Jacques Lacau: Desire and Its Interpretation
Jacques Lacau: Desire and Its Interpretation
Jacques Lacau: Desire and Its Interpretation
polity
First published in French as Le Semii;iaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VI Le desir
et son interpretation (1958-1959) ©Editions de La Martiniere et Le Champ
Freudien, 2013
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Abbreviations Vll
Bibliographical Note Vlll
Figures, Tables, and Illustrations ix
INTRODUCTION
ON DESIRE IN DREAMS
III The Dream about the Dead Father: "He did not
know he was dead" 43
IV Little Anna's Dream 60
v The Dream about the Dead Father: "As he wished" 78
VI Introducing the Object of Desire 95
VII Desire's Phallic Mediation 111
APPENDIX
Index 519
Abbreviations
This year we are going to talk about desire and its interpretation.
A psychoanalysis is a therapeutic process, as people are wont to
say. Let us say that it is a treatment, a psychical treatment.
This treatment concerns different levels ofthe psyche, first and fore
most what I will call marginal or residual phenomena, such as dreams,
slips ofthe tongue, and witticisms. These were the first scientific objects
ofpsychoanalytic experience and the ones I emphasized last year.
Examining the curative aspect of this treatment, we find that it
also concerns symptoms, broadly speaking, insofar as they manifest
themselves in subjects in the guise of inhibitions. The latter form
symptoms and are sustained by symptoms.
Lastly, it is a treatment that modifies structures - namely, those
that are known as neuroses or neuropsychoses - which Freud at first
characterized as "neuropsychoses of defense."
In what way does psychoanalysis intervene so as to deal at various
levels with these different phenomenal realities? It intervenes insofar
as they involve desire.
The phenomena that I called residual or marginal were initially
apprehended by Freud, in the symptoms that we see described from
one end of his work to the other, under the heading of desire and as
significant as regards desire.
Similarly, anxiety [angoisse], inasmuch as we consider it to be key
to the determination of symptoms, arises only insofar as some activ-
ity that enters into the play of symptoms becomes eroticized- or, to 12
put it better, is taken up in the mechanism of desire.
4 Introduction
Finally, what does the very term "defense" mean when it is used
regarding the neuropsychoses? What is there a defense against, if it
is not desire itself?
To conclude this introduction, it will suffice to indicate that
libido, a notion that lies at the heart of psychoanalytic theory, is
nothing but the psychical energy of desire.
I previously indicated in passing - recall my metaphor of the
factory - that in order for the notion of energy to hold up, certain
conjunctions of the symbolic with the real are necessary. I cannot,
however, go into this specific point right now.
Analytic theory is thus thoroughly based on the notion of libido
- that is, on the energy of desire.
Yet, as we have been seeing for some time now, analytic theory is
moving ever further in a different direction.
Those who champion this new orientation very consciously
indicate its originality, at least those among them who are most
conscious of what they are doing. Fairbairn, who is the most typical
representative of this trend, has written on several occasions -
because he never stops writing - and, specifically, in a collection
entitled Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, that modern psy
choanalytic theory has changed its axis somewhat compared to the
one Freud initially gave it, inasmuch as it no longer considers libido
to be "pleasure-seeking"* but, rather, to be "object-seeking."*
I have frequently discussed this trend, which views libido as corre
lated with an object that is supposed to be in some sense predestined
for it. I have already shown you its impact on psychoanalytic theory
and technique in a thousand ways. I believe that I have managed on
several occasions to designate the deviations from analytic practice
that this trend entails, several of which might well be characterized
as dangerous.
In order for us to broach the problem we will be focusing on this
year, I wish to point out the importance of simply reintroducing the
13 word "desire" into our vocabulary, a word that is manifestly veiled
in all of current psychoanalytic experience. By reintroducing it, we
produce a feeling, not of revitalization, but of disorientation. I mean
that, if instead of speaking about "libido" or the "genital object," we
speak about "genital desire," it may seem harder to take for granted
that the development of this desire automatically implies the pos
sibility of opening oneself up to love, or the possibility of a total
actualization of love. The latter seems to have become a doctrinal
Constructing the Graph 5
It is, after all, in his work that we read, at least with a rather excep
tional stress, a formulation like the following: "Desire is the very
essence of man." So as not to separate the beginning of his formula
tion from what follows, I will add: "inasmuch as it is understood to
be based on one of his inclinations, understood as determined and
dominated by one of his inclinations to do something."
We could already spell out in detail what in this formulation
17 remains unrevealed, as it were. I say "unrevealed" because, of
course, one cannot translate Spinoza using Freud. But I am men
tioning it here as a quite singular bit of evidence. I no doubt have
a greater fondness for Spinoza's work than others do, owing to the
fact that I spent a lot of time reading Spinoza a very long time ago.
Yet I do not believe that this is the reason why, in rereading his work
on the basis of my own experience, it seems to me that someone
who is involved in Freudian practice can feel quite at home reading
texts like De Servitute Humana, written by someone for whom all of
human reality is structured and organized on the basis of the attrib
utes of divine substance. But let us leave this introductory remark
aside as well for the time being, with the understanding that we will
return to it.
I would like to give you a far more accessible example, with
which I will conclude my philosophical references to our topic. I
selected it at the most accessible level, or even the most common
you can find. Open the dictionary by the late, charming Lalande, his
Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie ["Technical and
Critical Dictionary of Philosophy" (Paris: PUP, 1960)]. Attempts to
establish such dictionaries are extremely perilous and yet simultane
ously fruitful, language being crucial to every problem we examine.
You can be sure that in putting together a dictionary, you will come
up with something suggestive. Here we find the following: "Desire:
Begehren, Begehrung. " It is worth recalling what desire means in
German philosophy; it is:
These reminders are extremely useful, except for the fact that, in
an article designed to define desire, there are but two lines to situate
Constructing the Graph 9
'
'
�
I
s
I
I
I
I
LI
I Id
dotted line intersects the line that represents the signifying chain
twice, first on the right and then on the left [d'avant en arriere].
The first intersection [the one on the right] takes place at the syn
chronic level, that of the simultaneous existence of signifiers. Point
C is what I call the point at which the dotted line intersects the code.
In other words, we have here the play of the signifier, something
akin to a chatterbox. The child addresses a subject whom he knows
to be a speaking subject, whom he has seen speaking, and who has
talked his ear off since the beginning of his awakening to the light of
day. Very early on, the subject must learn that, in order for his needs
to be satisfied, their manifestations have to stoop to get through this
doorway or narrow passageway.
M, the second point of intersection, is the one where the message
is produced. It is always through the retroactive play of a series of
signifiers that signification is, in fact, affirmed and becomes precise.
It is only afterward that the message takes form, on the basis of the
signifier or code that precedes it. Conversely, the message, as it is
being formulated, constantly gets ahead of the code, placing a bet
on the future [tire une traite].
I have already told you what results from the intentional process 23
that runs from the id to capital I.
What is at its origin presents itself in the f orm of the blossoming
of need, or of "disposition" [or: predisposition, tendance], as psy
chologists say. This is represented in my schema at the level of the
id. Here there is no return pathway that closes the circle, for the id
is caught up in language, but it does not know what it is; it is not
reflected on the basis of this innocent approach to language in which
the subject initially turns himself into discourse.
The fact that the subject has relations with other speaking sub
jects results in the following, even when this is only just barely
apprehended by him: what I have called the first or primal identifi
cation, I, occurs at the end of the intentional chain.
This is the first realization of an ideal about which one cannot
even say at this point in the schema that it involves an ego-ideal, but
simply that the subject receives the first stamp [seing] or signum of its
relationship with the Other here.
24
,,
<f
D'
I
I
I
I �
Figure 1.2: The second level
When I say that he knows how to speak, I mean that, at the second
level of the schema, there is something that goes beyond being in the
grip of language. There is a relationship here with the Other, strictly
speaking, inasmuch as there is an appeal to the Other as presence,
presence against a background of absence. This is the moment of the
fort-da that so impressed Freud in 1 9 1 5, as we can determine, when
he had been called in to see one of his grandsons, the one who would
later go on to become a psychoanalyst. I am speaking of the child
whom he observed.
At the first level, what the chain of discourse articulates as exist
ing beyond the subject imposes its form on the subject, whether he
likes it or not. We have here, as it were, an innocent apprehension
by the subject of linguistic form. But beyond this articulation and
Constructing the Graph 15
<f
D'
I
I
I
L1
I A
Figure 1.3: The second level completed by "Che vuoi?"
s
s
This [Figure 1 .4] represents the third stage [etape], form, or phase
of the schema.
Here is what constitutes it. Finding himself in the primitive pres
ence of the Other's desire as obscure and opaque, the subject has no
recourse, he is hiljlos. Hiljlosigkeit, to use Freud's term, is known
in French as the subject's "distress." It is the foundation of what,
in psychoanalysis, has been explored, experienced, and qualified as
"trauma."
What Freud taught us, at the end of the journey that allowed 28
him to finally situate the experience of anxiety in its true place, is
that anxiety has nothing to do with the in some sense diffuse, or so
it seems to me, nature of what people call the existential experience
of anxiety.
In philosophy, people have gone so far as to say that anxiety
confronts us with nothingness. Such formulations are assuredly
justifiable from a certain vantage point. Nevertheless, you should be
aware that, on this topic, Freud teaches us something that is positive
and clearly formulated. He views anxiety as something that is thor
oughly situated in a theory of communication, when he says that
anxiety is a signal. Assuming that desire must be produced in the
18 Introduction
.,
<t' S'
D'
($0a)
'
�
s
I
Figure 1.4: The third stage [etape]
I realize full well that I am not leading you along an easy path in our
first class of the year. But if I did not begin by laying out our main
terms immediately, if I confined myself to proceeding slowly, step-
31 by-step, in order to suggest to you the need for such and such a term,
what could I accomplish?
If I did not immediately provide you with what I call the graph
[of desire], I would have to provide you with it little by little as I did
last year, and this would make it all the more obscure. This is why I
decided to begin with it directly. Which is not to say that, by doing
so, I have made your task easier.
To ease your task, I would now like to give you a little illustration,
taken from the simplest level, since what is involved are the relations
between the subject and the signifier. The least one can expect, and
the first thing one can expect, from a schema is to see what purpose
it can serve with respect to commutation.
I recalled an anecdote I had once read in Darwin's book, The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which, I must say,
amused me quite a bit. Darwin recounts that at a soiree he heard a man
named Sydney Smith, who was, I assume, a high-society Englishman
of Darwin's time, come out quite placidly with the following sen
tence: "I hear that dear old Lady Cork has been overlooked."*
Etymologically speaking, "to be overlooked"* means that one
has not been noticed, that one has been neglected or forgotten - by
an overseer, for example. Literally, someone's eye passed over you.
The verb "to overlook"* is commonly used in English, but there is
no corresponding expression in French. This is why languages are
so useful and so harmful at the same time; they allow you to avoid
making an effort, to avoid carrying out in French the substitution
of signifiers thanks to which we might manage to target a certain
signified; for we would have to change the entire context in order to
obtain the same effect.
Constructing the Graph 21
Darwin marvels at the fact that the quip was perfectly clear to
everyone present. In fact, no one there had the slightest doubt that it
meant that the Devil had overlooked the dear old lady and had for
gotten to carry her off to the tomb, which seems to have been at that
time, in the minds of his audience, her natural place, even the place
they wished she would occupy. Darwin raises a question about this
but leaves the question unanswered. "What did Sydney Smith do in
order to have this effect?" he asks himself more or less, and opines, 32
"I truly can't say."
We should appreciate the fact that he highlights, in an especially
significant and exemplary way, that he experienced his own limits in
broaching this question. Since Darwin had broached the problem of
the emotions in a certain way, he could have said that the expression
of the emotions was nevertheless involved here because the subject
did not manifest any emotion - because he said it "placidly"* - but
that would perhaps have been taking things a bit far. In any case,
Darwin does not say that. He was truly astonished by the fact he
relates, and we must take him literally, because, as always when we
study a case, we must not reduce it by rendering it vague. Everyone
understood that the guy was talking about the Devil, Darwin says,
whereas the Devil was nowhere to be found in what he said. And
this is what is interesting: the fact that Darwin tells us that the
Devil's shudder was felt by all those assembled there.
Let us now try to understand this a bit. I will not dwell on
Darwin's intellectual limitations - we will inevitably come to them,
but not right away. What is clear is that there is, right from the
outset, something along the lines of knowledge here, and this is what
is striking. There is no need to posit the principle of metaphorical
effects - that is, the substitution of one signifier for another - nor to
require Darwin to have had some inkling of it, to immediately realize
that the effect of Smith's statement stemmed first and foremost from
the fact that he did not say what was expected.
A sentence that begins with "Lady Cork" should usually end with
"ill."* [We would usually expect to hear something like,] "I hear she
is not well." It seems, in fact, that everyone was expecting news con
cerning the old lady's health, for, when people talk about old ladies,
it is always their health that is foremost in their minds at the outset.
A substitution thus took place here: the expected news was replaced
by something else, which was, in certain ways, irreverent. Smith did
not say that she was on death's doorstep, nor did he say that she was
quite well; he said that she had been forgotten.
What then came into play to produce this metaphorical effect?
If the word "overlooked"* had been expected, there would have
been no such effect. It is inasmuch as it was not expected, but was 33
22 Introduction
rather put in the place of another signifier, that a new signified was
produced. It was neither along the lines of what was expected, nor of
what was unexpected. This unexpected thing was not characterized
as unexpected, but it was something original that had to be created
in the minds of all of those present in accordance with their own
ways of thinking. In any case, a new signified arose from something
that made it such that, for example, Sydney Smith came across in
his circle as a witty man - in other words, as someone who did not
express himself in cliches.
But why the Devil? It will help us a great deal to look at our little
schema. If we create schemas, it is in order to use them. We could
arrive at the same result without it, but the schema guides us and
shows us what is really [ree� happening. What is rendered present
here is, strictly speaking, a fantasy.
And by what mechanisms? It is here that the schema allows us
to go further than the naive notion, I would say, that things are
designed to express something that wants to be communicated, an
emotion, as they say, as if emotions did not pose in and of them
selves plenty of other problems - namely, what they are, assuming
they do not already need to be communicated.
Our speaker was perfectly placid, we are told. In other words, he
presented himself in some sense in a pure state, the presence of his
speech being a pure metonymic effect, I mean his speech qua speech
in the continuity of speech. And in this continuity he conjured up
the following: the presence of death insofar as a subject can or
cannot escape it.
Stated differently, he conjured up the presence of something that
is closely tied to the coming into the world of the signifier itself. In
effect, if there is a dimension in which death (or the fact that there
is no longer any death) can be both directly conjured up and at the
same time veiled (but is, in any case, incarnated), in which death
can become immanent in an act, it is certainly that of signifying
articulation.
It is clear that this subject who spoke so easily of death did not
wish Lady Cork especially well. But, on the other hand, the perfect
placidity with which he spoke of her implies that, in this regard, he
had dominated his desire, insofar as his desire could express itself as
34 in Volpone where we find the lovely formulation, "Die, and stink"!
Sydney Smith did not say that; he simply and serenely articulated
that the fate that awaits each of us in tum had been forgotten for
a moment. But this was not the Devil, if I may put it thus, it was
death, and it would come one day or another. Simultaneously,
this character presented himself as someone who was not afraid of
comparing himself with the lady about whom he was speaking, not
Constructing the Graph 23
afraid to place himself at the same level, subject to the same flaw,
and thus to the same final equalization by the absolute master [i.e.,
death] that he rendered present to mind here.
In other words, in his full command of the language, he revealed
himself as having a sort of familiarity with what is veiled in lan
guage. This suggests something on which I want to end class today,
which was missing in everything I said in my discussion of the three
stages, and it will complete the mainspring of what I wanted to
formulate for you.
In the first schema, we have the innocent image of the subject.
He is unconscious of course, but it is an unconsciousness that is
just waiting to be [or: is itching to be, ne demande qu'a] transformed
into knowledge. Let us not forget that the Latin term scire is present
in "unconsciousness" [inconscience], and that even in French avoir
conscience [to be aware] implies the notion of knowledge.
In the next two stages, we have, as I told you, a far more conscious
use of knowledge; the subject knows how to speak and he speaks;
this is what he does when he calls on the Other. It is nevertheless
here that we find the originality of the field that Freud discovered,
which he calls the unconscious.
There is, in fact, something in this Other that always places the
subject at a certain distance from his being, and which makes it such
that he can never join up with that being, can never reach it except
in "the metonymy of being" in the subject that is known as desire.
Why is that? Because at the level at which the subject is himself
caught up in speech, and thereby in a relationship with the Other as
the locus of speech, there is a signifier that is always missing. Why?
Because it is the signifier that is specifically assigned to the relation
ship between the subject and the signifier [or: signifying system, le
signifiant]. This signifier has a name; it is the phallus.
Desire is the metonymy of being in the subject; the phallus is the
metonymy of the subject in being. We will come back to this. The
phallus is the signifying element that is subtracted from the chain of
speech, insofar as speech is involved in any and every relationship 35
with the Other. This is the ultimate principle which is such that the
subject, inasmuch as he is caught up in speech, falls under the sway
of what has been conceptualized under the heading of the "castra-
tion complex," with all its clinical consequences.
What is suggested by any type of usage - I would not say pure,
but perhaps rather impure - of "the tribe's words"? Every type of
metaphorical inauguration, assuming it is audacious, defies what
language always veils. What it always veils is, in the final analysis,
death. This always tends to bring out the enigmatic figure of the
missing signifier: the phallus. It is the phallus that appears here, and
24 Introduction
FURTHER EXPLANATION
I will first lay out the limits of what I would like to do in class today.
I will thus enunciate what I mean to show you by taking up the
example of the interpretation of a dream, as well as the use of what
we have, for some time now, been conventionally calling the graph
[of desire].
As I do not wish to discuss things in a way that goes over your
heads, if I dare express myself thus, I would like it if a certain
communication, as they say, could be established through this dis
cussion. I did not fail to receive echoes of the difficulties that some
of you, even many of you, had last time when faced with the repo
sitioning of this graph, even though the graph is far from being new
to all of you.
We constructed this graph together last year, and perfected it
progressively. You watched it come together to answer the needs of
a certain formulation centered around what I called "unconscious
formations." The fact that its usage is not yet unequivocal to you,
as some have remarked, is not surprising, since a part of what I shall
have to explain this year about desire will show you its utility and
will simultaneously teach you how to use it.
Our first order of business is thus to understand it. This is pre
cisely what seems to have been difficult for some here, to different
degrees, perhaps less than they let on. I would like you to note that
the term "understanding" [comprehension] I assure you that I
-
39 1
himself?" It is around this very question that the two levels can be
differentiated.
As this seems to have escaped some of you, I will tell you imme
diately that we must view the two levels as functioning at the same
time in even the slightest speech act. And you will see what I mean
by "speech act" [acte de parole] and how far I take this term.
What I will tell you is something that I had the opportunity
to formulate for one of you to whom I gave a bit of additional
explanation after the last class. I am mentioning this because my
interlocutor indicated that it included something he had not per
ceived at the time.
Namely, how to think about the processes that occur in the
subject insofar as the signifier is involved in his activity. The pro
cesses in question begin simultaneously at four different points: ll,
A, D, and X. These points are, respectively- and you will see what
underpins my expose today- the subject's intention, the subject qua
speaking I, the act of demanding, and X, which we will give a certain
name later and which I will leave unspecified for the time being.
