert Kuhn's conjecture of an originary signification of
`Fire-driller' (in `Die Sprachvergleichung und die Urgeschichte der ind-
ogerma;hischen v &Ike[' irL Zeitschrif t fdr Vergleichende Sprachf orschung

4 (185S).. 124., a.r\d Die Herabkunft des Feuers and des G6ttertranks,
Berlin: Ferd, Dtimmler, 1859, pp. 12-18). It was subsequently noted,
however, that Kuhn was falsely conflating mo#/A (`twirl' or `drill') and
mcz/A (`seize'), the latter being frequently compounded with prcz to mean
`forcibly snatch to oneself'. Cf. Johanna Narten, `Das vedische Verbum
114lczfA' in J#c/a-Jrcz#j.cm Jowr#¢/ 4(2/3) (1960): 12+35; seconded by
Marcello Dula;ate in Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca. Parte
seconda.. risultanze della comparazione indoeuropea, Rome.. Dell A+teneo ,
\976, p. 57. a.nd Culvert Wa:tkius in How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects Of
J7®do-Ewrapccz# Poe/z.cf, Oxford University Press: 1995, p. 256n.
XXII An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic
1 The annotated typescript here bears an asterisk linking to an apostil

in Lacan's hand: `l'ouvrage apocryphe Theologia Aristotelis n'est en
fait que Proclus (et/ou Plotin ?) si je me souviens bien. Cf. Gilson'. The
concluding note is surely a reference to Etienne Gilson's fo pfez./osapAz.e
au Moyen Age, Tome I.. De Scot Erigane d S. Bonaventure,Pa,ris.. Pedyot.
1922, p. 98, `Deux traites essentiellement n6oplatoniciens, la 7lrfe6o/ogz.c
d'4r!.s/ofc et le fj.bcr de Cczusz.a, passerent pour des productions authen-
tiques du maltre et influencent profond6ment l'interpietation que l'on
donne de sa pens6e. Le contenu du premier est emprunte aux Enn6ades
de Plotin (livres IV-VI), et celui du second a l'E/cmc#/czfj.a fAeo/ogz.ca de
Proclus.,
2 From Act I, Scene 7. Simpson (op. cit. p. 213) gives:
I am a decent woman-mister
My wife is a man-lady
She's taken the piano the violin the butter dish
She's a soldier minister mover of shit
And Slater (op. cit„ p.182) gives:
I'm a respectable wife-monsieur

My wife's a man-madame
She's gone off with the piano the violin the butter-dish
She's a soldier a minister a phy-shit-ian
3 Anthony Hatley, in his translation `Booz Sleeping' (in 7lrfec Pc#g%z.# Book
of French Verse, With Plain Prose Translation of Each Poem, Vol. 3,
1957, p. 69), gives, `His sheaves of corn were not mean or hateful'. E.
H. and A. M. Blackmore in their `Boaz Asleep' in Sc/ccJcd Poc77€s o/
Victor Hugo,. A Bilingual Edition (Chica.go.. University o[ Chica.go Press,
2001), p. 337, lose the metaphor somewhat by giving, `He harvested
with neither greed nor spite'; so too does Brooks Haxton, in his trams-
lation `Boaz Asleep' (in 7lrfe€ 4merz.ccz# Scfeo/¢r 70(4):66, reprinted in
V!.c/or fJ"go,. Sc/ecfcd Poems, Penguin, 2002), giving, `He bound sheaves
without the strain of hate / or envy'. Steven Monte, in his translation
`Boaz Asleep' ( V!.c/or JJwgo, Sc'/ccJcc7 Pocfrj; (Routledge, 2002), p. 219),
gives, `His sheaves were neither miserly nor filled with bitterness'. John
Richmond, in his translation `Boaz Asleep' in 114.j; Prapcr I;/c - Poems
/97j-20/7 (Cottesloe, WA: Chalk face Press, 2017), gives, `His sheaves
contained no hate nor meanness in their yield.'
4 Hatley (ibid., p. 71) gives, `Booz saw an oak, which, issuing from his
stomach, went up to the blue sky; a people ascended it like a long chain; a
king was singing at the bottom, a god dying at the top.' The Blackmores
(ibid., p. 339) have, `Boaz saw an oak tree grow / Out of his loins, and
reach up to the sky, / Where a long chain of people climbed; below / A
king sang, and a god was slain on high.' Haxton (ibid., p. 67) gives, `he
saw a live oak grow out of his belly / far up into the blue; and many
people / climbed it in a long chain, while a king sat / singing at the root,
and a god died at the crown.' Monte (ibid., p. 221) gives, `Boaz saw an
oak tree grow out of / The middle of his stomach and ascend into the
blue. / A nation climbed upward like the links of a chain: / A king sung
at the bottom and a God died above.' Richmond (ibid.) gives, òut of his
belly, like a sprouting rod, / An oak tree rose into the sky. A chosen race,
/ Links in a long chain, scaled its height; down at its base / A king sang;
at its top, men put to death their god.'
5 Hatley (ibid., p. 72) gives, `While he slept, Ruth, a Moabite, had lain
down at the feet of Booz, with naked breast, hoping we know not
what unknown gleam, when the sudden light of awakening shone.'
The Blackmores (ibid., p. 341) give, `While he was sleeping, Ruth, a
Moabite, / Came to his feet and, with her breast bared, lay / Hoping for
some unknown uncertain ray / When, suddenly, they would waken into
light'. Haxton (ibid. p. 68) has `Ruth, a Moabite, had come while Boaz
slept, / and now lay at his feet, who knows what light / from what door
in the heavens finding her breast / naked, tender to its stirring as his
dreams.' Monte (ibid., p. 221) gives, `While he was sleeping there, Ruth,
a Moabite, / Lay down with her breasts bared at Boaz's feet, / Hoping for
some sort of unfamiliar ray / In which understanding would flare up like
a light.' Richmond (ibid.) gives, Ìn his oblivion, came Ruth, a Moabite,
/ And lay down at the old man's feet. Her breasts were bare. / She hoped
we know not what chance ray might touch her there / When he should
start awake, his eyes renewed with light.'
6 Hatley (ibid., p. 73) gives, `what God, what harvester of the eternal
summer, had negligently thrown down this golden sickle in the field of
stars.' Haxton has (ibid. p. 68) `what god / of the eternal summer passing
dropped / his golden scythe there in that field of stars.' The Blackmores
(ibid., p. 343) give, `what stray god, as he cropped / The timeless summer,
had so idly dropped / That golden sickle in the starry field.' Monte
(ibid., p. 223) gives, `what reaper of eternity ~ what kind / Of God -had,
leaving us, carelessly tossed behind / This golden sickle in the dark field
of the stars.' Richmond (ibid.) gives, ònce eternal summer's crop was
mown, / What god, what harvester so carelessly had thrown / His golden
sickle on that field of stars, and gone?'
XXII1 `Me domera sans f iemme une prog6niture'
1 The Seuil edition modifies the passage in the typescript reading,

`nous nous permettons de parler de la fonction hypnopompique et
hypnagogique' (000023.07), to `nous nous permettons de parler de
fonction m6taphorique et de fonction metonymique' a. 392). In a 1911
footnote to the rrczwmdewfcj#g, and in some contributions thereafter,
Freud mentions Herbert Silberer's 1909 study devoted in part to hyp-
nagogic phenomena, `Bericht tiber eine Methode gewisse symbolische
Halluzinations-Erscheinungen hervorzurufen und zu beodachten' in
Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen,
1(2): 513-25 (translated in 1951 as `Report on a method of eliciting and
observing certain symbolic hallucination-phenomena' in Rapaport, D.
(ed.) Organization and Pathology of Thought: Selected Sources, Now
York: Columbia University Press, 1951 pp. 195-207). Lacan will cite
this reference two years after the present Seminar in `Sur la th6orie du
symbolisme d'Ernest Jones', and then in 1966 in `D'un syllabaire apres
coup'.
2 An authorial annotation inserts [Levi-Strauss?] to supply the ste-
nographer's ellipsis (000022.23), footnoted in turn to expand on the
uncertainty denoted by the question mark: `Tot6misme d'aujourd'hui,
ou Kroeber ? -Je doute'. L6vi-Strauss's book was not published until
1962 (Paris: PUF), and in its Introduction the author claims it was begun
just two years previously, thus three years after the present lesson. Alfred
L. Kroeber's text, `Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic Psychoanalysis'
was published in 1920 (in .4mcrz.ccz# 4HfArapo/ogz.a/ 22(1): 48-55), and
its sequel, `Totem and Taboo in Retrospect', in 1939 (,4mcrz.ca# Jowrm¢/
a/Socj.a/og)/ 45: 446-51 ; both were reprinted in his collected papers, 7lrfec
IVcrfwrc o/Cw//wre, Chicago: University of chicago Press,1952, pp. 301~5,
pp. 306-9). Lacan will mention Kroeber's work in his `Proposition du 9
octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l'Ecole' and again in Seminars XVI
and XVII. The Seuil edition, here respected, circumvents the doubt by
interpolating `l'anthropologie structurale' (p. 399).
3 The nonce word Aj.s/orj.o/c is a French calque for the Latin 4z.L5forz.a/a,
especially as used by Spinoza in his expression `historiola mentis' in the
10 June 1666 letter to Johannes Bouwmeester (Ep. XXXVII).
4 Further to its primary signification of `transport' or `traffic', Vcrkcfer can
mean `contact' or `dealings' and also `sexual intercourse' or `coitus'.
5 Lacan's retrospective manuscript apostil at 000023.35, `La donna e
mobile', suggests that mobz./c might also be understood with its Italian
overtones of `fickle' or `flighty'.
6 Again from Act I, Scene 9. Simpson (op. cit. p. 214) gives:
Return this night to see how nature can

Provide me with progeny without a woman.
And Slater (op. cit., p.187) gives:
I will have offspring though I have no wife

To see how it is done come back to me tonight.
XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror
1 The stenographer's typescript (000024.13) has . . . comme/.c vows /'¢j. dj.f,

non pas fille d'une mere, mats fille de deux mares, but there is ti]ttle in the
material thus far developed to anticipate such an attribution of daugh-
terly positioning to little Hans, nor is the point here amplified. While
the text should most likely read either¢/s dc dewx m6rcs, or pfo!. cJc c7cwx
mGrcs, the phrase is merely bracketed out in the authorially annotated
typescript, not emended.
2 J. Strachey's èditor's note' to Alan Tyson's translation for the S/¢#dorcJ
Ed!.f!.o# claims the first scholar to notice the error was Irma A. Richter,
in a footnote to her Se/c'cf!.o#s from her father's editions of Leonardo's
Notebooks (Galaxy, 1952, p. 286). An earlier example however is
the 1923 article cited by Schapiro: Eric Maclagen, `Leonardo in the
Consulting Room', Bwr/I.ngfo# A4¢gacz.#c, 42: 54-57; see also the 1948
article by Raymond Stites, À Criticism of Freud's Leonardo', Co//cgc
j4rf Jowr#a/ 7(4):257~67. The text from the Codex Atlanticus f. 186V-b
(formerly 66V-b) reads:
questo scriuersi distintamete del nibbio par che sia moi destino,
perche nella prima ricordatione della mia infantia e' mi parea che,
essendo lo in culla, che vn nibbio venisse a me e mi aprisse la bocca
colla sua coda, e molte volte mi percuotesse co tal coda dentro alle
labra.
3 Lacan may be drawing, here and in the following paragraph, on Ludwig

Keimer's critica,1 note o[ \927 ±r\ The American Journal Of Semitic
Languages and Literatures 43(3).. 226-3L.
4 From the Institut de France Notebook (MS 2180), f.I.I 18 rrd: `La natura
e piena d'infinite ragioni che n6 fur6 mai in isperietia'. The present
translation again reproduces R. C. Bell's rendering.
5 There is a blending here of Vasari's account (in fe I/!.fc) of Leonardo's
commission for the Annunziata, with Novellara's account in his letter.
For a more involved enquiry, see Virginia Budny's 1983 article, `The
Sequence o[ Leona,rdo's Sketches tòr The Virgin and Child with Saint
Anne and Saint John the Baptist' , The Art Bulletin 6S(I).. 34~SO., thouch
some details have since been challenged by more recent findings (briskly
summarised in Chapter 21 of Walter Isaacson's fco#czrdo cJcz I/z.#cz., New
York, Simon & Schuster, 2017, pp. 315-24). Lacan is almost certainly
reading out the passage from Novellara's letter as reproduced in the
Schapiro article ®p. 168-9), which is also the source of the mentions
below of both Kris and the indulgences. The letter was first published
in A. LITz;ro. I precellori di lsabella d' Este: appunti e documenti, A[mcona;.
Morelli,1887, p. 32, note 1. Schapiro quotes the John Shapley rendering
in the latter's 1925 article, À Lost Cartoon for Leonardo's Madonna
with St. Anne' 7lrfec 4r/ Bw//a/!.", 7(3): 96-102, where the original is
printed in full on p. 98, note 3. For an alternative Englishing, cf. D.
S. Chairbers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, London..
Palgrave Macmillan, 1970, pp. 145nd.
Index
cz-a ' scc imaginary relationship amnesia 270-1, 399400, 426

Abraham, Karl anachtic (,4#/cfe#w#g) relationship
Traum und Mythus, Eine Studie ~zur 74-7
V6lkerpsychologie 442-3n anal symbolism 182, 276
Versuch einer anal stage 46, 54,116, 250, 269,
Entwicklungsgeschichte der 346-7
Libido 10 see a/so object, anal
`Manifestations of the Female
Angelus Silesius
Castration Complex' 184-5 Cherubinischer Wandersmam Z]4,
acting out 155 440n
adaptation 11,13-14,19, 54, 328, animal behaviour 118,180,187, 263,
333 388
affect, affectivity 13,14, 51, 2434, animals in phobia 221, 230-1
283, 284, 293 androcentrism 145,184,195
aggression 23, 69, 98,172,185, 233, Anne, Saint 378, 422, 4234
322, 346 Anna Selbdritt/Metterza 424
aggressiveness 20-I, 22-3, 56-7, 98, anorexia nervosa 177,179, 335,
99,104,152,168,199, 212, 437n
337, 388, 419 anthropology 390, 445n
agent 31-2, 51, 59-60,108,109,117, scc cz/so ethnography
191, 207, 242, 261 Antigone 325
alienation 4,179, 399, 426 anxiety 11,14~15,16,19, 65,174,
Allais, Alphonse 192,198-9, 209, 215, 218, 234
I; engraisseur 2:]2 et seq.
almightiness, all-powerfulness 61, castration anxiety 15-16
161,177,178-9,185-6, 267, signal function 15, 239, 298-9,
330, 349, 356, 385 373
altruism 55 aphanisis 208-9
ambivalence (,4mbz.va/e73:) 6, 9, 54, Apollinaire, Guillaune
158, 351, 433n Les mamelles de Tir6sias 340, 365,
amboceptor 308 399, 442n, 443n, 445n
Ambrose, Saint (Aurelius Ambrosius) Aquinas, Saint Thomas 432n
416 Aristotle 338, 364
448 Index
artificial insemination 366-7 Binet, Alfred