The processes are thus simultaneous in the four trajectories,
n�s. ll�I. A�s(A), and the trajectory of the upper line [D'�s·
"' I
<I I
I I
I
S'
D' I I
I I
- - -.f
- - �
, .,.. .,. ... , I
'' I
1 "'
'
�
s
I
Figure 2. 1: The simultaneity of the four trajectories
28 Introduction
have said, but of many other things - establish himself and assert
himself as an ego? This is the problem at hand. Now, putting a need
43 into play in demand is already something that assuredly simplifies
the subject with respect to the more or less chaotic and random
interferences of the different needs among themselves.
If, nevertheless, the first part of the line f),.�I, namely, the part up
until s(A), appears in a fragmented form, it is because it represents
the retroactive effect of the form of discourse's discrete elements on
this shifting [mouvance]; the latter is both continuous and discon
tinuous, and assuredly confused, and we must assume it to be that
of the primitive manifestation of needs [or: of (pre)disposition, de
la tendance]. Discursivity is retroactively imposed on need, which
is thereby subjected to its form. This is why the line appears in a
fragmented form shy, not of the code, but of the message.
What happens beyond the message [s(A)]? I have underscored it
at other times, so I can cover it quickly here. It is the following: the
subject identifies with the Other to whom his demand is addressed
[l'Autre de la demande], insofar as this Other is omnipotent. I do not
think that I need to go back over the topic of omnipotence, which is
sometimes attributed by psychoanalysts to thought and sometimes
to speech. The fact remains that we see here, as I have often pointed
out, how wrongheaded it is to attribute omnipotence to the subject;
we can see here the depreciative stance that psychologists get into
the habit of adopting, inasmuch as they are always more or less
pedantic, in the original sense of the term. For the omnipotence in
question here is that of the Other, insofar as the Other quite simply
has the sum total of signifiers at his disposal.
To show you that by articulating things in this way we are not
moving away from concrete experience, I will expressly point them
out in development, and more precisely in language acquisition,
which lies at the heart of mother-child relations.
Capital I - at which the segment that begins from s(A), the signi
fied of A, arrives - is what primary identification is based on. Edward
Glover conceptualized this as the first nucleus of the formation of
Further Explanation 31
At the second level of the graph, the subject is something other than
a subject who passes through the defiles of signifying articulation. It
is the subject who begins to speak- that is, the subject qua I.
I must, nevertheless, stop before providing a specific formulation
in order to add an essential proviso. After all, I would not be dwell
ing on this /, for it is not our concern today, if I had not alluded, in
previous work, to the I in "I am thinking, therefore I am." This is
merely a parenthetical remark.
All the difficulties that have arisen regarding the / have concerned
this "I am thinking, therefore I am." But this is said to be point
less, because the I was unjustifiably introduced into what is after all
merely a cogitatum - that is, an "it [s::a] is thinking." Why then would
I be I in that?
I believe that all the difficulties that have been pointed out here
stem from a failure to distinguish between two subjects in the way
that I first formulated the distinction between them. In the experi-
ence that philosophy invites us to consider, people refer, more or 45
less wrongly, to the fact that the subject is faced with an object, an
32 Introduction
There is also an I that underlies the sentence "You are the one
who will follow me" [Tu es celui qui me suivras] which I emphasized
in that Seminar. It is inscribed, with the whole problem of a certain
future tense, in vocatives, strictly speaking, vocatives of vocation.
For those who were not here at that time, let me recall the difference
we find in French - it is a subtlety that not every language allows us
to bring out - between Tu es celui qui me suivras and Tu es celui qui
me suivra without an s [both mean "You are the one who will follow
me"). In this case, the difference in the performative power of the
"you" is in fact an actual difference of the I insofar as it is involved
in this act of speaking. We see clearly here that the subject always
receives his own message in an inverted form - namely, that it is the
I that must own itself here via the form it gives to the "you."
This discourse - in other words, the discourse that is formulated
at the second level - is a discourse with which we have always been
familiar. Every discourse is the Other's discourse, even when it is the
subject who speaks it. In this regard, the distinction between the two
levels is merely arbitrary.
Nevertheless, what we find at the second level is fundamentally
a call for being [un appel de l'etre], which is made with more or less
force. It always more or less contains a "So be it!" ["Soit!"], and
we have here yet another of the marvelous homophonic equivoca
tions for which French allows. In other words, it contains a "Fiat"
which is the source and root of what, in need, comes to be inscribed
for speaking beings in the register of wanting [vouloir]. Or, stated
otherwise, it is the root of the I insofar as the latter splits into the
two terms that we are examining here: the one in the imperative
"Rise and walk" and the other in the erection by the subject of his
own /.
You can now see at what level the question that I articulated last 47
time in the form " Che vuoi?" is situated. " Che vuoi?" is, as it were,
the Other's response to the subject's act of speaking. This question
responds - indeed, I would say that questions always respond. This
response prior to the question responds to the question - that is,
to the redoubtable question mark whose very form in my schema
articulates the act of speaking.
The act of speaking goes much further than the speech of the
subject alone, since his whole life is taken up in acts of speaking.
His life as such - namely, all his actions - are symbolic actions if
only because they are recorded, because they are subject to record
ing, and because they are often actions designed to be taken note
of. Like everything that happens before the examining magistrate,
everything the subject does can be held against him. All his actions
are imposed upon him in a language context, and his very gestures
34 Introduction
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
- - - ...rc - - �d
I
'
�
s
You undoubtedly can now guess at the riches that stem from the
fact that an imaginary relationship is inscribed in the field of the
determinant gap between the two discourses, an imaginary relation
ship that homologically reproduces the relationship with the other
involved in the game of bearing [between m and i(a)].
Further Explanation 37
God only knows - if I can bring God into the picture, and why
not? - what desire stirs up in one. It is something that in reality
mobilizes and orients something quite different in one's personality
than that toward which, conventionally speaking, one's precise goal
seems to be oriented. To refer to an infinitely less poetic experience
perhaps, but it seems that one need not be an analyst to mention it,
we cannot misrecognize how quickly and front and center the struc
ture of fantasy emerges in connection with the slightest distortion of
the personality, as they say, or of images.
The subject's involvement in desire always brings out this struc
ture, and it is rightfully predominant. To tell someone, "I desire
you," is to tell him, "I include you in my fundamental fantasy." But
experience does not always show us this, except in the case of those
nice, instructive little perverts, little and big.
Since I have decided this year not to go beyond a certain time
limit during which I ask you to listen to me here, and I still hope
to hold myself to that, I will leave it there, at a point that falls far
short of where I thought I would stop today, and put an end to your
travails for the time being.
I will conclude by designating the key or decisive point in fantasy 54
where desire must be interpreted, assuming the term "desire" has a
different meaning than that of the wish in a dream.
This point is located here on the graph. You might say that it
is part of the dotted circle that traces out a type of little tail at
the second level. I would simply like to say, in order to whet your
appetite a bit, that elements spin around this dotted circuit. It is
constructed in this way because, once it is ftleled [or: powered up,
alimente] by the beginning, it goes around inside indefinitely. What
are these elements? They are the ones that have been repressed. In
other words, it is the locus of the unconscious as such, as located
on the graph. This and this alone is what Freud spoke about
up until 1 9 1 5, when he wrote two articles that are entitled "The
Unconscious" and "Repression."
I will pick it up there the next time, to tell you to what extent
Freud articulated the very substance of what I am trying to
convey to you regarding the signifier. What Freud himself clearly
and unambiguously formulated is that the only thing that can be
repressed are signifying elements. This is found in Freud's work.
The only thing missing there is the word "signifier." I will show you,
by re-examining the article on the unconscious, that only signifiers
can be repressed.
On the graph you see the two systems that are juxtaposed.
The dotted system, as I have said, is the locus of the unconscious,
the one where the repressed goes around and around until it makes
40 Introduction
itself felt - in other words, until some part of the message at the
level of being's discourse [discours de l'etre] upsets the message at
the level of demand, which is the whole problem of psychoanalytic
symptoms.
There is another dotted system. It is the one that paves the way
for what I call the little landing - namely, the discovery of manifes
tations [/'avatar]. While we were already having so much trouble
getting used to the first system [the first topography: conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious], Freud made the fatal kind deed
[bienfait] of taking the next step himself before his death by proffer
ing the second topography [id, ego, and superego], which is the little
landing I mentioned. He discovered the register of the other system.
In other words, Freud asked himself what happens at the level of
the prediscursive subject as a function of the fact that the subject
who speaks does not know what he is doing when he speaks - that is,
55 as a function of the unconscious that Freud truly discovered. Let us
say, if you will, to schematize things, that Freud sought to figure out
at what level the ego is constituted with regard to the original place
from which it speaks, and at what moment it is constituted with
respect to an aim which is that of the endpoint of the process at I.
Freud also discovered a primitive discourse there, which is both
purely imposed and marked by a fundamental arbitrariness, which
continues to speak. It is the superego.
Nevertheless, he also left something undone. He left us something
to discover and articulate, which completes his second topography
and which allows us to resituate it in and restore it to the whole
of his discovery. It is the fundamentally metaphorical function of
language.
November 19, 1958
ON DESIRE IN DREAMS
III 59
Did some of you follow my advice and reread the two articles by
Freud that came out in 1 9 1 5?
If you consult, for example, his article on the unconscious
The Dream about the Dead Father 49
[ Unbewusste], the part that is most relevant to our topic, you will
observe that what is at work [in the unconscious] is nothing other
than signifying elements. When I speak here about the signifier,
those who understand absolutely nothing unremittingly repeat that
I am espousing an intellectualist theory, to which they naturally
oppose affective life and dynamics. I am far from contesting the
existence of the latter, since it is precisely in order to explain them 66
clearly that I am mentioning Freud's article on the Unbewusste. We
will thus turn to a consideration of unconscious feelings, inasmuch
as Freud mentions them.
In the third part of his article, Freud explains very clearly that the
only thing that can, strictly speaking, be repressed is what he calls
the Vorstellungsrepriisentanz. The German here means "representa
tive of the representation. " Of what? Of drive impulses, which he
calls Triebregungen here, which we can even refer to more exactly as
the units [unite] of drive motion.
Freud's text leaves absolutely no ambiguity on this score: we
cannot consider the Triebregungen to be unconscious, nor can we
consider them to be conscious. What does this mean? It means that
what we call Triebregung must be taken as an objective concept. It is
an objective unit because we look at it and it is neither conscious nor
unconscious; it simply is what it is - namely, an isolated fragment of
reality that we conceptualize as having its own active impact.
It is thus, in my view, all the more remarkable that what rep
resents the Triebregung - namely, the "representative of (the)
representation," this is the exact value of the German term, and it
is the sole representative of the drive (Trieb) - is said by Freud to
belong to the unconscious. Now, the latter implies the exact term
that I wrote on the board earlier with a question mark next to it -
namely, an unconscious subject.
You, of course, can already see not where I am heading with this,
but where we will necessarily wind up. Whereas Freud, at his time,
was at the stage at which things could be said in the form of scientific
discourse, you must clearly sense that this Vorstellungsrepriisentanz
is strictly equivalent to the notion of the signifier, to the term
"signifier. "
I am merely announcing this to you, even if its demonstration
strikes me as already quite advanced; if not, what was the point of
everything I said to you earlier today? I will, naturally, demonstrate
it to you more thoroughly, ever more thoroughly. The signifier is
precisely what is at work here.
Freud, on the other hand, articulates in the most unmistakable
way that none of what we connote with the terms sensation, feeling,
and affect, which he lumps together, can be called unconscious
50 On Desire in Dreams
His father was alive once more and was talking with him in his
usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had
really died, only without knowing it. [SE XII, p. 225]
How does Freud broach things? We will stick to the level of his
text:
This leads us to give its full weight to the way in which Freud
approaches the dream: via the signifier. What Freud inserts into the
text, and what he lays out for us as allowing us to understand the
dream, as delivering up the meaning of the text, are clausulae. I will
try to articulate what they are at the linguistic level.
Please pay attention to what I am saying here. I am not saying
that this is the interpretation. It may in fact be the interpreta
tion, but I am not yet saying so. I am freezing the frame here at a
moment at which a certain signifier is designated as being produced
by the fact that it is missing. It is by resituating it in the context of
72 the dream that we can immediately accede to what we are given to
understand to be the meaning of the dream.
We find ourselves faced with a typical case here, a case in which
one's self-reproach concerning a loved one leads back to the infantile
signification of a death wish. The term transference, Ubertragung, is
used here by Freud in the way he first used it in The Interpretation of
Dreams to designate the carryover of an early situation - of an early
death wish, in this instance - into a current situation. A wish that
is analogical, homologous, parallel, or in any way similar is intro
duced in order to revive the archaic wish in question.
Freud thus approaches the problem via the signifier. It is on that
basis that we can try to elaborate what interpretation means. But let
us begin by settling a score with the type ofinterpretation we set aside,
which refers to "wishful thinking."* One remark will suffice here.
This English term cannot be translated by pensee desireuse or
pensee desirante for a very simple reason. It has a meaning, of
course, but people use it in analysis in a context in which that
meaning is not valid. Whenever you encounter the term, in order
to put the pertinence of its usage to the test, you need but make
the following distinction. It must not signify "take one's desires for
realities," as people say nowadays [in French] - that is the meaning
The Dream about the Dead Father 55
of thought insofar as it slip slides and gives way - but rather "take
one's dream for reality." This in and of itself makes it altogether
inapplicable to the interpretation of dreams, to this type of compre
hension of dreams. In the case of dreams, it simply means that we
dream because we dream. An interpretation at this level is in no wise
applicable at any moment to dreams.
We must thus turn to the procedure known as the addition of
signifiers.
If we follow Freud here, this procedure assumes that there had
been a prior subtraction of a signifier - "subtraction" is the exact
meaning of the term that Freud uses to designate the operation of
repression in its pure form, in its unterdruckt effect, I would say. It
is here that we find ourselves brought up short by something that
appears to be an objection and an obstacle.
If we had not decided in advance to find everything in Freud's 73
work wonderful - in other words, if we had not decided. in advance
to believe we believe, as Prevert puts it - we would stop to consider
the following: that the pure and simple restoring of the two clausu-
lae, "nach seinem Wunsch" and "daft er [der Traumer] es wunschte"
- that is, that the son wished for his father's death - provides
nothing, strictly speaking, as regards what Freud himself designates
as the final goal of interpretation, namely, the reconstruction of the
unconscious desire in the dream.
What are we actually formulating with these additions? Nothing
but what the subject already knew perfectly well. During his father's
extremely painful illness, the subject indeed wished for his father's
death as a solution and end to his torments. Naturally, he did every
thing possible to hide this desire or wish from his father, but it was
totally accessible to the son in this context, in his recent life experi
ence. We need not even speak about it being preconscious in this
regard - it was a conscious memory that was part and parcel of the
continuous text of his consciousness.
It is thus the dream that subtracts from its text an element that is
not at all hidden from the subject's conscious mind. And it is thus
the phenomenon of subtraction that takes on a positive value here,
as it were. I mean that this is the problem of repression. What
is repressed here is indubitably a Vorstellungsreprasentanz, one that
is even quite t)'pical.
If something deserves to be termed a Vorstellungsreprasentanz,
it is certainly something that is, in and of itself, I would say, a
form that is devoid of meaning. Taken all by itself, isolated [from
its context], "as he wished'? means nothing. It means "in conse
quence of the wish mentioned earlier." The meaning depends on the
sentence that came before it.
56 On Desire in Dreams
trajectories of the chains that I call the "chain of the subject" and the
"signifying chain," respectively, such as they are posited, repeated,
and insistently presented to you in the form of our graph of desire.
You will see what this graph can do for us, and that there is no
possible functioning of discourse except on the basis of structures
in which the topological position of elements and of their relations
are inscribed. You will also see that the notion of these structures
alone allows us to give meaning to the analysis of this dream. In
other words, up to a certain point, we can say that the two clausulae
in question are truly the content of the repressed - namely, the Real
verdriingt, as Freud puts it, what is really repressed.
But that is not enough. We must also distinguish how and why
the dream uses these elements. They are undoubtedly repressed, but
at the level of the dream they are not repressed. Whereas the earlier
immediately lived experience brought them into play as such, in the
dream, far from being repressed, they are elided as clausulae. Why?
In order to produce what sort of effect? It is not easy to say. In short,
it is a signification that is produced, there is no doubt about that;
but we will shall see that the elision of the same wish can have effects
that are altogether different in different structures.
To pique and stimulate your curiosity a bit, I would simply like
to observe that there is perhaps a relationship between the elision
of the clausula "as he wished," and what we see in other contexts,
which are not dream contexts - in psychosis, for example, where
we sometimes observe a misrecognition of death, misrecognition
by the subject of his own death. At the formal level, it suffices that
the words "he did not know it" or "he wanted to know nothing
about it" be linked otherwise with "he is dead" for the one to lead
to the other, unless we immediately distinguish the clinical con
texts, as Verwerfung [foreclosure] is distinguished from Verneinung
[negation] .
77 In psychosis this articulation can lead to feelings of being invaded
or penetrated, or to fertile moments in which the subject thinks that
he in fact has across from him something far closer still to a dream
image than we might expect - namely, someone who is dead. The
subject lives with a dead man, but a dead man who quite simply does
not know that he is dead.
Perhaps we can go so far as to recognize a similar phenomenon
in normal life, the kind we experience every day. Perhaps it happens
to us more often than we think to have in our presence someone
who appears to behave satisfactorily, socially speaking, but who -
in terms of his being of interest to us, in terms of what allows us to
get along with a human being - is truly dead, and has been for some
time, dead and mummified, who is just waiting for the pendulum
The Dream about the Dead Father 59
to swing - for I know not what, for [the last straw that reveals he is
mere] semblance - to be reduced to the sort of dust that must spell
his demise. I know more than one of them. Now that I have brought
this to your attention, look around among those you know.
Being half-dead is perhaps far more prevalent than we think in
relations between subjects. Isn't it true that the part of every living
being that is half-dead does not leave us a perfectly clear conscience?
Perhaps a large part of our behavior with our fellow men sets off in
us an incidental reaction that is always present and essential, which
is denoted by the precautions we must take in order not to comment
to the half-dead that where he is, where he is in the process of talking
to us, he is half-prey to death.
Perhaps this is something that we must take into account, whose
importance we must weigh, when we take it upon ourselves to listen
to the speech, revelations, and free discourse of people undergoing
analysis. Undertaking something so audacious with analysands
cannot fail to have an impact upon ourselves, which is precisely
what we defend against most strongly. [We defend against] what
there is in us that is most fictitious and most repeated - namely,
what is half-dead in us, too.
At the point at which we have arrived at the end of today's class,
I have raised more questions than I have answered.
If this dream teaches us something about the relations between 78
the subject and desire, it is because it has a value that should not
surprise us given its protagonists - namely, a father, a son, death
incarnate, and, as you will see, a relationship to desire.
It is thus no accident that I chose this example and that we will
have to explore it further next time.
November 26, 1 958
79 IV
I left you last time in the midst of discussing a dream, a dream that
at least superficially seems simple. I announced that, with regard to
this dream, we would strive to articulate the strict meaning we give
here to the following terms: the desire in the dream and interpreta
tion. We will return to those. I also think that this dream is quite
valuable, theoretically speaking.
I have once again been rereading The Interpretation of Dreams,
having told you that this was the first text we would be examining
this year on desire and its interpretation.
I must admit that, up until a certain point, I allowed myself to
reproach people in the analytic community for being unfamiliar
with its twists and turns - which is indisputable - yet my reproach,
like every reproach, has another facet, which is that of an excuse.