`Le fetichisme dams 1'amour' 152
appeal 59-60, 73,117,123,166.
174-5, 314 biting, mordaciousness 64, 73, 220,
see also cry 238, 269, 297, 320 c/ scq.
appurtenance(s) 93,117,118, see cz/so devoration
131,151,182,195-6, 201, Blackmore, E. H & A. M.
`Boaz Asleep' 443n, 444n
204
artefact scc perverse artefact Blondel, Charles
atypia, atypical position 54, 76,193, Iid psychanalyse \76
213, 377, 398, 408, 424-5 body image 334, 48, 49,119,169,
Auguste (clown) 21, 432n 178,181-2
Aurand, Ammon Monroe Bonaparte, Napoleon 340
Little K]rown Facts about Bundling borer, gimlet (BOArcr) 276-7, 322,
in the New World 79 339, 344, 352, 359, 439n
autoeroticism 55, 59,118-19 Bouvet, Maurice
`La clinique psychanalytique' 5,
Balint, Alice 55-6, 62, 215 11-14, 20-I, 22-3, 68
`Handhabung der Ubertragung Bouwmeester, Johannes 445n
auf Grund der Ferenczischen breast 27, 54-5, 60-I, 87,117-18,
Versuche' 434n 167,175-6,181, 207, 220, 242,
`Love for the Mother and Mother 261, 349~50, 412-13
Love' 56, 433n scc cz/so object, oral object cz#d real
Balint, Michael 55 object
Belgian Psychoanalytic Association Briconnet, Guillaume 434n
Bulletin d'activit6s 56, sO, 4Z] Bryan, Douglas 437n
belief loo,119,132-3,156, 244, 248,Budny, VirSnia
`The Sequence of Leonardo's
256, 263, 265, 356
Bell' R. C. Sketches for The VirSn and
The Notebooks Of Leonardo Da Child with Saint Anne and
Trz.»cz. 441n, 446n Saint John the Baptist' 446n
Belon, Pierre bundling 78-9, 435n
I;histoire de la nalvre des oyseoux Bussy, Dorothy 441n
11 414-15
86nassy, Maurice Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da
Èvolution de la psychanalyse' 5, 369
11-12 Carroll, Lewis
Bergson, Henri Alice through the Looking-Glass
Le Hire (Laughter) 2:S] (Humpty-Dumpty) 286
beyond, beyond-zone 10, 79, 102, Alice in Wonderland 2:94
117,120-1,125,133 cf sea. castration (complex) 29, 51, 30-2,
Bible 41, 46, 53, 66, 73, 74, 76, 88,
Old Testament scc Ecclesiastes, 92,114,145,148,151,171 c/
Exodus, Psalms Seq.
New Testament scc Matthew, scc a/so anxiety, castration anxiety
Peter' catastrophic reaction
bigamy 205 (Katastrophenreaktion) 339 ,
big Other scc Other 442n
Index 449
Catullus, Gaius Valerius 34 danger (Gc/afar) 221, 239, 258, 320,

Cazotte, Jacques 349, 371, 396
Le Diable amoureux 16\-2 death 20, 40, 43, 246, 342, 405,
child analysis 1034, 282, 268, 300, 422-3
311, 333, 373 death of Christ 369, 423
childhood sexual theories scc symbol as death of the thing 368
infantile sexual death instinct (rodes'crz.eb) 40, 42, 43,
theories 65, 362
Chocolat (Rafael) 21, 432n defence 41, 74,105-6,115,152, 240,
Christ, Jesus 369-70, 378, 416, E!Em
4224, 425 defensive outpost (Schw/:bow,

Christianity 424 Vordaw) 15, 239, 240, 273
Judeo-Christian tradition 364 delusion 249, 283, 284, 408
Church 367, 423 denegation 279
Church Fathers 367, 416 depersonalisation 12
Clark, Kenneth depressive position 57, 59,117,
Leonardo da Vinci 4\2 178-9
cinema 137 desire passim
clitoris 89 animal 193
coachman 276, 357, 361, 397 for a child 90~1, 97-8,116,121,
Cocteau, Jean 126
fc po/omczk (Mortimer couple) to deceive 100
62 disappearance of, scc aphanisis
communication 108 and lack 30-1,102,148,183,
communication theory 180 185-6, 217
visual 263 and love 148,150,173
comparison ( I/erg/cz.chw#g) 197-8, indestructible, permanent 131,
300, 355 172,175, 203
complete object see object mortified 20
compromise-formation mother's 194, 217, 235, 236, 242,
(Kompromi|3bildung) 332 253, 256, 262, 286, 350, 404,
compulsion 284 406
compulsive brooding ( Gr#be/:wfl7cg) perverse 157-8,162
418 unconscious and preconscious
condensation 287, 361, 384 126-7
co#/.#go 205, 214 scc cz/so object, of desire
consciousness 10, 354 detachability 259, 308, 33940,
correspondence (czdt;gwa/i.oH) 7,10, 341-2, 348, 397
11, 28, 57,104-5 detriment (dczm) 29-30, 47, 49, 51,
countertransference 81-2, 99-loo, 242
292-3 Deutsch, Helene 24, 433n
Cresswell, Robert 437n "`Feminine" Masochism and its
Cronus 370 Relation to Frigidity' 90
cry 180-1, 285 devoration 152,183,187, 220-1,
s'ce cz/so appeal 358-9, 371
curtain 147-8,157 scc a/so biting, mordaciousness
see a/so veil Diana 264
450 Index
Diatkine, Ren6 ejaculation 252

`The Ego in Perverse Relationships'
premature ejaculation 355
(with S. Nacht and J. Favreau) energetics, energy 25~6, 35-7, 38, 41
105,158 environment, environmental image
disavowal ( Vcrfewg#wng) 148 66, 261-2, 313
displacement 12-13, 76, 89, 92,109, erection
198, 275~6, 293, 372, 423 phallus 4i, 43, 62
distance (closing of `neurotic in childhood 294, 331
distance') 70, 71-2, 79, 824 Eros 77
Dolto, Francoise 33, 34-5, 48-9, eroticisation of defences (Nacht,
367 Diatkine, Favreau) 105-6
Don Juan, do#/.#¢#j.swc 328, 410-11 £s scc id
Dora scc Freud, Sigmund, ethnography 195, 239, 246, 359, 390
Bruchsttlck einer Euripides
Hysterie-Analyse ¢oivicfoui 325
double 20,198, 256, 258, 410, 421 excrement see object, anal object
Dranem 432n excretory complex
drawers (of Hans's mother) 291-2. (Exkretionskomplex) 439n
321, 322~3, 340-I, 344, 345, Exodus
347-8 N]?7 Xy] N]?i (`1 AM THAT I
drive (Triebe, pulsion, tendance) 7 , AM') 202
8-10,13, 38, 40, 52,105,113,
114-15,121,166,167, 220, Fain, Michel 434n
275, 283, 284, 431n, 436n,
Ìmportance du role de la motricit6
439n dams la relation d'objet' (with
aggressive drives 57-8, P. Marty) 68-72, 79
genital drive 105, 218, 219, 294, falcon 414-15
365 falling 96, 98,139, 238, 280, 289-90,
`motor manifestation' of 69
297, 311, 319, 320, 338-9,
oraldrive 151,166-7 344, 348, 350-i, 360, 372, 395,
Duhem, Pierre 398
Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci 4\9 see also Niederkommen
Durante, Marcello fantasy (PAcr#/asz.c) 45, 46, 67,115,
Sulla preisloria della tradizione 194, 212, 397, 413, 425
à child is being beaten' 106~13,
poe/j.ccz grcccz 443n
Dwrch¢rdcz.fw#g s'ec working-through 436n
Hans's fantasies 241 cf jicq.
Ecclesiastes 356, 442n perverse 81-2,111,147,162
ego 4, 9,12-13,19-20, 66, 98,109, of phallic incorporation 21
110,116,120,130 cJ feq. of phallic mother 184, 217-18,
see also not me 347, 425
Ego-ideal (Jch-Jdeczo 165,169-70, primordial fantasies 104-5
187,189, 204, 398 of seduction 213
egoism 55 father
ego psychology 419 symbolic, fourth term, paternal
Egypt 295, 414-16 function 50, 73, 76, 90, 110,
Luxor 414 121,125,152,154,192-3,194,
Index 451
202, 211-12, 219-20, 221, 222, Fokker, Anton 414