For in fact, it does not suffice to have read this book hundreds of
times in order to remember its contents. This is a phenomenon that
we encounter quite often, but that has been brought home to me
especially clearly the last few days. Everyone knows how easily we
forget everything that has to do with the unconscious.
For example, it is quite obvious to what degree people forget
funny stories and stories that are considered to be witty. This
highly significant fact cannot be explained even one iota outside of
a Freudian perspective. Let us say that you are meeting with some
friends. Someone makes a joke, not even recounting a funny story,
but making a pun at the beginning of the get-together or at the end
80 of the lunch, and by the time the coffee comes at the end of the meal
Little Anna's Dream 61
you ask yourself, "What was that incredibly funny thing the person
sitting to my right said earlier?" And you cannot for the life of you
recall it. This is an almost sure sign of the fact that witticisms arise
from the unconscious.
When we read or reread The Interpretation of Dreams, we have
the impression that it is what I would call a magical book, if the
word did not lend itself, in our vocabulary, to so much ambigu
ity and even error, which is quite unfortunate. We stroll through
The Interpretation of Dreams as if we were truly in the book of the
unconscious, which is why we have so much trouble holding onto
what is so well articulated in it. We have here a phenomenon that is
worth noting.
To that we have to add the almost insane distortion introduced
by the French translation. The more closely I examine it, the more
I find truly inexcusable the crude inaccuracies it contains. Some of
you ask me for explanations and I immediately refer back to the
text. There is, for example, in Chapter VI, devoted to the dream
work, a section entitled "Considerations of Representability," the
first page of which in the French translation is more than just a web
of inaccuracies - it has nothing whatsoever to do with the German
text, and it confuses everything and puzzles us. I will not develop
this point any further, but obviously none of this makes it especially
easy for readers of the French to get a handle on The Interpretation
of Dreams.
We began to decipher the dream we took up last time �n a way
that may not have seemed very straightforward to you, but which
was nevertheless intelligible, at least I hope it was. To clearly see
what is at stake, we will articulate it using the graph of desire.
If a dream interests us, it is in the sense in which it interests Freud
- that is, in the sense in which it fulfills [realisation] desire. Desire
is at work in the dream here insofar as the dream is its fulfillment.
How are we going to be able to articulate it? I will first bring up
another dream, one I already mentioned before [see Seminar V,
Chapter XII], and whose exemplary value you will see. It is not ter
ribly well known - one has to go looking for it.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, whose title is "A Dream Is the
Fulfillment of a Wish," we find dreams whose existence I am sure
none of you are unaware of, children's dreams, and they are pre
sented to us by Freud as what I will call an early stage of desire in
dreams.
The dream I will discuss was already included in the first edition of 81
the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation ofDreams]. Freud mentions it
at the moment at which he begins to spell out the nature of dreams
for his contemporaries. The fact that the Traumdeutung takes the
62 On Desire in Dreams
She thus used her name to express taking possession, and the
enumeration of all the prestigious dishes, or those that seemed
to her such, [to express] food worth desiring.
did not borrow so much from the German context, I think, given the
specific form of the last word. Lastly, there was the Jewish proverb,
"What do chickens dream of? They dream of millet."
Let us dwell upon this for a moment.
I will begin with a brief tangential remark.
2 88
fact of his having related it. While it is certainly not insignificant that
Freud grants so much importance to the Niederschrift that consti
tutes the dream's residue, it is clear that this Niederschrift is related
to an experience that the subject tells us about.
Freud is light years from sanctioning for so much as an instant
the obvious objection that a spoken narrative is one thing, whereas
a lived experience is something else. On the contrary, he rejects it
energetically and he even expressly grounds his entire analysis in the
narrative, going so far as to advise us to use a sort of Niederschrift
technique, based on how the dream is set down in writing. This clearly
shows what he thinks, at bottom, about lived experience - namely,
that such experience gains from being broached via the signifier. If
experience is articulated, it is not its own doing, of course, for it is
already structured as a series of Niederschriften.
We have here a kind of palimpsest writing, as it were, assuming
we could imagine a palimpsest on which the different superimposed
texts were related to each other, even if we did not know how. But
if we tried to determine how, we would see that the relationship
between them was far more to be sought out in the shape of the
letters than in the meaning of the text. I am thus not in the process
of saying that.
What I am saying in this case is that what we know of Anna's
dream is strictly speaking what we know at the very moment at
which it occurs as an articulated dream. Stated otherwise, the
89 degree of certainty we have about this dream is linked to the fact
that we would also be far more certain about what pigs and geese
dream about if they themselves told us their dreams. But in this
earliest example, we have more. The exemplary value of the dream
overheard by Freud is that it was spoken out loud while Anna was
sleeping, and this leaves no room for ambiguity whatsoever con
cerning the presence of the signifier in its actual text.
It is impossible to cast the slightest doubt on the dream by point
ing to the supposedly added character of the information that comes
to us about it through speech. We know that Anna Freud is dream
ing because she pronounces the words, "Anna F. eud, Er(d)beer,
Hochbeer, Eier(s)peis, Papp!" We know nothing about the dream
images in this case, but they find in these words a symbolic "affix"
[affixe], if l may borrow a term from the theory of complex numbers,
an affix in which we in some sense see the signifier present itself in a
flocculated state - in other words, in a series of names.
These names constitute a sequence whose choice of elements is
not random. In effect, as Freud tells us, what is involved here is pre
cisely everything that she was prohibited, inter-dieted, from having,
everything which, when she asked for it, she was told "No, you can't
Little Anna's Dream 69
there. In order for us to say "He is dead," he must have been a being
who was underpinned by speech.
We do not expect anyone to realize that, of course; but we do
expect people to realize that the act of enunciating the statement
"He is dead" commonly requires that we have at our disposal
in discourse itself all sorts of landmarks [reperes] that are distin
guished from landmarks derived from the statement of the process
[/'enonce du proces]. If what I am saying here were not obvious, all
of grammar would evaporate.
For the time being, I am simply getting you to note the need to
use the future perfect, inasmuch as there are two temporal land
marks. One of them concerns the act that will be involved - for
example, in the statement "At such and such a time, I will have
become her husband"; this is the landmark of the I that will be
transformed by marriage. Nevertheless, since you express it in
the future perfect tense, there is a second temporal landmark: the
current point from which you are speaking, which situates [repere]
you as the I in the act of enunciation. There are thus two subjects
- that is, two ls.
The stage that the child must reach in Binet's test - namely, the
distinction between these two Is - seems to me to have literally
nothing to do with the well-known reduction to reciprocity that
Piaget makes into the pivotal point of the child's ability to use
personal pronouns. But let us leave this aside for the time being.
which is the guise in which the reality of Anna Freud's dream pre
sents itself to us.
This child was quite capable of perceiving the meaning of what
her nurse said. Whether true or false, Freud implies this. Freud
assumes it to be true, and rightly so, of course, because a nineteen
month-old child very clearly understands when her nurse is about to
make life difficult for her.
What she enunciates in her dream is articulated in a form that I
called flocculated. Signifiers follow one another in a certain order,
but this order takes the form of a piling up. These signifiers are
superimposed on each other, as it were, in the form of a column.
They replace each other, like so many metaphors for each other.
What we need to bring out here is the reality of the satisfaction qua
interdicted.
We will not go any further with Anna Freud's dream. Since the
topology of repression is involved in it, we will take the next step
now by asking ourselves how what we are beginning to articulate
allows us to clarify what is at stake in an adult's dream. What is the
true difference between the form taken by the child's desire in Anna
Freud's dream and the form taken by an adult's dream? The latter
is assuredly more complicated since it is going to give us far more
trouble, at least as regards its interpretation.
What Freud says on this score is in no way ambiguous - it suffices
to read what he says. The function of what intervenes is akin to cen
sorship. Censorship operates exactly as I illustrated it in the course
of my previous Seminars. I am not sure if you recall the well-known
story we liked so much, that of the typist caught up in the Irish
revolution who said, "If the King of England were an idiot, then all
would be permitted." I gave you a different explanation of it, based
on what we find in Freud's work regarding punishment dreams.
Specifically, we assumed the existence of a law stipulating that
"Whoever shall say that the King of England is an idiot will have his
head cut off," and I proposed we imagine that the next night I dream 95
that I have my head cut off.
There are still simpler forms that Freud also articulates. Since for
some time now people have managed to get me to read the Tintin
comic books, I will borrow an example from him. In a Tintinesque
vein, I can evade the censorship in another manner: I can articulate
out loud, "Whoever says that General Tapioca is no better than
General Alcazar will have to deal with me. " Ifl articulate something
like that, it is clear that neither General Tapioca's supporters nor
General Alcazar's supporters will be satisfied, and, what is more
surprising still, those who support both of them will be the least
satisfied.
74 On Desire in Dreams
that children initially believe that all of their thoughts are known to
others.
As opposed to the definition given by psychologists, thought is
not a first sketch of action. Thought is first and foremost something
that is part and parcel of the dimension of the unsaid [non-dit] that
I have just introduced by way of the distinction between the enun
ciation process and the statement process. But, of course, in order
for something unsaid to be unsaid, one must speak. In order for the
unsaid to subsist, it must be spoken at the level of the enunciation
process - that is, qua the Other's discourse. This is why children do
not doubt for a single instant that those who represent for them the
locus in which this discourse resides - that is, their parents - know
their thoughts.
This is, in any case, their first impression. It persists as long as
something new has not been introduced, which we have not yet
articulated here, concerning the relation between the upper line and
the lower line - namely, what, apart from grammar, keeps them at a
certain distance from each other.
I have no need to tell you how grammar keeps us at a distance in
sentences like "I do not know if he is dead," "He is not dead as far
as I know," "I have not heard he was dead," and "I am afraid he is
dead" [ C'est la crainte qu'il fut mart]. All of these subtle taxemes, 97
which run the gamut from the subjunctive to a ne that Le Bidois
calls, in a way that is truly incredible for a philologist who writes for
the Le Monde newspaper, "the expletive ne" all of this is designed
-
At the point at which I left you last time, you could already see that
I was tending to broach our topic, desire and its interpretation, by
means of a certain ordination of signifying structure.
I showed you that what is enunciated in the signifier involves an
internal split [duplicite] between the process of the statement and the
process of the act of enunciation.
I emphasized the difference between the I of the statement and the
I of enunciation. The former is involved in every statement insofar
as, like any other [subject], it is the subject of a stated process, for
example, which is moreover not the only mode of statement. The
latter is involved in any and every enunciation, but especially when
it announces itself as the I of enunciation.
The way in which this I announces itself is not unimportant. In
little Anna Freud's dream, it announces itself by naming itself at
the beginning of the dream's message. I indicated to you that some
thing ambiguous remained there - is this I, qua I of enunciation,
authenticated at that moment, or not? I am hinting that it is not
yet authenticated, which is what accounts for the distinction Freud
makes between the desire in a child's dream and the desire in an
adult's dream.
In children, something has not yet been completed, precipitated
by the structure, or distinguished in the structl.).re. I showed you the
1 02 reflection and trace of this something, an undoubtedly late trace, in
a psychological test. Although the clearly defined conditions of the
experiment do not allow us to judge in advance what the situation is
The Dream about the Dead Father 79
for the subject at his core, it appears that the difficulty distinguishing
between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement lasts a long
time, going so far as to manifest itself in a form of fumbling that
occurs during a test that chance and psychological flair made Binet
point out, "I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me," where we
see that the subject does not yet know how to "uncount" himself.
The trace that I pointed out is an index - there are others too - of
the element that is essential to the subject, which is constituted by the
difference between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement.
As I told you, we are not taking things up by way of deduction, but
by a pathway about which I cannot say that it is empirical, since it
was already traced out and constructed by Freud.
Freud tells us that the desire in an adult's dream is a borrowed
desire, which is the mark of repression, a repression he characterizes
at this level as [an instance of] censorship. What does he emphasize
when he takes up the mechanism of censorship? He emphasizes
the impossibilities of this censorship, and it is in this sense that he
shows us what censorship is. I was trying to get you to dwell for a
moment on this point by showing you the type of contradiction in
terms implicit in anything that is unsaid at the level of enunciation, I
mean the self-contradictory nature of a formulation like, "I am not
saying that . . . "
Last time, I tried to convey this to you in various funny forms:
"Anyone who says such and such about so and so whose speech
must be respected, who must not be offended, will have to deal with
me!" What does this mean, if not that in taking this obviously ironic
stand, I find myself proffering exactly what one must not say?
Freud himself often highlighted how frequently dreams adopt this
path - namely, that what they articulate as not being supposed to
be said is [est] precisely what they have to say, and is that by which
what is effectively said in the dreams transits.
As this formulation "I am not saying that . . . " brings us to some
thing that is connected with the signifier's deepest structure, I would
like to dwell on it further before taking an additional step.
1 103
the term nicht in German and the term not in English. " Quite so. But
that is not what is important.
In English, for example, we find traces in the articulation of the
linguistic system of something analogous. I cannot bring this out
here, as I am not here to give you a class on linguistics, but keep in
mind that, in English, negation cannot be applied purely and simply
to the verb that designates the process in statements. You do not say
"I eat not," * but rather "I do not eat."* In other words, for every
thing involving negation, statements are led to borrow a form that is
based on the use of an auxiliary [verb], the auxiliary being typically
what introduces the dimension of the subject into a statement, as in 107
"I don't eat," * ''I won't eat," * or "I won't go."*
In French, Je n 'irai pas [I won't go] merely expresses the fact that
the subject will not go, whereas "I won't go"* implies a resolution
on the subject's part not to go.
The fact that in English all pure and simple negation brings out
something like an auxiliary dimension is the trace of something that
links negation to the earliest position of enunciation in an essential
manner.
Thus at the outset, the subject is constituted in the process of dis
tinguishing between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement.
In our last class, I began to articulate what comes next, the second
time or stage.
That is what we will turn to now.
In order to show you by what route the subject enters into a dialectic
involving the Other [la dialectique de /'Autre], insofar as this dialec
tic is imposed on him by the very structure of the difference between
enunciation and statement, I have led you by a path that is not the
only one possible, but that I deliberately made an empirical one - in
other words, I have introduced the subject's real history into it.
The next step in this history is, as I told you, the dimension of
"knowing nothing about it."
The subject puts it to the test against the backdrop of the idea
that the Other knows all about his thoughts, since at the outset
his thoughts are, by their very nature and structure, this Other's
discourse. The discovery that the Other knows nothing about his
thoughts, which is factually true, inaugurates the pathway by which
the subject develops the opposite requirement that lies within the
unsaid. From there, he will have to find the difficult path by which
he must implement the unsaid in his being, going so far as to become
84 On Desire in Dreams
the sort of being with which we deal - namely, a subject who has the
dimension of the unconscious.
The essential step that psychoanalysis has us take in the experi
ence of humanity is that - after many centuries in which philosophy
has, I would say, entered obstinately and ever further into a dis
course in which the subject is merely the correlate of the object in
108 the knowledge relationship, where he is what is presupposed by the
knowledge of objects, where he is a sort of strange subject about
which I said somewhere, I do not recall where, he could fill up phi
losophers' weekends, because the rest of the week (namely, during
the workweek) everyone can naturally neglect altogether this subject
who is in some sense but the shadow and underside [doublure] of
objects - we analysts realized that something about this subject had
been overlooked, namely, the fact that he speaks.
This is the case only from the moment at which we can no longer
overlook him that is, from the moment at which his domain as a
-
subject who speaks stands on its own two feet, as it were, whether
the subject is there or not. But what completely changes the nature
of his relations to the object is the crucial thing known as desire.
It is in the field of desire that we try to articulate the relations
between the subject and the object. These are relations involving
desire, for it is in the field of desire that psychoanalytic experience
teaches us that the subject must be articulated. The relationship
between the subject and the object is not based on need; it is a
complex relationship that I am trying to elucidate for you.
I will begin by quickly indicating that, inasmuch as the relation
ship between the subject and the object is situated in the field of
desire, the object cannot be the correlate of, or something that
merely corresponds to, one of the subject's needs. The object is
something that props the subject up at the precise moment at which
the subject has to face, as it were, his existence. The object is some
thing that props him up in his existence in the most radical sense
- namely, in the sense in which he exists in language. Otherwise
stated, the object is something that is outside of him and whose true
linguistic nature he can grasp only at the very moment at which he,
as a subject, must be effaced, vanish, or disappear behind a signi
fier. At that moment, which is a moment of panic, so to speak, the
subject must grab hold of something, and he grabs hold of the object
qua object of desire.
Someone whom I will not name immediately today, in order not
to create confusion, someone who is quite contemporary but is now
dead, wrote somewhere: "To ascertain exactly what the miser whose
treasure was stolen lost: thus we should learn much. " This is exactly
what we must learn, I mean learn for ourselves and teach to others.
The Dream about the Dead Father 85
We have seen, as we should have expected, that desire has to find its
place somewhere on the graph between, on the one hand, the point
from which we began when we said that the subject is alienated there
[A], inasmuch as he must enter into the defiles of the signifier - in
other words, essentially the alienation of the appeal [to the Other],
88 On Desire in Dreams
that related to need - and, on the other hand, the beyond in which
the dimension of the unsaid is introduced as essential.
The dream that I selected, the one involving the dead father, will
allow us to show how and where desire is articulated.
This dream is assuredly among the most problematic, insofar as
it is a dream in which a dead man appears. The appearance of dead
people in dreams is far from having revealed its secret to us, even
if Freud talked a good deal about it already - see page 433 of the
German edition [SE V, p. 43 1 ]. Throughout his analysis of dreams in
the Traumdeutung, Freud never stopped emphasizing the profound
ambivalence of feelings we have about those we love and respect,
this having been his first take on the psychology of the unconscious.
He broached this topic anew regarding the dream about the dead
father, which I selected in order to begin to try to spell out for you
the function of desire in dreams.
I remarked last time that we always forget what is in the
Traumdeutung. Having decided for various reasons to reread the
first edition of it, I realized that I had forgotten that this dream was
only added in 1 930. More precisely, it was first added as a footnote
shortly after its publication in the Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur
Neurosenlehre, 1 9 1 3, volume 3, page 271 of the second edition, and
it was moved into the text in the 1 930 edition. Since then it has thus
been in the main body of the Traumdeutung.
I will indicate once again how this dream goes. The dreamer sees
his father appear before him, a father whom he has just lost after a
long, drawn-out, and tormenting illness. The dreamer sees his father
1 13 in front of him and is "penetrated," as Freud tells us, with profound
pain at the thought that his father is dead and "did not know it."
Freud emphasizes the absurd resonance of this formulation and he
tells us that it can be understood if we add that the father was dead
"as he [i.e., the son] wished." In short, "he did not know" that it was
"as he wished" that "he was dead."
These are the elements that I must thus situate on the different
levels of the graph. We will try to verify this in detail at the experi
ential level.
I will place "he did not know" on the lower line, insofar as it
is essentially related to the dimension of the constitution of the
subject. It is, in effect, on the basis of a useless "he did not know"
that the subject must situate himself, and it is precisely here that he
must constitute himself as not knowing, for it is the only exit offered
to him in order for what is not said to actually take on the import
of the unsaid.
"He did not know" is situated at the level of the statement, but
it is clear that no statement of this type can be made, if it is not
The Dream about the Dead Father 89
\
I
\
I I
I I
\
f I
I '
�
� _ _ _ _ _ _ .,, , ,
.. -'lllf ...
' '
'I
� � I
I \ I
as he wished
When Freud tells us that the meaning, and implicitly the inter- 1 16
pretation, of the dream is found in "as he wished," it all seems quite
simple. Yet I have indicated that it is not quite so simple. But what
does this mean? If we are at the level of the signifier, as Freud for-
mally indicates - not just in this passage, but also in the one about
repression that I asked you to reread - you must immediately see
that we can make more than one use of "as he wished."
Where does "he was dead as [the dreamer] wished" take us? It
seems to me that some of you at least can recall the point to which I
once led you in discussing the story of Oedipus.
Recall that, after having exhausted in every form the pathway of
desire, insofar as it is not known to the subject, and suffering the
effect of punishment - for what crime? for no other crime than that
of having existed in this desire - Oedipus finds himself led to a point
where he can proffer no other exclamation than me phUnai, "Never
to have been born," where existence, having arrived at the extinction
of his desire, ends up. Well, the pain that the dreamer feels in the
dream - let us not forget that he is someone about whom we know
nothing other than the immediately prior fact that he witnessed his
father's demise in the course of a long illness - is close, in experience,
to the pain of existence when nothing any longer inhabits it other
than existence itself, and that everything, when suffering is excessive,
tends to abolish a term that cannot be uprooted: the desire to live.
If the pain of existing after desire had dried up was experienced by
someone, it was no doubt by he who was far from being a stranger
to the dreamer - namely, his father. But what is certain, in any case,
is that the dreamer knew about this pain. We will never know if he
who felt this pain in the real knew or did not know the meaning of
92 On Desire in Dreams
the pain, but what is clear is that the dreamer does not know what
he is taking on, which is the pain itself. He does not know it in the
dream, of course - nor, quite surely, outside of the dream - before
interpretation leads us there.
1 17 The proof thereof is that in the dream he can only articulate this
pain in a way that, in his relation to the other, is both faithful and
cynical, and takes an absurd form. What does this form correspond
to? If we tum back to the short section in the Traumdeutung that dis
cusses absurd dreams [SE V, pp. 426--45], we see that the impression
of absurdity, which is often linked in dreams to a sort of contradic
tion that is linked to the structure of the unconscious itself, can lead
to something laughable, but that in certain cases absurdity is intro
duced to express a particularly violent repudiation of the designated
meaning. Freud says this quite specifically regarding this dream, and
it confirms what I was trying to articulate for you here even before
having reread the passage.
What does "he did not know" mean? It assuredly means that the
dreamer can see that his father did not know the dreamer's wish -
his wish that his father die in order to be done with his suffering. In
other words, at this level, the dreamer is cognizant of his own wish.
He can see - or not see, it all depends on what point he is at in his
analysis - that, in the past, he himself had wished his father would
die, although not for the sake of his father, but of the son, his rival.
But there is something that he cannot see at all at the point he is
at, which is that he has taken on his father's pain without knowing
it. He cannot see, moreover, that it is absolutely necessary for him to
keep situating ignorance across from him [i.e., outside of himself] -
in the father as a character in the dream, that is, in the object, in the
form "he did not know" - in order not to know that it would have
been better to have never been born. If there is nothing at the end
of existence but the pain of existing, it would be so much better to
take that pain as though it were the other's [!'assumer comme celle de
l'autre] as though it were that of the other who is there, and who
-
sees his father again in the guise of Garibaldi [SE V, pp. 427-9,
447-8, 478). We will go further with that one, and we will see what
Freud's desire truly is. Those who reproach me for not making
enough of anal eroticism will be repaid in spades.
94 On Desire in Dreams
For the time being, let us stick to the dream about the dead father.
This schematic dream figures the dreamer's confrontation with
death. But the shade who is summoned up by the dream makes his
mortal meaning fall away. What, indeed, does the appearance of a
dead man mean, if not that the dreamer is not dead, because he can
suffer in the dead man's stead?
But that is not all. Behind this suffering there lies a lure, the only
one the subject can still hold onto at this crucial moment. And what
is it? It is the lure of his rival, the lure of killing the father, the lure
of imaginary fixation.
We will pick it up there next time, for I believe that, with what I
have said today, I have sufficiently paved the way for the elucida
tion of the constant formula of fantasy in the unconscious: barred
S, lozenge, little a ($0a).
The subject, insofar as he is barred, canceled out, and abolished
by the action of the signifier, finds his prop in the other who, for the
speaking subject, is what defines the object as such. We will try to
identify this other, who is the prevalent object of human eroticism.
In fact, we will identify him very quickly. Those who attended
the first year of this Seminar heard me talk about this for a whole
term. This other is the image of one's own body, in the broad sense
we shall give it.
In this case, it is here - in this human fantasy, which is the sub
ject's fantasy and which is no longer anything but a shade - that the
subject maintains his existence, maintains the veil that is such that
he can continue to be a subject who speaks. _
122 1
I ii:i.dicated at the end of the last class by what path I intend to inves
tigate the function of desire, as it is articulated in Freud's work,
namely at the level of unconscious desire - that is, on the basis of
the formula ($0a) to which we are led by everything we have demon
strated regarding the structure of the dream about the dead father.
What does the dream consist of? It shows us the confrontation
between the subject and an other, a small other in this case.
In the dream, the father seems to be alive again, and he turns out
to be related to the subject in ways whose ambiguities we began to
investigate. It is the father who makes it such that the subject takes
upon himself what I called the pain of existing. It is the father whose
soul the subject witnessed to be in agony. It is the father whose death
he wished for - insofar as nothing is more intolerable than existence
reduced to itself, existence beyond anything that can sustain it, exist
ence sustained despite the abolition of desire.
I indicated what we could glimpse here by way of a distribution of
intra-subjective functions, as it were. The subject takes responsibil
ity for the other's pain, all the while rejecting onto the other what
he does not know - namely, the subject's own ignorance. His desire
is, in effect, to stay ignorant. This is the precise desire in the dream.
The desire for death takes on its full meaning here. It is the
desire not to awaken - not to awaken to the message, the most
secret message that is borne by the dream itself, which is that the
subject, through his father's death, is now confronted with death,
having been protected from it hitherto by the father's presence.
"Confronted with death" - what does that mean? Confronted with
an x that is linked to the father's function, that is present here in the
pain of existing, and that is the pivotal point around which what
Freud discovered in the Oedipus complex revolves - namely, the
signification of castration.
Such is the function of castration.
What does "to take castration upon oneself' [assumer la castra
tion] signify? Does one ever truly assume [one's own] castration?
What is this sort of point on which the last waves of "Analysis
123 Terminable and Interminable," as Freud calls it, crash? And up to
what point is the analyst not simply within his rights, but in a posi
tion to be able to interpret it in this dream and regarding this dream?
At the end of what I said last time about the dream, I raised,
without answering it, a question regarding the three ways in
which the analyst can bring the subject's "as he wished" into the
interpretation.
Introducing the Object of Desire 97
There is, first of all, the way that proceeds according to [selon]
the subject's speech, according to what he wanted, which he recalls
perfectly well, it having not been forgotten by him in the least. "He
did not know, as he wished." The phrase "as he wished" is inserted
here at the level of the statement line.
Re-established afterward at the level of the upper line - that is, at
the level of the enunciation that is hidden in unconscious memory -
it restores the traces of the Oedipus complex, which are those of the
child's desire for the father's death: "He was dead, as he wished."
Recall here what Freud tells us about the child's desire, which is,
when any dream forms, the capitalist, the latter finding his entrepre
neur in a current desire. The current desire, which is far from always
beil)g unconscious, is the one that is expressed in the dream, and
it is strictly speaking the desire in the dream. In this case, once the
phrase "as he wished" is restored to the level of the child's desire,
isn't it clear that the latter finds itself in a position to go in the direc
tion of the desire in the dream?
What is, in effect, the desire in this dream? It is indisputably - at
this crucial moment in the subject's life, the disappearance of his
father - to interpose the image of the object [i(a)], in order to make
it into the prop of a perpetual ignorance veiling desire. In short, "he
did not know" buttresses what was up until then desire's alibi. It
maintains and perpetuates the very function of prohibition that the
father conveyed. The latter is what gives desire here its enigmatic
and even abyssal form. It separates the subject from his desire; it
gives the subject shelter from or a defense, in the final analysis,
against this desire; it gives him a moral excuse not to confront it.
This was very clearly glimpsed by Ernest Jones, whose extraor
dinary insights about certain points of this psychical dynamic I will
have the opportunity to show you today.
Lastly, can't we say that there is some intermediate stage of
the interpretation of the dream to which the pure and simple
interpretation of Oedipal desire is connected, like: "You wished 1 24
for your father's death at such and such a time and for such and
such a reason"? You will recognize the nature of this third stage
once I have designated it as "identification with the aggressor."
Identification with the aggressor lies somewhere in one's childhood.
Haven't you recognized that, being one of the typical forms of
defense, it is essential, and that it emerges at the very place where
"as he wished" is elided?
The meaning of "as" [selon] is undoubtedly essential if we are to
reach a full interpretation of the dream.
The fact remains that the conditions and opportunities that allow
the analyst to reach it will depend on the stage of the treatment
98 On Desire in Dreams
and on the context of the response that the subject gives - by what
means? By his dreams - since we know that the dreams dreamt by a
subject in analysis are responses to the analyst, at least to what the
analyst has become in the transference - but essentially, I would say,
by the logical position of terms.
The fact remains, above all, that we can wonder if, to the ques
tion "What is the wish in 'as he wished'?" we do not always risk
giving some precipitated or premature response, and thus giving the
subject an opportunity to avoid what is at stake- namely, the dead
end in which he is placed by the fundamental structure that turns the
object of any desire into the prop of an essential metonymy.
As such, in effect, the object of human desire presents itself in a
vanishing form, about which we can perhaps glimpse that castration
turns out to be what we might call the final temperament.
In order to investigate more precisely what human desire means
and signifies, we are thus led to broach the question from the other
end, an end that is not given in dreams - namely, to take up the
question via our algorithm, in which the barred S is confronted with
and placed across from little a, the object.
I introduced the algorithm ($0a) last time. Why not put it to the test
125 of the phenomenology of desire, as the latter presents itself to us as
analysts? If we allow ourselves to be guided by this algorithm, it will
lead us to investigate together our shared experience.
Let us try to see in what form the desire that is in us - that has
been there since Freud, that lies at the heart of analysis, and that
curiously enough has not been investigated as it should have been
heretofore - presents itself in the subject.
The subject is not obligatorily nor always a neurotic subject. But
if he is, it is no reason to assume that our research concerning desire
does not have to take his structure into account, for that structure
reveals a more general structure. The neurotic indubitably finds
himself situated somewhere along the continuum of an experience
that, to our way of thinking, is universal. All of Freud's theories are
constructed upon this foundation.
Before examining some of the ways in which the dialectic of
the relations between the subject and his desire have already been
broached - that is, before coming to Jones's thought, which I men
tioned earlier - I want to discuss something I came across quite
recently in my clinical practice, which seems rather well designed to
introduce what I am seeking to illustrate.
Introducing the Object of Desire 99
1 32 3
i(a) a
0
$ I
DESIRE'S PHALLIC
MEDIATION
It turns out that Freud highlighted this odd dream, the one in
which the dead father appears, on two different occasions. After
having given it an especially useful place in his 1911 article on
the two principles of mental functioning [SE XII, pp. 225-6], the
pleasure principle and the reality principle, he integrated it into the
Traumdeutung.
I have tried to situate the elements of this dream on what we
might call the graph of the inscription of the elementary biological ·
.
I
I
I
I
I
\ I
I
\ AS HE WISHED ·, I
he was dead
, ,
I I
\
I I
A
Figure 7. 1 : New distribution of the statement and enunciation
harbors within itself a paradox, for it makes the very person that
it concerns subsist, preserving him in being, whereas there is no
being here who can be dead. There can be no symbolic assertion of
someone being dead [de l'etre mort] that does not immortalize him,
in a certain manner. This is clearly what is at work in the dream
about the dead father.
The fact remains that the position of this being who is found
wanting, that this subjective minus value [mains-value], does not aim
at the fact that he is dead but that he is the one who does not know
it. This is how the subject [i.e., the dreamer] is situated in relation
143 to the other. Not only does the other not know that he is dead but
I would say that, in the end, he must not be told this. Such protect
ing of the other is always found more or less at the root of any and
all communication between beings, where the question of what one
can and what one cannot make known to the other always arises.
This is something whose impact you should always weigh carefully
whenever you are engaged in analytic discourse.
We talked last night about those who cannot speak, those who
encounter obstacles to expressing themselves. What was at issue was
the resistance of discourse itself, strictly speaking. It is essential that
we mention this dimension if we are to relate the dream about the
dead father to another dream, one that I will borrow from a page
Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 15
image to mind. This image separates him from the sort of abyss or
vertigo that opens up before him whenever he is confronted with the
final term of his existence, and attaches him to something that calms
men down - namely, desire. What he needs to interpose between
himself and unbearable existence is, in this case, a desire.
He does not cite just any old prop for his desire, just any old
desire, but the closest and most urgent one, the best one, the desire
that had long dominated him, the one he had subdued but that he
must now bring back to life imaginarily for a while.
In the power struggle that lies at the core of his rivalry with his
father, it is the dreamer who finally wins out. If he triumphs, it is
because the other does not know, whereas he does. Here we see
the flimsy footbridge [passerelle] thanks to which the subject does
not feel directly invaded - or swallowed up by the gaping hole
that opens up before him - when he is directly confronted with
the anxiety that death provokes.
To put this more crudely, we know that the death of one's father
is always experienced as the disappearance of a sort of shield, of the
interposition or substitution that the father was with respect to the
absolute master, death.
145 We thus begin to see a sort of prefiguration of something; we see
something being sketched out. What is it, if not the formula that
I am trying to present, which is what props desire up - the funda
mental formula of the essential intra-subjective relationship within
which all desire, as such, must be inscribed: (SOa)?
In this simplest form possible, the formula ($0a) expresses the same
relationship as the one that interposes itself in the partially uncon
scious discourse coming from the Other with a capital 0 [grand
Autre] and going toward the subject, in the quadrilateral schema
that you already know, the one known as the L schema.
The imaginary tension a---a ' between the ego and the other - that
we could call, in certain regards, the tension between little a and the
image of a generally structures the relationship between the subject
-
and the object, whereas the formula ($0a) specifically expresses the
absence of the subject that is characteristic of the impact of desire
on the relationship between the subject and the imaginary functions.
Indeed, desire as such raises for man the question of his subjective
elision, $, with regard to any and every possible object.
To the degree to which the subject is inscribed in the dimension
of speech as a plaintiff [or: petitioner, demandeur], he approaches
Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 17
(Es) S G) other
(ego ) a © other
the most elaborate and evolved object that certain analysts more or
less·deftly conceptualize as the object of "oblativity." This notion is 146
problematic, as I have often indicated. I, too, try to conceptualize
what is involved here and endeavor to formulate it more rigorously.
Inasmuch as a subject, qua desire - that is, in the fullness of a
human destiny which is that of a speaking subject - approaches this
object, he finds himself caught in a sort of impasse. He cannot reach
this object qua object except by finding himself, as a subject of speech,
effaced in a kind of elision that leaves him in the darkness brought
on ·by trauma, and in what is, strictly speaking, beyond anxiety itself.
Or else he finds that he must take the place of the object, substitute
himself for it, and subsume himself under a certain signifier.
Which one? The phallus. For the time being, I am simply stating
this. I am not justifying it; our whole discussion will justify it. All
of psychoanalytic experience attests to it. It is owing to this that, in
every instance of assuming a fully developed [mure] position, the one
we refer to as genital, something occurs which has an impact at the
imaginary level - it is called castration.
It is from this perspective alone that one can understand the
problematic of the phallic phase that raised truly infinite questions
and contradictions from which analysts have found it impossible to
extricate themselves. The dialogue between Freud and Jones on this
topic is, I would say, singularly moving. It suffices to see the impasse
that Jones ends up in when he revolts against the conception - which
is too simple for his taste - that Freud offers of the phallic function,
as the one and only term around which all concrete and historical
development of sexuality in men and women revolves. Jones high
lights instead what he refers to as the functions of defense linked to
the image of the phallus.
Freud and Jones end up saying the same thing, but they come at
1 18 On Desire in Dreams
• "Why?" asks Jones, and when he asks why in his article and in
Why should imperfect access to the nipple give a boy the sense
:of; imperfect possession of his own penis? I am quite convinced
that the two things are intimately related, although the logical
connection between them is certainly not obvious. [p. 46 1]
Let us consider the most banal or common fantasy, the one Freud
paid special attention to: "A child is being beaten" [SE XVII,
pp. 1 79-204].
Let us re-examine it from the perspective I am developing in order
to see in what respect fantasy is desire's necessary prop.
122 On Desire in Dreams
The person beating remains the same (that is, the father); but
the child who is beaten has been changed into another one and
is now invariably the child producing the fantasy. The fantasy
is accompanied by a high degree of pleasure, and has now
acquired a significant content, with the origin of which we shall
be concerned later. Now, therefore, the wording runs: "I am
being beaten by my father." [p. 1 85]
This second phase is the most important and the most momen
tous of all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has
Desire's Phallic Mediation 123
the pure and simple loss of the subject in the darkness of subjective
'indetermination with something that is completely different from
it: the fact that the subject becomes alert or erect, as it were, when
faced with danger.
In. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud introduces a still 155
more astonishing phenomenological distinction that is so subtle that
it is not easy to translate into French. It is the distinction between
abwarten, which I will endeavor to translate by subir [to undergo),
n"en pouvoir mais [to be unable to do anything about it], or tendre
/e•dos [brace oneself], and erwarten, which is s'attendre a [to expect].
The affect that is emphasized and attached to the other or partner
1. attached to he who is across from one, little a - is situated in this
register or range in the sadist's fantasy.
t .Where, in the final analysis, is this subject - this subject who, in
this case, is prey to something that he does not have [and that he
\VDUld have to have] in order to know where he is? It would be easy
to say that he is between the two [the beater and the beaten]. I would
go further still - I would say that he is so truly between the two that
he plays, in an exemplary manner, the role of the instrument with
which the one hits the other. The subject is identical here to the
instrument.
Indeed, the instrument is very frequently the essential personage
in the imaginary structure of desire that we are trying to formulate
here. We are always flabbergasted to see this, and we always have
the best of reasons to be astonished by this, unless we do not want to
see it. What is most paradoxical and the biggest warning for us is, in
short, that the subject abolishes himself behind this signifier, which
is altogether unveiled here in its nature as a signifier, insofar as he
recognizes his essential being in it, if it is true that we can say with
Spinoza that this essential being is his desire.
It is, in effect, to this same crossroads that we are led whenever a
sexual problematic is brought up. The crux of the sexual problem
atic in women is the phallic phase. We began with this two years ago
and Jones returns to it constantly in order to dispute and develop it.
Jones's text manifests the kind of working over of a topic that we see
in the course of a psychoanalysis.
The central focus of the phallic phase in girls is the relationship
between hatred for the mother and desire for the phallus. It is on this
very point that Freud bases the requirement [or: demand, exigence]
that everyone have a phallus, a requirement that plays a role in the
resolution of the Oedipus complex in boys, and a role in the entry
into the Oedipus complex for girls. This requirement has a truly
fundamental, generative [or: developmental, genetique] character.
The link between hatred for the mother and desire for the phallus
1 26 On Desire in Dreams
I
a
upsiiot being that, if the mirror is narrow, in order to see the image
one must place oneself in a field where the rays reflected from the
mirror cross anew its center, which assumes a certain lighting up [or:
blossoming, epanouissement] of the spatial zone.