242, 268, 315. 354-6, 366-7, foreclosure ( ycrwcr/w#g) 219, 407,
387-9, 392-3 436n
as giver of child 90-1,101-2, For//Da 59,174,181
97-8,116,120,125,127,131, Frege, Gottlob
137,194~5 Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik 230
imaginary 120-2,125,193, 207, Freud, Anna 46, 634, 66, 92, 1034,
212, 242, 261, 267-8, 272-3, 155,175-6, 373
275, 356 Freud, Sigmund
mythical 202-3, 399 Analyse der Phobie eines
real 125,138,193, 203, 204, 205-6, iinf i chrigen Knaben (Analy sis
207, 212-13, 222, 242, 254, of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old
261, 272, 314, 366, 390 Bo)/ `Little Hans') 11, 64,
What is afather? \96-],201.-2, 187-8,192 c/ s'eq.
207, 363, 389 Aus der Geschichte einer inf;antilen
fcc cz/s'o identification, with father Neurose (From the History Of
cz#d Name-of-the-Father an lnf antile Neurosis `Wdif
Favez-Boutonier, Juliette Man') 192-3, 236, 258, 438n
`La psychanalyse et les problemes `Bemerkungen tiber die
de l'enfance' 176 Ubertragungsliebe'
Favreau, Jean Alphonse (Òbservations on
Transference-Love') 196
(with R. Diatkine and S. Bruchsttick einer Hysterie-Analyse
Nacht) 105,158 (Fragment of an Analysis Of a
fear 15,19, 80-1,108,111, 208, 238, Case of Hysteria `Dora.') 97 ,
240, 274, 277, 280, 336, 391 100,102,126,128-39
fellatio 412-13
`Der Untergang des
Fenichel, Otto Odipuskomplexes' (`The
`The Psychology of Transvestism'
Dissolution of the Oedipus
186 Complex') 199-200, 438n
`The Symbolic Equation: Girl =
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur
Phallus' 159-60, 436n (Civilisation and Its
fetish 15~17, 28, 34, 67,Ill,120, Discontents) 19
143-55,157-8,166,170,186, Der Witz und seine Be-ziehung zum
192, 217, 372, 376, 386, 406 Unbewuf oten 2:8] -9
etymology of 162
`Die Ichspaltung im
see a/s'o perversion, fetishism Abwehrvorgang' (`Splitting
Fink, Bruce 432n, 433n, 434n of the Ego in the Process of
First World War 1 1 Defence') 187
fitter scc plumber `Die infantile Genitalorganisation'
`fixed in' (o#grw¢j'chc#) 258~9, 277,
(Ìnfantile Genital
284, 332 Organisation') 88-9, 433n
Fliess, Wilhelm 207, 313, 441n Eine Kindheitserinnerung des
Fliess, Robert Leonardo de Vinci (Leonardo
`Phylogenetic Vs. Ontogenetic
da Vinci, A Memory of His
Experience' 280, 313, 323, Childhoody 378-9, 409,
380-1 411-14, 416-19, 422-3
452 Index
Ùber die Psychogenese eines

Freud, Sigmund (co#/.)
Èin Kind wird geschlagen'
Falles von weiblicher
(À Child is Being Beaten') Homosexualitat' (`The
106-13,116 Psychogenesis of a Case of
Èinige psychische Folgen
Homosexuality in a Woman')
des anatomischen 94-102,103,107,113~17,
Geschlechtsunterschieds' 120-2,124-8,136-9,154, 302,
(`Some Psychical 306, 438n
Consequences of the Totem und Tabu 202-3 , 221, Z]9
Anatomical Distinction Troumdeutung (Interpretation of
Between the Sexes' 195 Drc¢ms) 9, 44,126~7,162,
Entwurf einer Psychologie (Project 202, 287, 377, 445n
Ùber Deckerinnerungen' (`Screen
for a Scientif ic Psychology)
6-8 Memories') 17,111-12,149
`Fetischismus' (`Fetishism') 1434
Zur Psychopathologie des
Hemmung, Symptom and Angst Alltagslebens (The
(Inhibitions, Symptoms and Psychopathology Of Everyday
4#j¥!.cf);) 298-9, 372-3 Life) 383
Janseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond Fritzl (Hans's friend) 308, 311, 357,
the Pleasure Principle) 3, 43 381
Massenpsychologie and lch-Analyse frustration passz.in
(Mass Psychology and fundamental rule (of analysis) 69
Analysis Of the Ego) 162rfe,
169-170, 436-7n Galileo Galilei 420
Neue Folge der Vorlesungen game of odds-and-evens 43, 1234,
-zur Eirrf uhrung in Die 185,198
Psychoanalyse (New Garden of the Hesperides 56,
Introductory Lectures) 19, 434n
434n genital type/individual 12,16,114
The Complete Letters of Sigmund genital organisation/stage 41, 88,
Frond to Wilhelm Fliess 2fJ] , 114-16, 276, 282, 294, 312,
44ln 314, 390
`Triebe und Triebschicksale'
genital maturity 208, 211, 234,
(`Drives and Their Fates') 52 364
Ùber die weibliche Sexualitat' see cz/so drive, genital drive
(`Female Sexuality') 37, 45-6, Gide, Andr6
90,185, 207 Si le grain ne meurt 3\6, 44ln
Ùber Libidin6se Typen' (`Libidinal
aft 61, 63, 93,114,115-16,117,122,
Types') 75 131-6,146,166-7,173,174~5,
`Zur Einfuhrung des Narzissmus' 177,181,182,194, 349
(Òn Narcissism: An Gillespie, William H.

À Contribution to the Study of
Introduction') 26
Drei Abhandlungen zur Fetishism' 152
Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on Gilson, Etienne
the Theory of Sexuality) 6=] , La philosophie ou Moyen Age,
37, 41-2, 44-5, 52, 88, 1434, rome J 443n
2424, 417, 418, 433n, 435n gimlet see borer
Index 453
girl-phallus 67,159-60, 271 harmony 7,18-19, 41, 45-6, 52,