'What was important in my little explanation back then was the
foilowing: if someone wanted to see this fantasized image get pro
duced somewhere in space - inside the vase, or a little to the side of
it, 'it makes no difference - where there is already a real object, and
if this observer is situated at S I he could rotate the plane mirror in
'
order to occupy the symmetrical and virtual position S2, which is
i'(a)-180°
inside the cone of visibility of the image, and he would see the image
of the flower in the plane mirror at the symmetrical point.
158 In other words, the ray of light that is reflected toward the
observer is strictly symmetrical to what occurs on the other side,
insofar as this observer has virtually come to occupy the place from
which he will see the vase in the plane mirror - which he can expect
since he is there - and, on the other hand, the real image which is
produced in a place where he cannot see it directly.
This optical device is thus apt for representing the relationship or
interplay between the subject's imaginary elements and his symbolic
identificatory elements. I do not think that the way in which it does
so betrays the psychoanalytic tradition, since, in the Traumdeutung,
Freud offers up a schema of successive lenses in which the progres
sive passage from the unconscious to the preconscious is refracted.
He was thus looking for analogous references in optics, as he says
precisely [SE V, pp. 536, 6 1 1].
This is but a metaphor, one that represents the specular pathway
py whicq the subject tries in fantasy to return to his place in the sym
bolic. Consequently, the $ is something other than an eye. The
spherical mirror, which helps him return to his place in the sym
bolic, represents capital A here - it is a symbolic mirror. It is not the
mirror in front of which the small child plays. What we have here is
in fact a certain reflection that is constructed with the help of words,
1 59 in the course of the first learning of language, and thanks to which
the subject learns to situate at the right distance the insignias with
which he identifies.
These symbolic insignias correspond to what, on the other side,
are the first imaginary ego identifications. We thus already find
something preformed and open to symbolic fragmentation at the
imaginary level, but which only enters into the play of fragmenta
tion inasmuch as the symbolic exists and opens up its field to him.
It is inside this field that, owing to the symbolic, a transformation
of the imaginary relation occurs which is such, as I am already indi
cating to you, that there will always be, in erotic relations with the
other, however advanced or fully developed we assume them to be,
a reduction point that you can grasp as extrapolations of the erotic
blueprint [epure] between subjects.
What is the transformation that is undergone by the first, fun
damentally specular relationship between a and a' or i( a) , which
regulates the relations between the subject and the other? The imagi
nary set of fragmented bodily elements must be distributed across
the puppet with which we deal in the symbolic, inasmuch as we are
puppets and our partners are too. But these puppets are missing
something: the phallus.
Desire's Phallic Mediation 129
Since we spoke about desire quite a lot in the last few classes, we are
now going to begin to broach the topic of interpretation. The graph
of desire will serve us here, in the following form:
- - ..
, ...
, '
, '
</ �
I
164 1.
one of its signifiers disappear and puts another signifier in its place.
Therein lies the essential property of the signifier.
This is related to the aspect of the subject's will [vouloir] that is
indicated by the retroactive loop. Without the subject knowing it, in
a way of which he is unconscious and which is beyond his intention,
his speech is at every moment affected by some parenthetical clause
[incidente] that intervenes in the choice of elements in the signifying
chain. We see the effects of this emerge at the surface, for example in
the form of a phonemic slip of the tongue - this is the most elemen
tary form. The simple change of a syllable in a word suffices to show
that another signifying chain is present and active there, this second
signifying chain having interrupted the first one in order to implant
another meaning in it.
At the level of the assuming of responsibility for the statement
by the subject, which is apparently the most developed level, the
interpretive rule proposed by Freud implies that the I is posited
as conscious. Nevertheless, we shall not say that the statement is
produced by this /, since the enigma here remains complete: whose
statement is it that we talk about at the level of enunciation? The
subject does not come down on any one side; but if he says "I
dreamt," it is with a characteristic connotation and stress that shows 170
that he who has dreamt nevertheless presents himself to the subject
as problematic.
Who is the subject of enunciation contained in the statement in
question? Thus far, we are still at the stage of wondering about this.
This subject was long considered to be a god, before becoming,
more or less with Aristotle, the "himself' of the subject.
As for what lies beyond the subject - that is to say, the Freudian
unconscious - the question of its alterity is no less perennial. An
entire oscillation or vacillation is produced around it. What the
subject then takes up from this beyond is of the same fragmenting
nature and has the same value as a signifying element, as what is
produced in the spontaneous phenomenon of substitution or mal
functioning of the signifier, which is what Freud shows us to be the
normal pathway for deciphering the meaning of a dream.
In other words, the fragmentation that occurs at the level of enun
ciation, insofar as the latter implies assumption of responsibility for
the dream by the subject, is situated for Freud at the same level and
is of the same nature as the pathway of the dream's interpretation
- namely, the maximal breaking down [decomposition] or spelling
out of signifying elements. This spelling out highlights the dream's
possibilities, which appear only inasmuch as the signifying chain is
intersected by all the other chains that can cross it and interweave
with it, at each of its elements and at each of the gaps that it leaves.
140 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
arriving at his analyst's door, and just before entering he has been
going "Uh, hum!" That is even saying too much, for it is, as Sharpe
tells us, the "discreetest of coughs" [p. 1 30].
Ella Sharpe was a brilliant woman, as every aspect of her style
indicates. She was some sort of elementary school teacher before
becoming an analyst, which is very fine training for being able to see
deeply into people's psychology. She was certainly a very talented
woman. She hears this "little cough" as though it were the arrival of
the dove at Noah's Ark. The cough announces that, hidden some
where, there is a place where feelings live. Oh, she tells herself, I
1 80 would never speak to him about that, because if I did he would tuck
it all away again.
This is the classic analytic stance in such cases. The rule is to
never make comments to a patient about his physical comportment
at a certain stage of his analysis, when it is important to simply
observe it. I mean, his way of coughing, lying down, buttoning or
unbuttoning his jacket, everything that his ingrained motor bearing
says about him - inasmuch as this attitude can take on the value of
. a signal and inasmuch as all of that goes right to the quick of his
narcissism.
Yet, this rule in no wise applies to something like this little cough.
Here we see the symbolic power and dimension insofar as it extends
to everything in the vocal register. Regardless of the fact that a
cough may give the impression of being a purely somatic event, it is
situated in the same dimension as sounds like "Uh, huh" and "Yes
. . . " that certain analysts sometimes make, quite authoritatively,
and that clearly have the effect of encouraging the patient to say
more.
The best proof of this is that, to the analyst's great surprise, the
cough is the first thing the patient speaks to her about that day. In
his "customary even and deliberate voice," he tells her:
I have been considering that little cough that I give just before
I enter the room. The last few days I have coughed I have
become aware of it, I don't know whether you have. To-day
when the maid called me to come upstairs I made up my mind
I would not cough. To my annoyance, however, I realized I
had coughed just as I had finished. It is most annoying to do a
thing like that, most annoying that something goes on in you or
by you that you cannot control, or do not control. One would
think some purpose is served by it, but what possible purpose
can be served by a little cough of that description it is hard to
think. [p. 1 3 1]
The Little Cough as a Message 149
omnipotence of discourse. This does not imply in the least that the
subject feels himself to be the mainstay or guardian of discourse. If 1 86
what he is dealing with is the omnipotence of discourse, it is via the
Other that he proffers it.
" This is especially forgotten in the way Ella Sharpe orients her
interpretation of the dream.
I will begin by indicating to you what we will see at the end, because
we will probably not manage to finish our discussion of the dream
in today's class. Such an elaborate piece of work brings up a host of
things - and a still greater host of things when we realize that, in the
final analysis, almost nothing has been said on the topic [of dreams],
even though we operate in this realm every day.
Ella Sharpe thus argues with her patient about his wish for
omnipotence, and as she puts it, his aggressive omnipotence [p. 145].
To begin with, this patient, about whom she absolutely does not
give us all the background information, has in his profession - he is
a lawyer - major difficulties whose neurotic character is so obvious
that she goes into them in detail. Indeed, she indicates that it is not
so much that he is afraid of failure but rather of success, of having
too much success. It is by modulating the very definition of his
symptom that she highlights a split and introduces into the analysis
� nuance that warrants our attention owing to its obviously subtle
nature.
She mentions that the patient has other difficulties as well that
go beyond his professional activities, extending to the whole of his
relations with other people. They manifest themselves especially
in games - in tennis, for instance. The sorts of difficulties he has
concern, for example, the fact that he has a hard time doing what is
necessary to win a game or a set - namely, to corner his adversary
at one end of the tennis court and, as people often do, hit the ball
to the opposite end of the court where his opponent cannot reach it.
The highlighting of such symptoms by the analyst is quite helpful in
confirming that the patient suffers from a problem manifesting his
potency, or more accurately stated, his power.
This leads her to intervene in a certain way, which elicits in the
patient a certain number of reactions in which she clearly rejoices, 1 87
in a word. This is the crowning moment at which she indicates where
his desire lies, and it is truly in the sense in which we define desire
here. One might almost say that she aims at desire in its relation to
demand - as you will see, this is truly what she does.
1 54 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
and the dream that lies center-stage in that session, manifests itself
with so much coherence that it incites us to see if we cannot center
things better with the help of the categories that I have been propos
ing for a long time, and whose map I have tried to give you in the
form of the topological schema, the graph, that we use.
Let me remind you that in the dream the patient takes a journey
with his wife around the world. He arrives in Czechoslovakia,
"where all kinds of things were happening" [p. 1 32). He underscores
the fact that there were plenty of things that took place before that
moment in the dream, but that he has forgotten them, such that the
dream does not take very long to recount.
He meets a woman on a road, and the road reminds him of
another road he has dreamt about, which he already described to his
analyst in two recent dreams. On this road, there had been "sexual
play with a woman," and this had occurred "in front of another
woman" [p. 1 32). The same thing happens in this dream, as he tells
us in a digression.
This time my wife was there while the sexual event occurred. The
woman I met was very passionate looking and I am reminded
of a woman I saw in a restaurant yesterday. She was dark and
had very full lips, very red and passionate looking, and it was
obvious that had I given her any encouragement she would
have responded. She must have stimulated the dream, I expect.
In the dream the woman wanted intercourse with me and she
took the initiative which as you know is a course which helps me
a great deal. If the woman will do this I am greatly helped. In
the dream the woman actually lay on top ofme; that has onlyjust 1 89
come to my mind. She was evidently intending to put my penis in
her body. I could tell that by the manoeuvers she was making. I
disagreed with this, but she was so disappointed I thought that I
would masturbate her. [pp. 1 32-3)
had resolved not to cough again this time, but a cough came out all
the same. It bothers him a lot that there is something in him that he
cannot control, and he wonders what it might mean.
We are now going to return to what he says by following the
way in which Ella Sharpe registers it in her own perspective. She
establishes a catalogue of what she calls the "ideas concerning the
purpose of a cough" [p. 1 36].
First of all, this cough brings with it "thoughts of lovers being
together." What did the patient say? After having spoken about his
cough and wondered what purpose it might have served, he said the
following:
Figure 9 . 1 : It is a message
The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 1 59
It is quite clear here that the subject has entered into analytic dis
course and that he literally raises a question concerning the Other
that is in him - namely, his unconscious. This level of articulation
is insistently present in every subject inasmuch as he asks himself,
"But what does this Other want?"
This is not an innocent statement that is supposedly made within
the analysis. There is absolutely no doubt but that this question is 1 93
enunciated at a level that is distinguished from the first verbal level,
that of innocent statements, and that it clearly indicates the locus
where we situate what must in the end be the shibboleth of analysis -
namely, the signifier of the Other [or: the Other's signifier, le signifiant
de /'Autre]. This signifier is precisely what is hidden from the neurotic,
inasmuch as he does not know its impact and he wonders about it. In
this case, he recognizes it but he is far from having an answer. Hence
the question, "What is this signifier of the Other doing in me?"
Let us say, in short, in terms that are suitable here at the begin
ning of my expose, that the subject is, and for good reason, far
from being able to recognize that the Other is castrated, but no
further than he is from being able to recognize that he himself is.
For the time being, from this position of innocence or educated
ignorance [ignorance docte], which is constituted by the fact of
being in analysis, he simply wonders what this signifier is insofar
as it signifies something in his unconscious which is the signifier of
the Other.
This is what is elided in Sharpe's way of proceeding.
She enumerates his "ideas concerning the purpose of a cough"
- this is her way of approaching things. Naturally, they are ideas
concerning the cough, but they already give us a great deal more
than a simple linear chain of ideas.
Something is already sketched out, which is mapped, here in par
ticular [Lacan is undoubtedly pointing to part of the graph], on our
graph.
Sharpe tells us that the cough first brings with it "thoughts of lovers
being together" [p. 1 36].
I read you what the patient said, and in my view it can in no wise
be summarized in that way.
If we listen to him, he imagines someone who arrives as a third
party, interrupting lovers who are together. He arrives as a third
party, but not in just any old way, since he orchestrates things so as
not to arrive as a third party in an overly embarrassing way.
1 60 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
and simple negation, that he is purely and simply rejecting the ana
lyst's proposal, which seems like it could serve, on the contrary, as a
model interpretation in being so opportune, since it leads to every- 1 95
thing that follows. A sexual fantasy associated with the patient's
entrance into the analyst's office, where she is supposed to be alone,
is clearly what is at issue, and you will see quickly enough that it
does not take a .genius to shed light on it.
The third element the patient's associations bring us is, according
to Sharpe, a fantasy: the "phantasy of being where he ought not to be,
and barking like a dog to put people offthe scent" [p. 1 36]. "To put off
the scent" is a metaphorical expression, and there is always a reason
why one metaphor is used instead of another; yet there is no trace of
the word "scent" in what the patient tells us. We have no means of
knowing whether it is repressed or not. I am saying this because scent
is what certain analysts joyfully look forward to. Let us confine our
attention here to what the patient tells us about the dream.
In response to the analyst's question, he says: "It has, however,
reminded me of a phantasy I had of being in a room where I ought
not to be" - this conforms to what the analyst surmises* - "and
thinking someone might think . . . " [p. 1 3 1].
The structure here is twofold, as it refers to the subjectivity of
another person: 'I think that someone might think. . . .' This is
what I will emphasize, for is absolutely rampant [in this patient's
discourse], it is what is constantly at work here, and it is here alone
that we can focus in on his desire. This is also what is constantly left
out of Sharpe's account, and of the way in which she accounts for
the different impacts of need [incidences tendancielles].
The patient proffers the following: I had a fantasy in which I was
"thinking someone might think I was there, and then I thought to
prevent anyone from coming in and finding me there I would bark
like a dog. That would disguise my presence. The 'someone' would
then say, 'Oh, it's only a dog in there' " [p. 1 3 1].
The patient clearly indicates that this fantasy dates back to late
childhood or early adolescence. Despite the not very coherent, para
doxical, and even absurd nature of the fantasy, Sharpe nevertheless
perceives its full value, and includes it in her catalogue of important
ideas. She thus summarizes it in the terms I mentioned: "Phantasy
of being where he ought not to be, and barking like a dog to put 196
people off the scent" [p. 1 36].
This is correct, except that, if he imagines being where he ought
not be, the goal of the fantasy - its meaning or obvious content -
is to show that he is not where he is. This is the flip side. It is very
important because, as we shall see, it characterizes and is the very
structure of every subjective assertion made by the patient.
1 62 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
To cut to the chase, as the analyst does, and tell him that he
wanted, at some point, to kill his fellow man, and that what he fears
here are repercussions and reprisals, is assuredly to take a stand, and
under conditions in which your chances of being wrong and of suc
ceeding at the same time - in other words, your chances nf in effect
getting him to subjectively adopt or subjectify what you are cutting
to the chase about - are particularly obvious. This is what makes
Sharpe's text interesting.
In any case, this interpretation brings out his structure insofar as
it manifests itself here, and already appears in the fantasy - namely,
that he is not where he is. We are going to see both the meaning this
interpretation may have and a completely different interpretation to
which this could perhaps lead.
Whatever the case may be, he does not employ just any old means
to make himself not be where he is; he sets about barking like a dog.
To do so in a room where one ought not to be is certainly not the
best way of going unnoticed. From the vantage point of reality, it is
only too clear that this fantasy is untenable.
The only value of this sentence [describing the fantasy] is to get
us to observe that we are not in the realm of the comprehensible
but of imaginary structure. When we hear things like that during
sessions, we believe we understand, but this is a retroactive effect
- the patient seems to understand and that is good enough for us.
Being understandable is, as I have already told you, a characteris
tic of any and every affect, of the whole margin, accompaniment,
or fringes of inner discourse - and, especially, such as we can
reconstruct it when we have the feeling that it is not as continu
ous as we think. Continuity is an effect that is primarily obtained
by means of affect. It is a law: the less affects have an explainable
cause [sont motives], the more understandable they appear to be to
the subject.
197 But there is no reason for us to follow his lead here. This is why
the remark I made, as obvious as it may seem, nevertheless has its
import. What we need to analyze is the fantasy, and without under
standing it - in other words, by finding within it the structure it
reveals.
Now what does this fantasy mean here? Earlier, it was important
for us to see that the subject told us that his cough was a message.
Similarly, it is important to perceive that this fantasy truly makes no
sense, owing to its totally impossible efficacy, and that by barking,
the subject simply says, "It's [only] a dog."
Here, too, he makes himself into something other than what he
is [ii se fait autre], but that is not the point. He does not wonder
here what the signifier of the Other in him is - he has a fantasy.
The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 1 63
I have already alluded to the following fact that people can take
note of, on the condition that they have an attentive ear rather than
trying to confirm at any cost the preconceived notions with which
they begin to broach children.
A friend of mine recently made the following comment to me:
having decided to look after his child himself, a child to whom he
devotes a lot of time, he had only ever spoken to his child about
the family dog by calling it "the dog." He did not fail to be a bit
surprised at the fact that the child, who had clearly figured out what
was designated by the adult's initial name for the animal, began to
call it a "bowwow."
"Bowwow," which the child used solely to designate the dog,
is the feature that was first chosen by the child among the dog's
myriad characteristics. And why should we be surprised by this?
The child obviously is not going to begin by listing his dog's quali
ties. Well before being able to handle any sort of attribute, he begins
to bring into play what he can say about it - namely, that by which
the animal presents itself as itself producing a sign, which is not a
signifier.
199 Let us note that language is served here by a boon offered to it by
something that is rather isolated in what manifests itself - namely,
the animal's presence - in order to furnish material, something
that is already laryngeal. The child takes this material as what? As
something that replaces "the dog," a term that he has already clearly
heard and understood, to such an extent that, when one says "dog/'
he can just as easily direct his gaze at the dog as at a picture of the
dog. To replace "dog" by "bowwow" is to create a first metaphor,
and it is here that predication first begins to operate. Nothing is
closer to the true genesis of language.
People have noticed that, in primitive forms of language, meta
phors are what play the role of adjectives. This is confirmed in this
child, except that we do not find ourselves faced here with some
mysterious primitive. operation of the mind, but rather with a struc
tural necessity of language, a necessity which is such that in order
for something to be generated in the realm of the signified, one sigrii
fier must be substituted for another.
You will ask, "Why assert that it is the substitution of 'bowwow'
for 'dog' that is essential? How do you know that?"