Glan= oaf der Naselglance at the nose 58, 63, 204-5, 233, 254, 260,
150 364-5
Glover, Edward 14,15 Hartmann, Heinz 419
Gmunden 275, 306, 311, 321, 324, Hatley, Anthony
`Booz Sleeping' 443n, 444n
351-2, 360, 378
God 132-3, 202, 267-8, 273, 313, Haxton, Brooks
315, 334, 356, 357, 393, 406
Goddess Mut 415 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 409
Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Heidegger, Martin 40, 246
Sc#dw#g 160-1, 436n hieroglyphics 314, 383, 415, 416
Goldstein, Kurt Henri 11 of France 414
Der Aufbou des Organismus Hermann, Imre 434n
442n Hermes 298
Graber, Gustav Hans Herodotus
`Die zweierlei Mechanismen der
jJz.sJorz.eJ 11 415
Identifizierung' 163 Herzfeld, Marie
grandmother of Hans (dz.c fczz.#zcrz.") Leonardo de Vinci.. Der Denker,
301, 303, 306-7, 311, 313, 317, Forscher und Poet 413
315, 321, 329, 348, 374-5, 377,heterosexuality 101,193,195, 201,
441n 314, 328, 376, 377, 406
graphia a,nd orthographia 22.8-30 Hippios 298
Greenacre, Phyllis 152 hitching 276, 280, 307-8, 325, 372
`Further Considerations Regarding
Hocart, Arthur Maurice 283, 284
Fetishism' 78 hole 16, 29, 30, 51, 210, 242, 258-9,
Grete (Hans's friend; Hans's doll) 277, 292, 322-3, 329, 339, 342,
272, 332, 342 345, 353, 357
Grigg, Russell 442n Holy spirit 38, 4o, 42
Grtibel.-wang see compulsive Homer 361
brooding homosexuality 73,101,152,186
guilt 106-7, 272, 273 female homosexuality 87-8,101,
Gunther, Reinhold 139
Kulturgeschichte der Liebe. Ein male homosexuality 186, 217,
ycrs#ch 435n 410
Weib und sittlichkeit; studien und Hop-o'-My-Thumb see Perrault,
darlegungen 435n Charles
Horapollo
hallucination 8-9,19, 27-8, 237~8, Hieroglyphica 4\S-L6, 440n
407 Homey, Karen 89-90,185
Hanna (Hans's sister) 198, 222, 234` horse 197 cf fcq.
238, 249, 276, 285, 299, 300, House of Bourbon 303
344, 350-1, 360-1, 371-2, 376, House of Hapsburg 303
397, 404-5 Hugo, Victor
`Booz endormi' 368-70, 391,
Hans, little s'ec Freud, Sigmund,
Analyse der Phobie eines 4434n
f unf j] dhrigen Finab en Humpty-Dumpty Sce Carroll, Lewis
454 Index
Hunter, Dugmore incorporation (Ez.werfez.bw#g) 21, 46,

Òbject-Relation Changes in the
166,168-9
Analysis of a Fetishist' 152 inhibition 254, 299, 352, 425
hydroelectric power station 25nd, interpretation 81, 91,100-I,139,
35-8, 42 151,187-8, 256, 268, 281, 297,
hydraulic pumping station 38 324, 330
hypnopompic and hypnogogic intersubjectivity 75, 77,109,Ilo,
function 383, 445n Ill,118,124,126,145,174,
hysteria scc neurosis 187,193,197, 235, 251, 263,
266, 274, 288, 385-6
Ich-libido see tiibido introjection 151,164,165-6,168
id (Es) 36, 40-I, 42,Ill, 203 inversion 125, 293, 323, 349, 352,
idealisation 47, 212, 271, 419 398, 399, 412, 423, 425, 426
identification 67,162-5,170, 212, irony 23, 361
422 Isaacs, Susan S. 179-80
primal 168 Isaacson, Walter
specular 169 Leonardo da Vinci 446n
scc a/i.a mirror stage lsabella d'Este 423, 446n
with analyst 19-20 Isakower, Otto
with father 90,102,121,122,
Òn the Exceptional Position of the
1634, 212, 314 Auditory Sphere' 381~2
with imaginary phallus 152,153, Israeli, Isaac 432n
407
with man (virile) 74,131 Jakobson, Roman
with matemal desire/ideal 406,
`Two Aspects of Language and
408 Two Types of Aphasic
with mother 76, 77,154,158,186, Disturbances' 436n
217, 221-2, 352, 353, 384 Jankel6vitch, Samuel 437n
with object/little other 9,19~20, jealousy 121,155, 231, 256, 335,
78, 98,186, 426 380-1
with phallus 217 jealous God 313, 357, 393
withwoman 152,153, 352 Jocasta 325
John the Baptist, Saint 378, 423, 425
imaSnary relationship (cz-&') 4~5, 22,
70-2, 76, 78-9, 81,ilo,113, Jones, Ernest 24, 29, 41, 48, 90,182,
118,120-I,125,139,1524, 185, 208-9, 210, 373
`The Early Development of Female
179,196, 203, 206, 212, 217,
2634 Sexuality' 209-10
`The Genesis of the Super-ego' 65
£cc a/so ego cz#d type-object
impotence 131,134,137 The Life and Work of Sigmund
indebtedness 30, 47, 51, 53, 94, 211, Frc#d 196, 202
242 0n the Nightmare 2:98
`F\eview o[ the Dictionary Of
infantile sexual theories (z.#/cz#/j./c
SexwcI//orschw#g) 41, 44, Psychology 436n
2434, 296, 389 jubilation 168,178-9
incest 205, 247-8 Judeo-Christian tradition scc
incest prohibition 30, 76,145, Christianity
433n Jung, Carl 230
Index 455
`S6minaire sur "La Lettre vol6e"

Keimer, Ludwig
À Note on the Hieroglyphs [G1] 1234, 224-30, 245, 257, 258,
and [G15]' 446n 276, 438n
RIerkegaard, Soren Seminar I 3, 22, 274
Gentagelsen (Repetition) 8 Seminar 11 3, 43,
kite 414-7 Seminar Ill 3. 363
Klein, Melanie 24, 56-8,103-5,117, Seminar V 406, 433n, 436n, 440n,
151,177-8, 320, 433n 442n
K]einians 150-I,166 Seminar VII 442n
Kris, Ernst Seminar VIII 432n
Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art Seminar X 442n
424, 446n Seminar XVI 445n
Kojeve, Alexandre Seminar XVII 445n
`Le demier monde nouveau' 409 `Situation de la psychanalyse et
Koyr6, Alexandre 420 formation du psychanalyste en
Krczwcz// 252, 280, 285, 325 1956' 437n
`Sur la th6orie du symbolisme
Kroeber, Alfred L.
`Totem and Taboo: An Ethnologic d'Emest Jones' 445n
Psychoanalysis' 445n 1951-1952 seminar 192-3, 438n
`Totem and Taboo in Retrospect'
1952-1953 seminar 438n
445n La Chatre, Louis de 43940n
The Nature Of Culture 44Sn Lagache, Daniel
Ì.e problem du transfert' 126
Kuhn, Adalbert
`Die Sprachvergleichung und Laius 325
die Urgeschichte der lamb 344, 378~9, 423, 425
indogermanischen V6lker' Lambin, Denis (Dionysius Lambinus)
442-3n 434n
Die Herablounft des Feuers und des La Mettrie, Julien Offray de
G6ttertranks 443n I; Horrune rrlachine 25
Latouche, Henri de
`L' schema (Z-shaped diagram) 4-5,
Fragoletta I.62
70-1,Ilo-11,113,116,120, Law (primordial, fundamental) 30,
125,135,145, 200, 425 53, 64, 76,132,136,138,
Lacan, Jacques 201-6, 220
`D'un syllabaire apres coup'
scc cz/so incest law
445n laws of exchange 136,1834
`Fonction et champ de la parole
Law of Falling Bodies 419
et du langage' (Rome report) Law of Gravity 419
78-9 432n, 434n Lebovici, Ruth
`La Chose freudienne' 264, 432n `Perversion sexuelle transitoire
`La direction de la cure . . .' 427,
au cours d'un traitement
432n psychanalytique' 804,
`Le mythe individuel du n6vrose'
435n
293 Lemaistre de Sacy, Louis-Isaac
`L'instance de la lettre' 403,
Bible de Port-Royal 442.n
441n Lemoine, Gennie 427
`Proposition du 9 octobre 1967'
Lemoine, Paul 427, 432n, 439n
456 Index
Leonardo da Vinci 327, 378, 409, animal 118,187,193

41 +14, 416-26, 441~2n, 446n £ws'f sc€ pleasure principle
Bacchus 422 Luther, Martin 313
Burlington Cartoon 378, 412,
422-5, 446n Maclagen, Erie
`Leonardo in the Consulting
Leda and the Swan 425
St John the Baptist 378, 42;2 Room' 446n
Virgin and Child with Saint Arme madness 120
378, 412, 422-5 Mallet, Jean
Virgin Of the Rocks 378, 4Z2 Contribution a 1' 6tude des phobies
L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1834, 437n, 15,174
445n A4cz##smr./j. 30, 433n
`The Family' 437n
Manutius (Manuzio), Aldus Pius
Les Structures 616mentaires de la 416
parenl6 (Elementary Structures Marguerite de Navarre

a/Kz.#sAzz7) 136, i45nd, 183 (D'Angouleme) 434n
`The Structural Study of Myth'
Mariedl 2334, 269, 319
270, 283, 284, 439n marriage 126,183, 205-6, 367
Le tot6misme aujourd'hui 445n Mars 298
libido, libidinal economy/ Marty, Pierre 434n
Ìmportance du role de la motricit6
development 10, 34, 41, 44,
74-6, 89,102,106,Ilo,113, dams la relation d'objet' (with
130,153,176-7,195, 203, 212, M. Fain) 68-72, 79
243, 328, 419 Marx, Karl
Ich-libido 44 fetish 16-17
lies, lying 100 mastery 178-9, 265, 342, 397, 398
Lodi 344, 376 masturbation 81, 89,106-7, 214-15,
Loewenstein, Rudolf M. 419 218, 234, 251-2, 272, 276, 284.
`Some Remarks on the Role of 294, 330, 435n
Speech in Psycho-Analytic matemity see motherhood
Technique' 180 matriarchy 1834, 437n
love passim matriarchal lineage 376, 377
courtly love 79,101 Matthew, Saint
demand for love 176 Gospelof 181
and aft 93,117-18,131-3,136, maturation (instinctual) 7,12,13-14,
143,167,174, 236 47,115, 312, 359, 364, 424
matemal love 117, 216, 219, 251, Medusa's head 187
293, 300, 319, 338, 349-50 memory 111, 228, 310
scc a/so anaclitic relationship ¢#c7 message
sign, of love received in inverted form 112,127,
`lumf' (£wmzz» 250, 276, 292, 345,
174, 202
347-9 Messiah scc Christ, Jesus
luring metaphor 70, 79,138,147,148,
child's luring of mother 186-7,193, 150,166, 228, 235, 266, 309,
198-201, 204, 217, 219~20, 368-9, 370, 371, 373, 390~1,
221-2, 251, 256-7, 264, 274, 392, 403
286, 293, 300, 331, 342 metaphysics 31, 244, 272
Index 457
metonymy 137,139,149,150, 235nd, Narten, Johanna

`Das vedische Verbum A4:c}/A' 443n
238, 256-7, 260, 266, 309, 311,
368, 403 nature 36, 42, 43, 204, 239, 246, 247,
Michelangelo 423 367, 399, 411, 416, 421-2
micturition scc urine, urination neurosis passim
mirror/specular relation 9, 74, 77-8, hysteria 96,128,130-2,135, 249,
110,168-9,178~9,182,194, 276, 386
189-9, 203 obsessional neurosis 20~1, 22-3,
scc cz/so imaginary relation 68, 72, 106, 382, 386
mirror stage 9-10,168,178-9 scc cz/so obsessional trait
mirror writing 425, 426 IV!.ecJcrkommc# 96, 98,102,139
moment (physics) 279, 310 Nietzsche, Friedrich
monogamy 196, 205 Also sprach Zarathustra 361
Monte, Steven nightmare 298
Ninon (Anne) de l'Enclos 440n
mordaciousness scc biting nonsense (Dummheit) 2]2, 287 , 289,
mother 307-8, 310-11, 319, 339, 372,
matemal body 58,104,166,178-9 392
phallic 81-2, 83,Ill-12,151,158, normalisation 10, 30,133,138,193,
184, 216, 243, 256, 261-2, 347, 206, 398
`not-me' (non-ego) 59, 61, 215
392, 393, 417
symbolic 64, 65,151,191, 201, nothing 135,139,147-8,175,177,
207, 211, 216, 242, 261, 179
349-50
as totality 57, 59,168-9,179 object j7asfz.in
motherhood, matemity 91, 97, 370 anal object (excrement) 181, 292,
motion (Bewcgw#g) 291, 338 345-9
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Jce cz/fo lumf
Don Giovanni 410 complete/whole object 117, 364
murder 247-8, 358-9 of desire 75, 77, 87, 98,119, 378,
myth, mythical construction 50, 58, 413
63,160, 202-3, 212, 244 c/ £cq. genital object 7,18
mytheme 247, 439n gift-object scc gift
mythology 264, 298, 320, 380 imaginary 21, 28, 31, 34, 51, 53,
69, 91, 98,101,191, 200, 201,
Nacht, Sacha 211, 242, 262-3, 265, 407, 426
lack of 28-30, 46, 48, 74, 76, 93,
(with R, Diatkine and J. 94,123,131,158,184, 242,
Favreau) 105,158 261
naivety 288-9 oral object 175-7
nakedness 269, 272-3, 275, 323, 331, real 27, 28, 30, 31, 51, 54, 55, 58,
357, 408 60, 61, 82, 83,101-2,117,167,
Name-of-the-Father 315, 355-6, 387 169,176,177,181,186,191,
narcissism 13, 44, 72, 74-6, 93, 98, 192,199
118-19,130-1,164,168-9,187, symbolic 31, 51,145,151,167,
195-6, 328, 376, 378, 398, 418 179,184,191, 201, 215, 242
narcissistic conflict 185 transitional object 27-8,119-20
458 Index
objectivation 110,111 passive/active position 9, 37, 82, 236,

objectivity 11,14, 28 353, 406
objectality 14 passive voice 110
object choice (Ofy'ck/wflAO 97, 114, paternity 156,174, 366, 369, 375,
1634,193 387, 389, 423
md.##/z.chc 101,120 paternal metaphor 370
oblativity 13, 75, 364-5 patricentrism 146,195
obsessional neurosis see neurosis Pavlov's dog 346
obsessional trait 418, 421, 424 Payne, Sylvia
`Some Observations on the Ego
Odin 298
odds-and-evens scc game of Development of the Fetishist'
odds-and-evens 152,1534
Oedipus 325-6 penis 58,121, 209, 324, 433n, 434n
Oedipus complex 30, 41, 45-6, 53, absence of 64,144, 210, 349
56-89 65, 73, 75, 82, 90,105 destructive 152
et seq. imadnary 116~17,120-1,125,
Onions, Charles Talbut 144,167-8, 272, 349
A New English Dictionary of losing/removal of 259, 292, 324-5,
Historical Principles I:X 434 371-2, 392, 398-9, 407
oral stage/orality 21, 54,116,151, paternal 151,195, 352, 354~5
166-7,175-7,187 real 194,195, 201, 218, 219-20,
fee a/so drive, oral drive a#d object, 233, 234, 251~2, 270, 274, 294,
oral object 330, 331-2, 350, 355, 356, 387,
oral/anal, oral-sadistic 152, 371, 395
434n symbolic 121,137,145, 211, 280,
organicism 26 see a/so phallus, distinct from penis
orgasm 252 and widdler
orthographia see graphia a.nd penis envy/yeaming (Pe#!'s#cz.® 62,
orthographia 116,145,169,194, 216~17,
Other (big Other, A) 4, 20, 38, 72, 76, 253, 364, 417
loo,111,112,113,120,161, permutation 121, 275, 276, 298, 307,
174, 200, 201, 219, 363, 384, 320, 321, 322, 329, 396
385, 422, 424, 426 Perrault, Charles
as `trans-object' 1 1 1 Le petit Poucet (Hap-o'-My-
other (little other, a) 4, 6,14, 59, 61, Thumb) 321
72, 74-5, 77, 93,108,110-11, perverse artefact/reaction 72-3,
118,162,168,169,187, 203, 814
421-2, 424-5, 426 s'cc a/so transitory perversion
perverse fantasy 81,111
Pasche, Francis perversion 77, 78,105-6,111,
`R6alit6 de l'objet et point de 112-13,121-2,129,137,139,
vue 6conomique' (with M. 147,149,157-8,160,185~7,
Renard) 56-8, 65 217, 243, 264
parade 193, 2634 exhibitionism 159,187, 264
paranoia see psychosis, paranoia fetishism 17, 34, 49, 77-8, 82,
paranoid position 178 143-55,157~8,160,166,186,
passage a l'acte 77 ,83 217, 321, 332, 341