I will answer first by a common enough observation that was
recounted to me not long ago by people who speak to me at times,
in a way which, although it is not directly clarified by the investiga
tive maps I provide, is oriented by my teaching. From the moment a
child has learned to call a dog "bowwow," he will call a slew of other
things "bowwow" that have absolutely nothing to do with dogs.
The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 165
This immediately shows you that what we are talking about here is
the transformation of a sign [the dog's barking] into a signifier, and
the power of the signifier being put to the test. It is put to the test of
all sorts of substitutions and thus it is of little importance whether it
is substituted for other signifiers or for real things.
The culminating point of this process is the decisive moment that
I highlighted at the end of the aforementioned scientific paper, in
which the child declares with the greatest authority and insistence
that "dog:; go meow" and "cats go bowwow." This is an abso
lutely decisive culmination, for it is at this moment that primitive
metaphor - which is purely and simply constituted by means of
signifying substitution - engenders the category of qualifiers [or:
attribution, qualification].
Pay close attention here. We can, in this case, formalize the step 200
or progress that is being made here.
I would say that a monolinear chain is at first established, which
says "dogs'' = "bowwow." Next, the child superimposes and
combines one chain with another; he makes one chain, "dogs go
bowwow," intersect another chain, "cats go meow." In short, by
substituting "meow" for "bowwow," he creates the possibility of
a division of each of the chains into two parts, one of which will
provisionally be fixed in place and the other of which will no less
provisionally be mobile. One part of the chain will remain, and the
part that can be exchanged will revolve around it.
In other words, the signified S' of cats is associated with S,
"bowwow," which is the signifier of dogs [i.e., which signifies dogs].
This presupposes that below - and to begin with, there is no below
- the child links "meow," the signifier of cats, with the signified of
"bowwow," that is, dogs.
S' S
S S'
register of the signifying chain that we can grasp what grounds the 202
child's apprehension of the world as a world structured by speech.
It is not that he is seeking the meaning or essence of birds, fluid,
or coins. It is that he literally finds them through the use of non
sense. If we had time, we would raise questions regarding what
nonsense is technically - I mean, "nonsense"* as it is understood
in English.
Nonsense is a [literary] genre. The English language has two
eminent examples of nonsense: Edward Lear, the author of books
of nonsense that he defined as such, and Lewis Carroll, whose
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I think you all know, at the very
least.
If I had an introductory book to recommend to anyone who was
going to become a child psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, I must say
that, rather than any of the books by Jean Piaget, I would recom
mend beginning by reading a book which I have the best reasons to
think, given what we know about the author, is based on profound
experience of children's mental play - namely, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland.
There he would grasp the value, impact, and dimension of non
sensical play as such. Today I can do no more here than mention
this.
I brought all of this up as a kind of parenthesis regarding the
comment made by Sharpe's patient, "It's only a dog."
We shall return to him now in concluding today's class.
\
\
($�a) ' - - - - - - ., � d
In order to help you firmly fix in your mind something that should
208 continue to get a bit better and more precisely sketched out, I will
begin by turning to the graph again for a moment.
I think you are beginning to glimpse what the two different levels
of the graph mean.
What, in short, does this trajectory [Lacan is pointing at a part of
the graph] - which loops back on itself, and which is that of analytic
enunciation insofar as it is liberated, I would say, by the rule of free
association - tend to do? It brings out, as far as possible, what is
included in every discourse - namely, a signifying chain insofar as
it breaks down into what we are all familiar with: interpretal ' ·
a dog, he makes himself other than he is. He himself does not know
what the message is and yet he announces himself by coughing.
What does he imagine in announcing himself by coughing? What
does he imagine there is in that room?
He tells us that this cough is, in this case, an impulse or compul
sion that escaped him, and it bothers him that it did so. I highlighted
in this regard how striking Sharpe's attitude about it is - she feels
that she certainly must not talk with him about it because the
subject is not conscious of it, and he must not be made conscious of
it. In fact, he is so conscious of it that it is he himself who talks to her
about it and who underscores the fact that it is a message but that he
does not know what the message is.
What does he imagine there is in the room? What object lies
behind the door while he is outside, announcing himself, in a way
that alienates him, with his little cough, with this message he does
not understand? His association that leads from the cough to
barking like a dog shows us that he manifests his presence by the
cough in order to announce himself as an other - that is, as someone
other than himself.
In a vague and ambiguous way, the subject in some sense traces
out a first loop here. First he speaks of his cough as a message.
Then he has an association, which is the fantasy in which he
imagines being a dog. Next comes the memory of something that
really happened, his coupling with a dog in a room. He thus goes
successively through something that reflects his desire and then
incarnates his fantasy. The circle closes on itself there. Then he
changes register.
It was on this point that my last class on this patient ended.
Sharpe notes that, at this very moment, the subject gives another
little cough, as if to punctuate what he just said, and begins recount
ing the dream that I already read to you.
I want to tell you what our aim is now going to be. We are going
to juxtapose the fantasy and the dream - in other words, we will
examine which aspect of the relationship between desire and fantasy 212
is manifested in the dream. We will then see, as I already told you,
that the dream and the fantasy emphasize things very differently.
In the fantasy, what is emphasized is the subject.
The subject barks like a dog. The barking is both a message or
announcement and what disguises him. By barking, he announces
himself as other than he is. He does not know why he proceeds in
this way, but his associations to the cough indicate that the point for
him is to put himself in the position of either not being there or, if he
is there, of announcing himself as other than he is, in such a way that
the couple separates and that what there was to be seen behind the
1
176 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
The analyst asks, "What else do you think of - let the look of it be
in your mind."
A cave with a part that projects forward is something like the grotto
of the Cyclops in Capri, the coast of which is strewn with such
caves.
Here he has a remarkable association:
nature of the vagina behind the line of the genital slit. Stated other
wise, all of this is highly ambiguous.
Limerick number 1 ,3 8 1 of a special collection I consulted is the
one that most closely approximates the patient's joke.* It is amusing
owing to the fact that it is not clear why China comes into the
limerick.* It is rather remarkable that one finds in it, as in the one
we are looking for, the essential superimposition of the image of a
mouth and of a genital image.
I would even say that the essential question is, does he or doesn't
he put his finger there? It is clear that he does put his finger there
and that he does not put anything else there; he specifically does
not put his penis there, even though his penis is clearly present in
this relationship with what comes to envelop or act like a glove on
his hand. This is quite salient and brought center stage as a result of
"[considerations of] representability" in the dream, as Freud puts it,
in order to designate the third element at work in the Traumarbeit -
that is, the dream-work.
The question is what we should do with it. Should we immediately
reduce it to a series of time-tested [redimees], preformed significa- 216
tions? Should we place behind this image everything we are used to
finding there, having put it there ourselves, as if we were pulling it
out of a magician's hat? No. We are going to stop and respect it as
something that has a specific value.
Assuming you have a little bit more in your head than novelis
tic notions about what such a fantasy can be, you should realize
that such an elaborate image warrants time and attention, and
that it is important above all not to submerge it - for example, in
the very general notion of being inside the mother's womb, which
people talk about so much in relation to fantasies. Moreover, what
the dream presents us with here is certainly not the inside of the
uterus, since it is "overhanging,"* there being an edge that projects
outward.
Sharpe, because she is very astute, underscores a bit further on, in
a passage we may turn to later, that we find ourselves presented here
with something remarkable - namely, a "projection,"* she says,
and she announces immediately thereafter that it "is equivalent to a
penis" [p. 144].
That is possible, but why be in such a rush? All the more so in that
she also underscores that it is difficult not to consider this projec
tion as related to the presence of the vagina. This is quite seriously
emphasized in the dream, and when we consider the very maneuver
that the patient engages in - I would say that he substitutes himself
for himself by placing his finger and not his penis there - how can we
fail to see that this so-to-speak localized thing in this fantasy indeed
has, as the patient articulates it, the closest relationship with the
front and back wall of the vagina?
In short, to a physician whose profession it is to practice medicine
� which was not the case of Sharpe who taught in the humanities,
which gave her a fine perspective on psychology - it sounds like
vaginal prolapse. It sounds like a prosection or downward displace
ment of the vaginal walls, the front wall first of all, and then perhaps
the back wall, and at a still later stage, it is the extremity of the cervix
180 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
What shall I do now? Shall I enter into the way the analyst interprets
it? Yes? [The audience acquiesces.] In that case I must make known
to you all the material we have at our disposal.
When the patient says "I'm still thinking of the hood," the analyst
·asks, "Yes, how now?" The patient replies, "A funny man at one
1 82 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
of the earliest golf courses I remember." The man ran after him
and, the patient adds, "He said he could get me a golf bag cheaply
and the material would be 'motor hood cloth"' [p. 1 34]. That is the
fabric people used for the hoods of cars. "It was the accent I remem
ber. I shall never forget it." Here he imitates the man's accent.
"Imitating him like that reminds me of a friend who broadcasts
impersonations" - "broadcast" is the operative word here -
The peak of speed for that car was about sixty [miles per hour],
as much as is good for the life of a car. Strange how one speaks
of the life of a car as if it were human. I remember I was sick in
that car, and that reminds me of the time I had to urinate into a
paper bag when I was in a railway train as a child. Still I think
of the hood. [p. 1 35]
longest dream he has ever had." That is what the patient said:
The next question that arises from that is why this phantasy of
extreme power? The answer is given in the dream. He is going
round the world. I would put as commensurate with this idea
the actual memory that came to him when he was describing
the hood in the dream which was so strange, for it brought out
not only the fact that he was describing a projection, a fold of
a hood, but that the hood was also overhanging like a lip of a
cave. So that we get directly the hood and lips of the vulva com
pared with the great cave on the hillside to which he went with
his mother. Hence the masturbation phantasy is one associated
se he is dreaming of compassing
ate to the huge cave beneath the
y• �..��·"t:»•yu. i u�• •u u&v uv.;ond thing of importance. [p. 1 39]
When you examine the analyst's train of thought here, you cannot
fail to sense that a jump has been made. The fact that there may be
a relationship between the childhood memory in which he gets cov
erage [subit une couverture], as they say, and the signifying value of
what I will call the fantasy of prolapse need not be ruled out, natu
rally, there obviously being some relationship owing to the fact of
his free association. But to consider on this basis that we are dealing
with the classic topic of the Oedipal relation, as it were, the one that
rises to the level of embracing one's mother - which here becomes
embracing mother earth herself, embracing the entire world - a step
has nevertheless been made which seems to me to have perhaps been
made a bit too quickly.
It is important not to overlook the fact that, alongside the gran
diose schema of the Oedipal hero who proves himself to be at his
mother's level, Freud clearly isolated this moment from a phase
of development in which the owning of his actual sexual organ is
precisely related in the male child to a feeling of inadequacy - which
runs counter to what Sharpe says - regarding what he has at his
disposal compared to what would be required by an enterprise like
conquering or having sex with his mother. This element plays an
1 86 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
No comment.
I was saying earlier that the mountain made of the dream gives 225
rise to a molehill. We have something analogous here, in what I
would almost call the analyst's droning on and on.
I am willing to admit that this "peak of speed" can be identified
with the peak of the hood, but if it is truly so peaked and enormous,
h6w can we associate it with a real, lived, childhood memory? There
is something excessive here in concluding so brazenly that we have
here a screen memory related to an actual sight of the female genita
lia and especially of the clitoris. This is nevertheless what the analyst
comes to, by highlighting, as a key element, the fact that:
And right after that she has to mention the following: "But con
sidering all the work in analysis we have done so far I believe in
addition there was some babyhood situation in which he had a quite
definite opportunity of seeing his mother's genitals" [pp. 140-1 ].
All of these details make the analyst surmise that at such a moment
he would have been "laid on the floor on a blanket" [p. 141].
sort of magic trick; one such trick is called the "egg bag." You turn a
specially designed bag inside out and right side in over and over, and
first you find nothing in it and then you find in it what you slipped
into it with a deft movement.
This sort of perpetual presence and non-presence of the subject
has yet another facet, which we find in masturbation as well, inas
much as masturbation already implies the presence of a certain
female element. This is why I speak of a certain circumcision. This
protruding element in his dream is also, in certain ways, the foreskin.
Another set of his memories brings out for us the fact that there
is a certain relationship between him and the sexual act. There was
indisputably one in his childhood. But where was he? He was in
his bed and, as you will see, tightly tucked in with pins securing his
sheets [p. 1 4 1]. There are other elements that also show us the patient
229 strapped into his pram [p. 1 36]. To the degree to which he himself
is bound and blocked, he cannot enjoy his fantasy and participate
in it except through a supplemental, derivative, displaced activity:
compulsive urination. The sort of supplement or false jouissance he
gets from urination is something that we frequently note in patients
who have been in close proximity to parental coitus.
What does he become at that moment? He becomes the female
partner about whom he tells us that she has such a need for him that
he must show her [how to do] everything, and he must do every
thing, becoming feminized in the process. Insofar as he is impotent,
as it were, he is male. And it is clear that this brings him some com
pensation at the level of his ambition to garner power. But inasmuch
as he is liberated, he is feminized.
The problem lies in this duplicitous game of hide and seek or of
the non-separation of the two facets of femininity and masculinity
in him; it lies in a type of unique fantasized apprehension of genital
desire, which is fundamentally masturbatory.
I hope to show next time just how justified I am in orienting my
interpretations in this direction, in order to allow the subject to take
the next step forward.
January 28, 1 959
XI 23 1
SACRIFICING THE
TABOO QUEEN
Naturally, he adds, "I disagreed with this, but she was so disap
pointed I thought that I would masturbate her" [p. 1 33). He makes
232 a remark here about the fundamentally intransitive nature of the
verb "to masturbate" in English [p. 1 33). It is already in our interest
to realize that what is involved here is, of course, ma�turbation on
the part of the patient himself. Sharpe herself realizes this, although
she does not stress as directly as I do the fact that this is based on
the grammatical nature of the patient's remark.
Last time, I highlighted the value of an image that appears less
in the associations than in the narrative of the dream - namely,
the fold, as in the fold of a "hood."* And I showed that resorting
to the stock images taken into account by classical psychoanalytic
doctrine - even though these manifestly stem from experience -
perhaps leads analysts to force things a bit when these images are
made to serve as so many separate objects, without very carefully
situating their function in relation to the subject. I thus underscored
what is paradoxical in the overly hasty interpretation that this odd
appendix, this protrusion from the female genitalia, is a sign that
what we are dealing with here is the maternal phallus.
Such haste also led Sharpe to take another leap, it being so true
that, as opposed to what people say, one imprudent step can only be
corrected by another. We learn less from our mistakes than people
think, for the only way of saving ourselves from a mistake is to make
another one that compensates for it.
I am not saying that Sharpe is completely wrong. I am trying to
articulate better ways of proceeding, which might have allowed for
greater accuracy. With the caveat, of course, that we can never actu
ally confirm this since we will never have the experience with the
patient we would have to have in order to do so.
What is the next leap I mentioned? It concerns the phallus, less
that of his imagined partner in the dream than his own. The analyst
agrees that the dream has a masturbatory character to it, because
everything that comes out in the patient's speech corroborates this.
But the patient's phallus is immediately viewed by her to be an
instrument of aggression and destruction of an extremely primitive
type, such as we find in what we might call psychoanalytic imagery
[p. 143).
This is the direction in which Sharpe's thoughts run right from
the outset, even though she is far from communicating to him the
233 whole of her interpretation [pp. 144-5). In the first place, slre points
out to him elements of what she calls "omnipotence." Secondly, she
says that what appears in the dream is masturbation. And thirdly,
that this masturbation is omnipotent, in the sense that the patient's
phallus is a "biting and boring thing" [p. 146).
Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 193
mention it is not to bring in a notion that was beyond her ken, for
when she wrote this text, in 1 937, the British psychoanalytic scene
was dominated by discussions I have spoken to you about regard
ing the phallic phase and the phallic function in female sexuality,
especially the discussions that took place between Ernest Jones and
Joan Riviere, whose article "Womanliness as Masquerade" we have
explored here [in Seminar V, pp. 254-5].
Jones introduces a term at one point, which he considers neces
sary if we are to begin to understand what, in psychoanalysis, is
truly the most difficult thing to understand, not simply to bring into
play - namely, the castration complex. The word Jones introduces is
"aphanisis," a word he introduced into psychoanalytic terminology
in an interesting way. We cannot consider it to be absent from the
British scene, as a great deal was made of it at the time.
Jones understands this term to mean disappearance. We will see
further on what he means by that. But I am going to use the word in
an entirely different way for the time being - in short, in an impres
sionistic way - regarding what Sharpe presents us, that is, regarding
what is constantly found in the dream material and what surrounds
it, as well as in the patient's behavior.
The patient presents himself to her in a way that she describes
very prettily - namely, with a sort of profound absence that gives
235 her the sense that there is not a single one of his remarks or gestures
which has not been thoroughly thought out or which includes any
affect. He keeps his nose completely clean. Moreover, he does not
announce his arrival - he simply appears, and as soon as he appears
he is even more unfathomable than if he were not there.
Let us first consider what he brings up during that day's session
prior to recounting the dream.
The patient himself tells us that he is wondering what purpose his
little cough might serve [p. 1 3 1]. It is designed to make something,
which must be there behind the door, disappear. He does not know
what it is. He says so himself: regarding the analyst what could there
be there that would have to disappear? He recalls in this connection
that, in other circumstances, in another context, coughing served as
a warning: he coughed to tell a pair of lovers to separate, to move
apart, for the situation would otherwise have been embarrassing
when he entered, and so on and so forth.
What about the dream itself?
Here, too, we are in the presence of three people, for, above and
beyond his sexual partner and himself, there is his wife. She must
not be forgotten, even though the subject, after having mentioned
her once, says nothing further about her. What exactly does he do
with his partner? In a word, he slips away [ii se derobe].
Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 195
2 238
I will add that the more the stroking takes on the character of
pleasure that is detached, autonomous, and insistent - and even
verges on what is called in this case, more or less correctly, a certain
sadism - the more obvious this becomes. In effect, the fact that the
phallus is involved as a signifier in the relationship between the
subject and the other is such that it can be sought out in the realm
beyond the embracing of the other where every kind of standard
form, that is more or less accentuated in the sense of perversion,
begins. It is in this respect that, to the subject, to masturbate the
other subject is completely different from allowing his own phallus
to be grabbed by the other. This then allows us to posit that, to this
patient, masturbating the other is strictly equivalent to engaging in
masturbation himself.
I have shown you the meaning of the partner's actions that the
subject qualified with the phrase "to get my penis." They are almost
tantamount to checking. The point is to ensure that what lies
opposite is something terribly important to the subject, something
that certainly has the closest connection with the phallus; but these
actions show, too, that the phallus is not there, that it is something
that flees and slips away, not simply owing to the subject's will, but
owing to some structural feature.
This is what is truly in question here, and it colors everything that
comes up in his associations to the dream. We find it again both
when he is talking about his female friend who behaves so remark
ably when she imitates men's voices perfectly, and when discussing
this sort of incredible conman [escamoteur], this false nice guy whom
the subject remembers after all those years. With his unbelievable
gift of gab, this character offers him something that is again, oddly 241
enough, one thing instead of another - namely, an envelope in
which to wrap up something, but it is a bag made of a material that
is designed for some other purpose, it being designed to make a car
top ["hood" in the patient's 1930s' vocabulary]. And what is the bag
for? To put his golf clubs in.
To the patient, things always present themselves in a problematic
form. Regardless of what element is involved, it always takes on the
same character. Whatever presents itself is never altogether what it
seems to be; it is never the real deal.