Index 459
negative of neurosis 105-6,113, potlatch 132

128, 243 preconscious 126-7
scoptophilia/scopophilia 158-9, pregenital relations 9,12-13, 44,
263, 436n 45-6, 71,116, 282, 390
transvestism 1534,158-9,162, pregenital type 12-13
186, 217 presence-absence 59-61, 64,116-17,
voyeurism 159 123,144-5,149,175,198,
Scc a/fo transitory perversion 201-2, 215, 300, 335, 386-7
Peter, Saint preoedipal phase 45~6, 53, 67, 73,
First Epistle (.Quaerens quem 151,184-5,192,194, 211,
devoret') 187 215-7, 231, 242, 279, 292,
phallic phase 24, 41, 45, 88, 89, 91, 370
114,182 Pr6vert, Jacques
phallophore, penis-bearer 66, 92, I;opera des girafes 188, 439n
183, 204, 217, 236. 438n primal scene 152
phallus p¢j.fz." primary and secondary systems 19,
distinct from penis 24, 62,167-8 26-8, 38-9
imaginary 112,152-3,182-3, 220, primary love 55
232, 253, 261, 265, 331, 417 Principle of Inertia 419
symbolic 144,145,146, 261, 395
privation 29, 31-2, 47-9, 51, 53,
phallus dentatus 330, 407 904,139,171,191, 207,
phobia 15,16-17, 34, 46-7, 48-50, 209-11, 242, 261, 266, 312-13,
63i, 73, 80-I, 83, 92, 96,187, 320, 364
191 et seq. see cz/i:a st6resis (or€pTior€)
agoraphobia 239 Prometheus 359, 442-3n
philosophy 7, 40 Psalms 442n
phylogenetic memories 57 Ps}jchcz#a/);s'c, L¢ ¢oumal) 123, 224,
physics 11, 279, 421 286, 290-I, 403, 416, 438n,
Pietro da Novellara 423, 446n 440n
pincers (Zcz#ge) 277, 324-6, 341-2, Psychanalyse d' oujourd' hui, La
352, 440n (Psychoanalysis of Today) S,
Plato 11-12, 56, 282, 427n
theory of ideal types 7-8, 57, psychiatry 35
360-1 psychical system 36-7, 42, 47
pleasure principle (£wsfprz.#:!.p) 4-5, psychogenesis 46, 404
8-9,19, 26-7, 38~9, 52,117 psychotherapy 66, 92, 404
Lust 39 psychosis 12, 22,174, 284
Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus) paranoia 4, 203, 219, 252
Naturalis Historia,X 414 transsexualism 264
plumber, fitter (Sch/osscr,
Installateur) I22, 259, 292, quashing of disappointment 175,
322, 324, 325, 341-2, 344, 351, 181,187, 220, 320, 349
352, 357~8 399, 439n Quillet dictionary 368
Poe, Edgar Allan
The Purloined Letter 2S] ,258 Rank, Otto
poetry 229, 245, 368-70, 376, 391 Die Don Juan-Gestalt 410
Polynices 248, 439n realism 137, 369
460 Index
realfty pinctp\e (Realit&tsprinzip) Safouan, Moustafa 437n

4-5, 8-9, 26-7, 38-9,117 Sagan, Francoise
reciprocity 6, 9,19, 23, 24, 56, 77, Bonjour trislesse 409
109,110, 204, 263, 435n Un certain sourire 409
re-finding ( Wrj.edcrjHdr#g) 7-8,19, Santissima Annunziata 423, 446n
45, 52, 312 Sartre, Jean-Paul
regression 47, 98,166-7,172-3,181, L'6tre et le n6ant (en-soi' a,nd
`pour-soi') 354, 442n
187, 220, 276, 333, 346, 360,
390, 397, 438n satisfaction p¢ssj.in
Renan, Ernest Saussure, Ferdinand de 180
Dialogues et fragnunts Schapiro, Meyer
`Leonardo and Freud: An Art-
philosophiques \8
Renard, Michel Historical Study' 413, 446n
`R6alit6 de l'objet et point de vue
Sch/osscr see plumber
6conomique' (with F. Pasche) Schmideberg, Melitta
`Delinquent Acts as Perversions
56ng, 65
repetition 7-8, 43,171, 268, 360, 418 and Fetishes' 155-6
repetition compulsion Schnurmann, Anneliese
Òbservation of a Phobia' 46-7,
(Wiederholungszwang) 1Z] -8 ,
172 63-7, 734, 92,loo, 434n
repression ( VcntJrd.#gw#g), the Schreber, Daniel Paul 203, 438n
repressed 112,150,172,199, Schwa.rmcrcz. 101, 435n
203, 232, 243, 375 scoptophilia/scopophilia see
resistance 3, 95, 98,126,130,179, perversion
230, 265 screen 24,Ilo, 292, 314, 385
retronchon (Nachtrdglichkeit , apres- screen-rnenory (Deckerinnerung) L7 ,
coc{p) 10, 46, 58, 91,108,151, 111-12,149,152, 413
174,178,192, 266, 300 screw-thread 259, 276
revendication 29, 93 screwing/unscrewing 222, 259, 277,
Rhine 25 292, 322, 324~5, 339, 348,
Richmond, John 351-2, 357-8, 396, 398
`Boaz Asleep' 444n
Second World War 64, 434n
Richter, Irma R. separation 236, 275, 310, 311,
Selections from the Notebooks Of 318-19, 423
Leonardo Da Vinci 446n Servicen, Louise
Richter, Jean Paul Carnets de L6cmard de Vinci
The Notebooks Of Leonardo Da 441
yz.#cz. 441n, 446n Servite Monastery scc Santissima
Rycroft, Charles Annunziata
`The Nature and Function of the
Shakespeare, William
Analyst's Communication to The Tragedie Of Hamlet L62
the Patient' 180 shame 56,106,185, 264
Shapley, John
À Lost Cartoon for Leonardo's
Sachs, Hanns
Òne of the Motive Factors in the Madonna with St. Anne'
Formation of the Super-Ego 446n
in Women' 195, 438n Sheridan, Alan 434n
Index 461
shortcoming (cczrc#cc) of the paternal Strachey, Alix 437n