Let us examine what comes immediately thereafter. Everything
that occurs to him is problematic in nature. Childhood memories
emerge suddenly. Long ago he had another compulsion, different
from the compulsive little cough just before his sessions. Why the
devil did he have to "collect leather straps"* and cut up his sister's
sandals?
200 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
this, and for good reason: in the final analysis, his only concern is
With not doing things. Doing things is not his thing! This is why he
says he is altogether incapable of doing anything, for fear of sue- 243
ceeding all too well, as the analyst points out.
This is one point, and not an insignificant one at that. But I
want to get to another point. Instead of the missing sentence, the
patient adds, "and there is no good thing in us" [p. 136]. This is a
total invention on his part. In The Book of Common Prayer we find
n'o such thing. We find instead, "there is no health in us." I believe
that the "good thing" that he substituted for it is what is truly at
work: the good object is not there. This is truly what is involved. He
oonfirms once again for us that what is at stake is the phallus.
It is very important to the subject to say that the good object is
not there. We again come across the expression, "it is not there"
[i.e., the good thing is not there in us]. It is never where we expect it
to be. It is assuredly a "good thing," which is of the utmost impor
tance to him, but it is no less clear that what he tends to show or
demonstrate is always one and the same thing - namely, that it is
tlever there. It is never where one could get it or take it. This is what
dominates all of the material.
He could not stop himself from cutting the leather straps of his
sister's sandals. In light of what I just said, it is possible that the
connection with the other compulsion, the cough, now seems less
surprising to you. The compulsion to cut has, in effect, a relation
with something that, like everyone else, we are only too happy to
associate with the theme of castration.
This is a very common psychoanalytic interpretation. If you read
Fenichel's work, you will see that boys who cut girls' braids off do
so because of their castration complex. But how can we know what
exactly is going on without considering each case in great detail? Is
it retaliation for castration that involves castrating someone other
than oneself? Or is it, on the contrary, the taming of castration by
subjecting the other to a castration that is not a true castration
and thus does not seem to be as dangerous as all that? Could it be
a domestication, as it were, or devaluation of castration, all the
more so in that it is always possible that the cut braids will grow
back- in other words, reassure you against castration? In short, one
could bring to this everything that the sum total of psychoanalytic 244
experience allows us to connect up with this theme.
If we force ourselves not to be hasty, and to maintain things at
the level at which we have formulated them heretofore, we will say
the following: there is no doubt but that there is some link with cas
tration here. It is obvious that castration is part, as it were, of the
context, and that the subject has some relation to castration. But
202 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
The analyst goes out on a limb when she says to the patient that the
phallus is somewhere very far back in you; it is part of an old rivalry
with your father; it is there at the crux of your primordial wishes for
omnipotence; it is there at the source of your fear of retaliation for
your own aggression. Nothing in the text allows us to articulate any
such thing.
Let us try to raise these questions ourselves and perhaps even
answer them a bit more brazenly than we might normally be wont
to.
It seems to me that we cannot react to a case study that was
written up and that we read in the same way as we talk to our stu
dents about their cases. If I were dealing with a student, I would
speak much more severely in such an instance. I would say, "What
could have possibly inspired you to say such a thing?" I would
inquire as to where the countertransference came in.
It may seem brazen to raise such concerns about the text of an
author who was, at that point in time, someone we would have
had good reason to lend credence to overall. I smiled to myself
245 when I wondered about this, because she struck me as a bit over
the top here. Well, one is never wrong, in the final analysis, to be
a bit overly audacious, for it sometimes happens that we find what
we are looking for in that way. And in this case I had to look prior
to finding. I mean that I had read the first few pages of Sharpe's
chapter somewhat distractedly - for, as usual, one never reads very
well - whereas there was something quite lovely there.
You recall the passage about the dead father, the father whom the
analyst cannot manage to bring back to life in the patient's memory.
She says that she had recently gotten things moving a bit such that
the patient marveled at the thought that he must have heard his
father speak when he was little. Right after that she notes that the
patient has the same difficulty with her: "He has no thoughts about
me."
That is something that might already have grabbed our attention.
Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 203
One might say that she misrecognizes on this occasion that, at the
level of speech, which is of primary importance in this case study,
it is her own intentions that are expressed in the term "corner."
She herself mentions "cornering him" [p. 127] in the text, before it
appears in the patient's discourse when, two sessions after the one in
which she provides the interpretation of the dream, he mentions, as
I have already indicated, that he finds it impossible in another game,
that of tennis, to corner his opponent and deliver the final blow
by sending a ball where his opponent cannot reach it. The analyst
shows her true colors here.
I am not, for all that, saying that the patient sees them. It is clear
that Sharpe is a good analyst.
She tells us in detail how she operates in this analysis. You may
have noticed, she says to her students, that it is a case in which I
247 make only the briefest of remarks or else I stay quiet. Why? Because
absolutely everything indicates to me that this patient's professed
wish to be helped implies the exact opposite - namely, that above
all, he wants to remain sheltered, with his little cover or car top [or:
hood, capote] over him.
To be under the hood* is a thoroughly fundamental position for
this patient. Sharpe senses that. Everything related to the effaced
memory of the pram revolves around the fact that he was "pinned
in bed." He also seems to have very precise notions about what
being tied up like that can lead to in a child, even though he can find
nothing in his memory that allows him to recall it. Yet he is assur
edly wedded to the position of being tied up.
The analyst is, therefore, far from allowing this countertransfer
ential element, which would be too interventionist and aggressive,
to appear in the game of chess. But my point is the following: it is
precisely because she so clearly senses the aggressive import of the
analytic game for this patient that she does not see its exact import.
Namely, that what is at stake has the closest relations with signifiers.
If we wonder where the phallus is, it is in this direction that we must
search for it.
Consider, if you will, the quadrangular schema on which we find
the subject, the other, the ego qua other's image, and the Other with
a capital 0 [the L schema]. Here the question is where the signifier
as such appears. The phallus is never where we expect it to be, but
is there all the same. It is there like the purloined letter, where one
least expects it and yet where everything points. To put it the way
the metaphor of the game of chess allows us to formulate it, I would
say that the subject does not want to lose his queen [dame] .
Let me explain. In his dream, the phallus is not what is present or
what the subject is looking at. That is not where the phallus is. The
Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 205
between the subject and his partner. This relationship is what must
be brought out at the moment at which it appears in the analysis.
This moment is the one at which the subject, with his little cough,
warns his analyst - if she had, as occurs in the dream, happened to
turn her bag inside out, as it were, or showed her cards - to turn it
right side in before he arrives; because were he to see that, were he to
see that there is nothing but a bag, he might lose everything.
The prudence the patient shows is exactly what keeps him in a
relationship to his desire that restrains him like a tightened strap,
like the pram-pinned* position of his childhood, and that can only
be fantasized. Namely, that he himself must be tied up, in a pram*
or elsewhere, truly squeezed and swaddled, so that the signifier or
image of his dreamed-of omnipotence can be elsewhere.
This is also how we must understand the whole discussion of
automobiles in which omnipotence plays a capital role.
Everyone senses the connection between power and these problem
atic instruments of our civilization, automobiles - their horsepower,
speed, and "peak of speed"* - and everyone obviously considers
them to be phallic equivalents, the backup potency of those who are
impotent. But at the same time everyone knows that automobiles
are coupled with their drivers and that cars are infinitely feminine
in nature. It is no accident that in French automobile is a feminine
noun. And we just so happen to give all kinds of little nicknames to
our cars that make them sound like partners of the fairer sex. The
patient himself makes problematic remarks on this topic; you recall
this one: "Strange how one speaks of the life of a car as if it were
human" [p. 135].
This is old hat, of course, but it is no less obvious that there is
something quite odd about automobiles - namely, the signifying
ambiguity which is such that they are simultaneously what protect
250 him, what strap him in, and what envelop him. In relation to him,
they have the exact same position as the protruding hood in the
dream - the same word is employed in both cases - this bizarre
sexual protuberance in which he happens to place his finger, and
which is, moreover, not red-striped but rather lined with red fabric
[p. 135]. I had underscored this before but poorly translated it.
Let us turn now to what his analyst tells him.
During the session in which he recounts the dream, she begins
to talk to him about his aggression. The next day, we learn that
what resulted from this was a curious manifestation on his part, the
nature of which she does not completely pick up on, and which one
might call psychosomatic: prior to entering the consulting room
that day, instead of a cough he experienced a "slight colicky pain"
[p. 146]. God only knows if he had to clench his sphincter at that
Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 207
Next time, I will show you what this "rule of three" is.
February 4, 1959
253 XII
I announced last time that today I would wrap up our study of the
dream that we have gone through quite thoroughly as regards its
interpretation, but I will be obliged to devote yet one more class to
it.
I will begin with a brief reminder.
It was dreamt by a patient who is a lawyer who has serious
difficulties in his profession. Ella Sharpe approaches things with
circumspection, the patient having every appearance of keeping
his nose clean, even though one cannot exactly call his behavior
rigid. She does not fail to underscore that everything he recounts is
thought out, not felt.
At the point they are at, he has a remarkable dream, which was
a turning point in the analysis. The patient boils it down into a
few words, even though it was, as he says, "a tremendous dream,"
so tremendous that, had he remembered it, he would never finish
recounting it. Only a fragment of it emerges, and this fragment
presents, to a certain degree, characteristics of a recurring dream - I
mean, a dream he has already had.
He undertook a journey, as he says, "with his wife around the
world" - I highlighted that - and he finds himself in Czechoslovakia.
This is the only point on which Sharpe tells us that she obtained
insufficient clarification, not having asked the patient what the w'ord
Czechoslovakia meant to him, and she regrets having failed to do
so. We, however, might have some thoughts about it.
"Sexual play with a woman in front of another woman," his
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 211
wife, occurs there [p. 132]. The woman with whom this sexual play
occurs adopts a dominant position with respect to him. Moreover, 254
she tries to maneuver in such a way as "to get [his] penis." He does
not mention this while recounting the dream, but it comes up in his
associations.
I mentioned the very specific nature of the verb "to get" in
English. To get is to obtain, but in all sorts of possible ways. "To
get" is a verb that is far less limited than obtenir [obtain] in French
- it is to obtain, catch, grasp, and finish off [en finir avec]. And if
the woman managed "to get [his] penis," that would mean she had
it\.
Nevertheless, his penis enters even less into action as the dream
ends on the following wish: given how disappointed the woman
was, he thought that she should masturbate. As I told you, this is
the secret meaning of that moment in the dream, for, in the patient's
telling of it, it manifests itself in the following form: the patient
thinks that he would be willing to "masturbate her."
There is, in fact, a true exploration of something that is presented
to us by the patient as "hoodlike,"* which is interpreted by Sharpe,
with a great deal of insistence and care, as being equivalent to a
hood. When we look closely, as we have, what should attract our
attention is that a female sexual organ is there and not a hood. It is
�'Sort of inside-out or prolapsed vagina, and it is as if the patient's
pseudo-masturbation were nothing but an attempt to verify that the
phallus is absent.
This is the sense in which I said that the imaginary structure,
the manifest articulation, should at least oblige us to limit a bit
the extension we give to the register of the signifier. This is in short
why I raise the question whether, by using a more prudent method,
which might be considered stricter, we cannot arrive at greater pre
cision in the interpretation.
Yet this cannot spare us from taking into account the structural
elements with which we have decided to familiarize ourselves.
Indeed, we must do so extensively enough that these signifiers allow
us to differentiate the meaning of each individual case. In doing so,
we see that the most particular cases are always those whose value is
the most universal.
Nothing included in this case study should be overlooked,
because what we want to do is no less than indicate in this case that 255
without which one cannot give the function of the phallus its true
position - namely, its character as a signifier.
212 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
1 1 There is, indeed, a relationship between the phallus and the Other
with a capital 0. But it is certainly not a relationship that places the
former beyond the latter, in the sense in which the phallus would be
the being of the Other with a capital 0 assuming someone raised
-
I will ask you to excuse the algebraic tone things will take on
today, but we must learn to set ideas out clearly, since, for some of
you, questions arise. In my notation, ($0a), something presents itself
as being a barred subject - namely, a desiring subject [or: subject of
desire, sujet du desir] - insofar as, in his relationship to the object,
he himself is profoundly called into question. This is what consti
tutes the specificity of his desire. And it is to the degree to which the
subject is a barred subject, insofar as he is a speaking subject, that
one can say that it is possible, under certain conditions, to designate
him with the phallic signifier [lui donner comme signifiant le phallus].
The subject both is and is not the phallus. He is it, because it is the
signifier with which language designates him, and he is not it inas
much as language and the law of language take it away from him.
In fact, these things do not take place at the same level. If the law
takes it away from him, it is precisely in order to make things work
out; it is because a certain choice is made at that moment. In the
final analysis, the law brings a definition, distribution, or change in
level into the situation. The law reminds the subject that he has it
or does not have it. But what happens in fact occurs entirely in the
interval between this signifying identification and this distribution
of roles: the subject is the phallus, but the subject, of course, is not
the phallus.
258 In the usage of the verb etre [to be] in French, there is a certain
slippage that the very form of the play of negation in speech allows
us to grasp in a formulation that I will emphasize, inasmuch as it
expresses what happens at the decisive moment, the one around
which the assumption [assomption] of castration revolves. The for
mulation is as follows: one can say that the subject both is and is not
the phallus, but "he is [also] not without having it."
It is in the inflection of "not being without" - it is around
the subjective assumption that is inflected between being and having
- that the reality of castration is played out. The central value
that the phallus takes on is based on the fact that, in a certain expe
rience, the subject's penis has been weighed in the balance against
the object, and has taken on a certain function as an equivalent or
standard in the relationship with the object. And one can say that,
up to a certain point, it is to the degree to which he gives up his
relationship to the phallus that the subject can possess the infinity of
objects that characterize the human world.
Note that the formulation, "he is not without having it," whose
modulation and stress I beg you to retain, can be found in other
forms in all languages - we will come back to this.
Now this is valid only for men. For women, relations to the
phallus and to the phallic phase, which has an essential function
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 215
her accounts thereof, one has a hard time grasping what the rela
tionship between image and symbol is supposed to be here.
Whatever the case may be, whether it is an image or a symbol, the
mother's body is assuredly a sort of One. The opposition between
image and symbol almost completely overlaps the philosophical
opposition between Being and the One laid out in Plato's famous
text, the Parmenides. Moreover, the child's relationship with its
mother is entirely centered around an apprehension of her unity or
totality.
Indeed, according to Klein, the child, as I have told you, appre
hends primordial objects as being contained, outside of himself,
260 in the mother's body. The latter presents itself to the child as the
universal container of all objects, both good and bad, which reside
there, if not in a chaotic state, at least in one of primal disorder. The
child's experience progressively teaches him to grasp the plurality of
these multiple relations and various fragmented objects in the unity
of the privileged object - that is, the maternal object - and this will
pave the way for him toward his own unity. What Klein believes is
essential to the child's development is this early shift from fragmen
tation to unity.
How can we formulate this in our algebra? Let us begin by noting
that there are obviously not just two terms here, but four. The pri
mordial relationship between the child and the mother's body is the
framework in which relations between the child and his own body
come to be inscribed.
I have for a long time been trying to explain these relations to you
with the notion of specular affect, inasmuch as this term designates
the structure of what is known as narcissistic affect. You know that
I refer in this context to a very early [originale] experience, which
occurs at a specific moment of development, and in which the
subject recognizes himself both as separate from the image of his
own body and as having a special relationship with that image. He
accedes to this specular relationship either owing to an experience
involving a mirror or in a certain transitive identificatory relation
ship in the course of games of bearing with the little other - the word
"little" indicating here the fact that it involves young comrades.
It is not with just any little others that the subject can have this
experience. Age plays a role here that I have stressed when I have
written about it. The comrades must be around the same age as the
child, indeed quite close to the same age, and their motor develop
ment must not go beyond a certain limit. Thus, the mother cannot
play this role for the child.
Eros or libido plays a special role here, in the sense that this
first relationship holds up only when it is linked to a second one.
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 217
The couple involving the child and the little other who represents
'liis own image to him [a-a'] becomes juxtaposed to a second
relationship in which this couple interferes and under which it
becomes subsumed. This second relationship, which is going to
come to regulate what happens in the specular couple [a-a'], is the
larger and more obscure relationship between the child - whose
primitive endeavors are motivated by need-based propensities [or:
'
(pre)disposition, tendances] - and the mother's body, insofar as the 26 1
latter is, in effect, the imaginary object of primal identification.
Our point of departure here thus includes two elements: on the
one hand, the subject in this primitive, not yet constituted state
witnessed by the unconstituted form in which the newborn's cry -
his first wailing, or his need-based calling for something - presents
itself, and, on the other hand, his mother's body, this universal
container which presents itself as a One at the level of the Other. It
is .the way in which relations between these two elements are estab
lished that regulates the relationship of the other two elements [a-a1
right from the outset. These latter elements are, on the one hand,
the subject insofar as he constitutes himself specularly - namely, as
an ego, and let us not forget that the ego is the other's image - and,
cm the other hand, a certain other who must be different from the
mother: the little other.
The first correspondences between the subject and his own iden
tity do not develop in a simple specular relationship. They develop
in a quadripartite relationship. Do not forget that all psychoanalytic
authors situate the locus of psychotic or parapsychotic anomalies -
which have an impact on the integration, at the borders of the bodily
image, of one or another term of the subject's autoerotic relations
with himself - in the central relationship between mother and child.
, One can easily conceptualize this with the help of the little schema
I have used in the past and that I recently recalled to mind, that of
the well-known concave mirror [see Figure 7.4]. It involves making
appear at the center of a spherical mirror, not the fantasy of a
flower, but a real image of a flower inside an actually existing vase.
This is achieved only if one looks on from a specific vantage point
that is situated in an area determined by lines extending from the
mirror's edges. This setup allows us to imagine what is involved in
the relationship between mother and child. Just as you must situate
yourself in a certain position with respect to the mirror to see the
illusion materialize [se realiser], it is inasmuch as the child identifies
with a certain position of his being within the mother's powers that
he comes into being [se realise].
This is underscored by everything I have said about the impor
tance of the first relations between mother and child. A child must
218 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
asserts that there can be something better than the mother's breast
- namely, the phallus.
She does not tell us why, however. The point remains mysteri
ous. I say that it all depends on the essential moment that I have
pointed to: the moment in child development that involves the birth
of metaphor.
Recall what I told you recently about the specific forms of
children's activity that disconcert adults and make them react awk
wardly, the example I gave you being of a child who - not content
to call what you always told him was called "dog" by a signifier he
himself picked, "bowwow" - decrees that dogs go meow and that
cats go bowwow.
This little tale was designed to illustrate for you the activity of
substitution wherein lies the entire mainspring of symbolic progress.
This occurs long before the child speaks in an articulated fashion,
and there is strictly speaking no articulation without substitution.
Nevertheless, if the field of substitutional activity goes far beyond
the passionate experience of a child who feels frustrated, the latter
is, in any case, included in the former. We can thus formalize this
by writing that the other's image [i(a)] is substituted for the subject
insofar as he is caught up in his annihilating passion - which is, in
this case, jealous passion.
i(a)
$
The subject who has been replaced [substitue] in this way finds
himself in a certain relationship to the object [a], but only insofar as
the latter replaces totality [i.e., the mother as I]. And it is here that
we enter into symbolic activity, strictly speaking, the activity that
makes human beings into speaking beings and defines all of their
future relations with the object.
i(a) a
0 ---
$ I
265 That said, how can these fundamental distinctions help us orient
ourselves in Ella Sharpe's case study if we preserve their thoroughly
primitive character? We must, on the contrary, use them to create
distinctions that will allow us to draw the maximum benefit from
facts that are given to us in the dream-experience and in the remarks
of the specific patient whose case we are analyzing.