position 131,153, 254, 279, Strachey, James 433n, 435n, 437n,
335, 353, 356, 377, 390, 408 440n, 446n
Òbituary of Joan Riviere' 436n
sickle 369-71, 388, 444n
sign Ill,150 sublimation 418-19, 423, 426
of love 117,131-2,174,176 subodoration 70, 434-5n
`sign-stimulus' 180-1
substitution 66,107, 213, 33940,
signifier pasJJ.in 368-9,
and signified 35, 38, 3940, 42-3, child for missing phallus 90-I,
46,138,180, 279, 281, 286, 102,116-17,121,146,159-60,
298, 337, 386, 433n 169,194, 234-5, 407
Silberer, Herbert fetish for mother's phallus 112,
`Bericht tiber eine Methode gewisse
148
symbolische Halluzinations- satisfaction of need for symbolic
Erscheinungen hervorzurufen satisfaction 175-7,181
und zu beodachten' 445n suggestion 130, 248-9, 272, 281, 322,
Simpson, Louis 442n, 443n, 445n 330, 345, 405
Slater, Maya 442n, 443n, 445n superego 65,161,167,169, 200,
sleep 60,175, 270 2034, 209, 381-2, 407
Soci6te fran¢aise de psychanalyse female superego 195
262 suppletion (swpp/6¢#cc) 356, 359,
Soci6t6 psychanalytique de Paris 240 442n
Socrates 366 surprise 83, 264, 272, 274
somatognosis 48, 433n Surrealists 368
specularity, specular relation scc symbolisation 43, 47, 48, 49, 63, 64,
mirror/specular relation 78, 91, 94,104-5,108,116,
speech (/czp¢ro/e) 39, 71-2, 91,104, 134,153,175, 211, 260, 268,
108,109,167,174,175,181, 274, 285, 294, 298, 332, 336,
230, 251, 268, 331, 334, 363, 339, 349, 358, 389, 407
367, 381-2, 385, 422 symbolism 4,161,182, 292, 390
unconscious speech 4,110-111 symptom/symptomatology 80, 96,
virtual speech 4 101,Ill,116,128,130,134,
Spinoza, Baruch 138,148,151,155,167,171,
`Letter to Joannes Bouwmeester'
177,198, 204, 262, 278-9, 281,
445n 283, 318, 346, 348, 353, 358,
splitting (Spa/Jw#g) 148,178-9,187 383
stain 237, 239, 290 symptomatic act 282
Stendhal 79 symptomatic formations/
De l'amour 435r\ productions 281, 283, 325
st6resis (or6pnoi€) 364 symptomatic signifier/signifying
see cz/so privation system 281, 293
Stites, Raymond
À Criticism of Freud's Leonardo'
tangency (of horse circuit and rail
446n circuit) 304, 311-12
stone 43, 259, 323, 357, 381, 407, 410tendency see drive
stork 249, 258, 281, 342, 344, 375-6, Theologia Aristotelis 364-S, 443n
391. 405-6 Titian 238, 427, 439n
462 Index
Tolstoy, Leo Versailles 303

Wrar a#d Peczcc 137, 436n Vcrwcr/##g sc€ foreclosure
totem 221, 390 Veronese, Paul
transference 3, 72, 99-loo,103,110, Venus and Mars United by Love
112,126,127-8, 233, 268, 373, 427, 439n
384 Venus and Mars with Cupid and a
transitional object see object, Horse 439n
transitional object Vienna 94,
transitory perversion 814, Hauptzollamt (Wien Mitte) station
reactional exhibitionism 154-5, 302, 306, 317, 441
jrec cz/fo perverse artefact/reaction Lainz 301, 3034, 306, 321, 374,
truth 82,100, 245~6, 248, 312, 334, 44ln
348, 356, 380, 385, 389, 408 Sch6nbrunn 303, 315, 44ln
turgescence 252, 294 Unter-St-Veit 3034, 306
/);pc-object 4, 7,16, 295 Voltaire
Tyson, Alan 446n Souvenirs de Madame Caylus 440n
La Prude 440D
unconscious pczsj!z.in vulture 412-7
Underwood, James Amery 437n
Uranus 370 Watkins, Calvert
Urbild ,30 How to Kill a Dragon.. Aspects of
urine, urination, mjcturition 64, 81, Indo-European Poetics 443n
82, 83,116, 291-2, 435n weaning 7, 356
whipping 344, 361, 376, 398
vagina dentata 330, 407 VThpsnade Zoo 231
vaginal sensation 89,182 widdler ( Wz.wz.mclcfecr) 64,197, 214,
Valeriano, Pierio 222, 231 cf scg.
Hieroglyphica 4\6 Wiederholungszwang see repetition
Vasari, Giorgio compulsion
Le Vite de' pin eccellenti pittori, Winnicott, Donald Woods
`Transitional Objects and
scultori, e architettori 446
Vaucresson 303, 441n Transitional Phenomena'
veil 147-52,154,157-8,170,186, 27-8,118-19
235, 264~5, 272-3, 290, 300, Wirklichkeit , Wirklung 24nd, 35nd,
340, 347-9, 365, 376 163,177, 397
Veil of Maya 147 Wolf Man scc Freud, Sigmund, 4ws
Verarbeitung 405 der Geschichte einer infantilen
Verdi, Giuseppe Neurose
jtj.go/c/fo (`La donna e mobile') wo rkin g-through (Dwrchardez./##g)
445n 268~9, 281
Verdrdngung see repression
Vcr/cwg#w#g see disavowal Xanthippe 366
Vcr/I.cb/Aez.f 131,162,164,168
I/crs¢g##g 172, 437n Zeus 298, 370

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The Object Relation

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Times NR MT by

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT

THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE

The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young

THE FETISH OBJECT

The Function of the Veil

MYTHICAL STRUCTURE IN THE OBSERVATION ON

XII On the Oedipus Complex

XVI How Myth is Analysed

XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror 403

The Z-shaped diagram

This year we shall be speaking on a topic to which the historical

relation to the object, regarded as a dual relationship, as a relation-

each apprehending, each recognition, upon the reminiscence of a

form. The fundamental possibility of this organisation that is sub-

have certainly worded in very precise terms - what they regard to be

prosaic, that o[ the patient's social relationships. This \alst expresstron

or symbolism in such a way that the choice of a symbol, quite arbitrar-

a perspective, nor a plane? Indeed, we cannot help but ask what is

This extraordinarily simphistic conception of the notion of instinc-

mental backdrop of anxiety that characterises the different stages in

to be more particularly bound to castration anxiety in so far as it

altogether coterminous, though not synonymous, term, namely the

THE THREE FORMS OF THE

If harmony in this realm were not a problematic thing, there would

I remind you that what is commonly forgotten in regard to the

identification with the analyst's ego. To show the extreme deviation

comparison, let's say that it's a matter of demonstrating something

element, because that would involve taking a step that we haven't

The imaginary relationship, whichever it may be, is moulded on

ship, the same that earlier I described as that of reciprocations, we

We arrive at this question both along the path of the expanded

analytic experience, a major object around which the entire dialectic

itself any possibility of effect, of Wj.rkw#g. It's the mechanism as a

us in this instance from the moment it begins to accumulate, and

We can never do without a notion of the lack of object as a central

castrating of an imaginary object. It was this commonality, between

that permits of explaining and appreciating in a very clear and

The body image and its signifier

Yesterday evening you heard an expose by Madame Dolto on

of interest to us in the notion of the object. This doesn't mean that

occasion. This is quite certainly something that can be situated at

Since here it's a matter of teaching, and since there is nothing

Wj.rk/j.cAkc!./, as the efficacy of the system as a whole, in this instance

signifying, this is obviously something that on no account is to be

there in the real, the uncomprehended signifier. It's already there,

starting point that Freud offers us when he performs this reconstruc-

out by saying that if the signifier functions, then it is against the

The central object relation, the one that is dynamically creative, is

pregenital relation, which is situated in the emergence of experi-

umpteen others, and we shall see what we can understand in it. We

Frustration placed at the centre of the mother4hild relation

agent lack of object object

I reminded you of what presents at the outset in what is given -