This is what we are going to do now.
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 221
Ella Sharpe's case can be broached from many different angles. Let
us take it up, as far as possible, from the most salient and sympto
matic of angles.
We must simultaneously attempt to focus, at every instant, on the
relationship known as desire - that is, the relationship between the
subject and the object insofar as it is a relationship involving human
desire.
Let me remind you that we must always locate therein the relation
ship of $ across from little a, which is the formula of fantasy, and which
implies that the subject verges on being annihilated in his relationship
with the object. As the above schema indicates, this formula is itself
inscribed in a quadruple relationship, which shows us how the subject
manages to give form to what he himself is when he desires - namely, a
barred subject who is fundamentally pallid and anguished. He does so
by substituting the other's image, i(a) -namely, the successive identi
fications that will come to constitute the ego - for himself.
What do we find in the different symptomatic elements that can 266
be seen in the material Sharpe's patient presents us?
He tells us that he used to cut the straps of his sister's sandals.
'fhis comes up in the course of his associations to the dream, after
a certain number of comments are made and questions asked by
the analyst, which are quite minimal, but not negligible for all that,
which are simply designed to get him to go further, and which lead
him little by little, one thing leading to another, to this point. After
the hood and the fact that the hood is shaped like the female geni
talia, after the hood [or: top] of the car and the straps that serve to
hold it down, we arrive at the straps that he would cut off his sister's
sandals, without him being able to recall what purpose he intended
to use them for at the time, and without him being able to demon
strate that he had any need for them.
These are the exact same terms he uses about his car. In the
second session after the one in which he recounted the dream, he
tells his analyst that his garage man did not get his car back to him
but that he is not thinking of making a scene about it with the nice
guy. He has no need for the car, but he would like to have it, even
though it is not necessary to him; he says, 'I love it.'
· Here, it seems, we have two forms of the object with which the
subject has a relationship whose odd character he himself points out
by saying that they correspond to no need on his part.
I am not the one who is saying so. I am not saying that "modern
man has no need for his car," even though anyone who looks closely
222 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
at the matter will realize that this is all too obvious. The patient
himself says so. He says, in short, "I don't need my car. But I love
it, I desire it." And as you know, it is here that Sharpe, with a swift
reaction, like that of a hunter who has located her prey - namely, the
very object she is seeking - intervenes so energetically, but without
telling us, curiously enough, in what terms she did so.
Let us begin to describe what is at stake. And since I want to start
with what is simplest, what can be most easily situated in an equa
tion with which you are already long familiar, I would say that the
straps are little a. There was even a time at which he collected straps.
I will oblige myself to follow my own formulas to some degree,
since if I propose them, they must serve some purpose. The image
267 of a, i(a) , here is clearly his sister, about whom we have not spok"'"
much, as we never suspect how complicated it is to bring out ti.. ,,
slightest little thing, when it comes to explaining what we are dea
with.
His sister is eight years older than him. We know this becau
is mentioned in the case study. Sharpe does not make much m
this fact, but what is clear is that if she is eight years older than I
she was eleven when he was three, which is the age at which he w�·
his father.
A certain taste for the signifier has the advantage of making us
do a little arithmetic now and then. This is not illicit, fo
doubt but that, when they are young, children never sto1
their ages and their differences in age from each other
God, manage to forget that we are over fifty, and we b
for doing so, but children are very concerned with ktJ
ages. Having performed this little calculation, one nc
thing that is very striking: the patient tells us that his me
begin at age eleven. This is included in the case study c
the author does not make much of it.
This is not simply a random find that I am supplyi:
here, because, if you now reread the case study, you ,
it goes much further. Just before telling us that he has
memory of anything that happened before the age of elc
us about his female friend who is incredibly smart and cc
can do impersonations - that is, she can imitate anyon
men, in an amazing way, she being called on to do so b:
It is striking that he speaks about that just befor
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 223
wants with the hand, and even show that there is nothing up one's
sleeve, but as for him, there is no one there [personne]!
As for his fantasy, it is "What is there in the place where he
must not be?" There is in effect no one there. There is no one there
because, if there is a phallus, it is that of the dog who masturbated in
a room which he would have been very upset if someone had come
into. In any case, he is not there.
What do we find at the level of capital I? To be sure, there is
Ella Sharpe; she is not without having some relationship to it.
With a little cough, he warns her in advance de ne pas mettre
son doigt, e/le non plus, entre l'arbre et !'ecorce [not to meddle in
other people's affairs either; literally, not to put her finger between
the tree and the bark], to invert the usual formulation - in other
words, he warns her that if she is in the process of doing some
thing more or less suspect to herself, she must put all that away
before he arrives.
Ella Sharpe must, in short, be completely out of reach of the sub
ject's blows. This is what I expressed last time when I referred to the
comparison between analysis and a game of chess, with the follow
ing words: the subject does not want to lose his queen. He does not
want to lose his queen because his queen is undoubtedly the key to
all of this, because none of this can hold up unless nothing changes 271
as regards the queen, because omnipotence is connected with the
queen.
What is strange is that Sharpe sniffs out and sees the idea of
omnipotence everywhere - so much so that she says to the patient
that he believes himself to be omnipotent because he had "a tremen
dous dream," for example, even though he is incapable of coughing
up any more of it than the little scene that takes place on a road in
Czechoslovakia. But it is not the patient who is omnipotent. It is the
Other who is omnipotent and this is why the situation is especially
frightening to him.
Let us not forget that we are talking about a patient who cannot
manage to speak up for a defendant in court [plaider]. He cannot,
and this is very striking. Why can't he manage to speak up in court?
Is it because he must not affect the Other by assuming the place
where one always places oneself if one is going to speak up - namely,
the Other's place?
In other words, the Other - and in this case, we are talking about
women - must absolutely not be castrated. I mean that the Other
carries within itself the signifier that takes on all values. And this is
indeed how we should consider the phallus.
I am not the only one who does so. Read Chapter 11 of
Melanie Klein's book, The Psychoanalysis of Children, regarding
226 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
the development of little girls. Klein clearly says that all the needs
a subject has, and of every kind - oral, anal, and urethral - are cen
tered on the phallic signifier. Even before we can speak of genital
needs, the phallic signifier takes on all values and especially the
drive-related values and aggressive tendencies that the subject has
been able to develop.
Incapable of putting the phallic signifier into play, the phallic
signifier remaining inherent in the Other as such, this patient finds
himself broken down [like a car, en panne], as we see him.
But what is altogether striking is that, here, as in every case in
which we find ourselves presented with resistance on the patient's
part, this resistance is the analyst's resistance. Indeed, if there is
something that Sharpe seriously does not allow herself here, it is to
speak up [plaider]. In this case, where there is a barrier that is there
272 to be crossed, that she could cross, she stops herself from crossing
it. Why? She does not know why, but it is clear that she admits she
does so. She does not allow herself to cross this barrier because she
does not realize why the patient is keeping his nose clean, what he is
keeping his nose clean in order to defend against.
It is not, as she thinks, because of some supposed aggression he
feels toward his father. The father has been dead and gone for a long
time and she has had a terrible time trying to bring him ever so little
back to life in the analysis.
Nor is it because of some conflict regarding homosexuality. It is
not because he happens to be more or less courageous or aggressive
in the presence of people who mock him about his tennis playing
because he does not know how to deliver the final "shot."* It is not
about inciting the patient to use the phallus as a weapon. None of
that is germane here.
The patient is not yet at the point where he must agree to perceive
that women are castrated. I am not saying that women do not have
the phallus, which is what he demonstrates quite ironically in his
dream fantasy ffantasme de reve], but rather that the Other as such,
owing to the fact that it is included in the Other as language, is sub
jected to the following: women are without having it.
This is precisely what he cannot in any wise accept. To him,
women must not be without having it and this is why he cannot let
women risk it at any cost. Let us not forget that, in his dream, his
wife is on the sidelines. She is there, but apparently plays no role
whatsoever. He never even mentions that she is watching. It is there,
as it were, that the phallus is tucked away. The patient never has to
risk the phallus himself, because it is in play solely in a corner where
no one would ever dream of looking for it.
The patient does not go so far as to say that it is located in a
The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 227
in which we long ago heard the laughter of the Olympians echo. The
subject will be in the position of Vulcan who captures Mars and
Venus in one and the same net.
Everyone knows that the laughter of the gods who were assembled
on that occasion still resounds in our ears and in Homer's verses.
IMPOSSIBLE ACTION
Freud on Hamlet
A more fundamental framework
Oedipus and Hamlet
The first threads
Ophelia, barometer of desire
number of things about Hamlet that are not devoid of interest, the
study of Shakespeare's work having been at the crux of her training.
We will perhaps have the opportunity to come back to this.
I believe that taking up the topic of Hamlet can serve to bolster
our work here on the castration complex, work that aims to indicate
how it is concretely articulated as the work of analysis unfolds.
Today we will begin to clear the ground for such an undertaking.
We will begin by asking ourselves what Freud meant by taking up
Hamlet, and what is demonstrated by what later authors were able
to say about it.
Freud did, in fact, stress that Oedipal dreams are like offshoots of
the unconscious desires that are their primary source and that never
stop resurfacing. As for Sophocles' Oedipus and other versions of
the Oedipus tale in Greek tragedy, they are like the development
and fabrication of the unconscious desires that always emerge.
This is how things are articulated by Freud verbatim, who tells us
that in Hamlet the child's desire "remains repressed; and - just as
in the case of a neurosis - we only learn of its existence from its
Hemmungswirkungen, its inhibiting consequences."
- you are aware that this is a reference to Polonius, and that Hamlet
kills him while having a talk with his mother that is far from being
crucial - nothing in the play is ever crucial, except for its lethal
ending, for there, everything that had been put off until then in the
nexus of the action accumulates, in the form of cadavers, in a few
short moments -
You recall that the play opens with the appearance of this ghost on
the platform of Elsinore Castle before two guards who soon after
ward alert Hamlet to this.
At the same time, I would say that the whole question lies in what
is situated by Freud at the level of "scruples of conscience," which
is in short the point in his footnote that has been least exploited and
investigated.
Since these scruples of conscience are presented to us as being the
way in which we can express at the conscious level what remains
unconscious in "the hero's character," it seems legitimate all the
same to wonder how this is articulated in the unconscious. Scruples
of conscience can only be viewed as a symptomatic development.
Now one thing is clear, which is that a symptomatic development
is not located in the unconscious; it is located in the conscious,
constructed in some way by means of defense. We must thus ask
ourselves what in the unconscious corresponds to this conscious
structure, and this is precisely the question we are going to try to
answer.
Be that as it may, we see that it did not take Freud long to throw
a first bridge over the abyss that is Hamlet. In truth, it is striking
that Hamlet remained a total literary enigma until Freud came
along. Which does not mean that it is no longer an enigma, but we
at least have this first bridge. Other works are similarly enigmatic,
like Moliere's Misanthrope.
Let me read you the remainder of the paragraph:
I will read you the end of the note too, for in the space of two
short sentences, it paves the way for those who have since tried to
organize the whole of Shakespeare's work by considering its devel
opment as indicative of a personal problem involving repression.
285 One of whom was Ella Sharpe, who did so in her article on Hamlet
that came out in the International Journal ofPsychoanalysis and was
republished after her death in the volume of her Collected Papers.
It was certainly imprudent of her to schematize things in this way;
in any case her approach can be criticized from a methodological
standpoint, which is not to say that she discovered nothing of value.
Here is a bit more of the footnote:
For it can of course only be the poet's own mind which con
fronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a book on Shakespeare by
Georg Brandes (1 896) a statement that Hamlet was writtPn
Impossible Action 239
sense, the flip side of the other and perhaps its very foundation. I say
"perhaps" because this formulation does not suffice to constitute
them as such.
Whatever the case may be, one thing is clear, which serves us as
a guide as we broach the tragedy of Hamlet. Namely, that we are
going to try to refute the historical notion - which is a bit super
ficial all the same, clearly related to the atmosphere and style of
that time - that what we have in Hamlet is some sort of modernist
tale and that with respect to the incredible stature of Antiquity's
writers, Modern writers are but poor degenerates. This is truly a
nineteenth-century-type comment, and it is no accident that Freud
cites Georg Brandes; we will never know whether Freud was famil- 288
iar with Nietzsche's work at that time, even if it is probable. But we
might find this reference to Modern writers inadequate. Why would
Modern writers be more neurotic than those of Antiquity? It is, in
any case, a petitio principii. What we are trying to articulate should
go further than this petitio principii or than the simplistic explana-
'
tion that "things are going to pot because things are going to pot."
What we have before us is a work the first threads of which we are
going to begin to tease apart.
The first thread in Hamlet is that the father quite clearly knows
that he is dead as his brother Claudius wished, Claudius having
wanted to take his place. The crime is not hidden from him, but
from the world, a world that is represented on the stage. This is
a crucial point, without which the drama of Hamlet could not, of
course, even exist.
This point is brought out by Jones, in an article that is easy to
lay your hands on, "The Death of Hamlet's Father." Jones men
tions there that Shakespeare introduced an essential difference into
the original saga in which the king was assassinated in front of
everyone, owing to something having to do with his relations with
his wife. There, the king was murdered by his brother, but everyone
knew it, whereas in Hamlet the thing is hidden, but the father knows
it. This is what is important. Indeed, it is the father himself who
informs us of it.
Horatio comments to Hamlet: "There needs no ghost, my lord,
come from the grave I To tell us this" [I, v, 1 24--5 ]. Freud cites this
several times, it sounding a bit like a proverb. If it is the Oedipal
theme that is, in fact, at work here, we already know quite a bit
about it. But when Hamlet was written, not .much was yet known
about it. It is significant that the fable is designed in such a way that
the father does know.
This is an absolutely essential element, and it constitutes a major
difference in thread with respect to the first major tale, the tragedy
242 Seven Classes on Hamlet
of Oedipus. Oedipus does not know. But once he does, once he has
discovered everything, the drama moves into high gear, and contin
ues right up to his self-punishment - in other words, his resolving of
things. But the Oedipal crime is committed by Oedipus unwittingly
289 [dans l'inconscience]. In Hamlet, the Oedipal crime is known, and it
is known to its victim, a victim who emerges in order to bring it to
the subject's awareness [connaissance].
You can begin to see the pathway I am following and the method
I am adopting.
It is a classical method that proceeds by comparison, comparison
of different threads of a structure that is taken to be an articulated
whole; and nowhere is there more articulation than in what is
located in the realm of the signifier. I never stop highlighting the
very notion of articulation, and it is, in short, consubstantial with
the signifier. After all, we only speak of articulation in the world
because the signifier gives meaning to this term. Otherwise there is
nothing but continuity and discontinuity, but no articulation.
We will proceed by a sort of comparison of the homologous
threads in the two phases, Oedipus and Hamlet, just as Freud com
pares them, and in order to grasp how things cohere. If in one of the
two dramas we come across a note that is the exact opposite of that
found in the other play, we will try to see if, why, how, and to what
degree we find a corresponding modification in it. I assume that
bringing out these correlations will lead us to the junction [joint] of
the kind of causality at work in these two tragedies.
The initial idea is thus that what is most instructive to us are these
correlated modifications. Highlighting them and writing them out in
a quasi-algebraic way will allow us to group together the signifying
mainsprings and make them more or less utilizable.
In the dream about the dead father, we placed "he did not know"
on the upper line [of the graph]. In Hamlet, we place "he knew he
was dead" there, for the father knows he is dead in accordance with
the murderous wish, his brother's wish, that led him to his grave.
What is the relationship between Claudius and Hamlet like?
In the psychoanalytic tradition, people always go straight for
superimposed identifications. The most convenient concepts being
the least developed ones, God only knows where people will stop
in their use of these identifications. In the final analysis, we are told
that Claudius is a form of Hamlet. What he does is what Hamlet
wants to do. This is to jump the gun.
290 Indeed, in order to situate Hamlet's position with respect to his
desire, we are obliged to bring in the "scruples of conscience." This
gives rise, in the relationship between Hamlet and Claudius, to a
twofold position that is profoundly ambivalent. If Hamlet relates to
Impossible Action 243
\ I
I
\ I
I I
\
I I
\
AS HE WISHED / I
... .ii. _ _ _ _ _ _ .. , , d
(SOa)
l
Claudius as a rival, we see that this rivalry is quite odd and at one
remove, because Claudius is also in reality he who has done what
Hamlet would not have dared to do. Because of that, Claudius is
surrounded by some sort of mysterious protective shield that we
must strive to define.
If Hamlet leaves him unscathed, it is because, we are told, of
his scruples of conscience. But how much weight do they carry
with respect to what is forced on him once the ghost* has liter
ally ordered him to take revenge on Claudius for him? From the
tnoment of this initial encounter, Hamlet, in order to take action
against his father's murderer, who is also the usurper who dispos
sessed him, is armed with all the necessary feelings - a feeling of
having been usurped, of rivalry, and of vengeance - as well as with
the explicit order received from a father who is above all admired. 291
Surely, everything in Hamlet is aligned for him to act, and yet he
does not act.
This is obviously where the problem begins.
To move in the direction of solving it, we must arm ourselves
with the greatest simplicity; I mean that we are always led astray
when we employ ready-made keys instead of really grappling with
244 Seven Classes on Hamlet
all the acts that little by little make them into mothers - in the name
of,which Hamlet pushes Ophelia away in what seems to be a most
sa¢astic and cruel way.
There is an essential correlation between the development of
Hamlet's position with respect to Ophelia and what determines his
overall position with respect to desire.
Let us note in passing that we are presented with an interpretation
of this development by a wild, amateur psychoanalyst: Polonius,
Ophelia's father. He immediately locates the cause of Hamlet's
melancholia. According to Polonius, the problem is that although
Hamlet wrote love letters to Ophelia, she responded sharply to
th:em, following instructions that Polonius gave her, he adhering
�olely to his duty as a father. Stated otherwise, Polonius believes
that Hamlet is lovesick. One can always find an easy, external
interpretation of events; and Polonius, who is quite a caricature of
a character, is there to represent for us the ironic outcome this easy
approach deserves.
Although the change in Hamlet's sexual position is profound
and altogether crucial, no one doubts but that it is organized some
what differently. What is involved naturally concerns the relation
between Hamlet and what? His action, essentially. Hamlet needs to
take action and his entire position as a subject [or: subject position,
position de sujet] depends upon it.
We see, quite precisely, throughout this play that Hamlet is fun
damentally in a position, with respect to action, that the English
language designates with a word that is far more often used in 293
I;nglish than in French: procrastinating. In French we would say
ajournement (putting oft) or retardement (delaying). Indeed, this is
what is involved: Hamlet procrastinates, and he does so throughout
t:P,e play, making it the procrastination play par excellence.
We want to know both what it means that whenever he has the
opportunity to take the action in question, he puts it off, and what is
cleterminant at the end when he finally takes the plunge. The ques
tion that arises is that of the signification of the action he is expected
fo take. This is the point to be brought out regarding procrastina
tion, at least in this case.
What I have already pointed out to you indicates this adequately:
the action Hamlet is expected to take has nothing to do with an
Qedipal action - namely, revolt against his father or conflict with his
father, in the sense that it is creative in the psyche.
Hamlet's action is not the same as that of Oedipus. Oedipus'
action sustained Oedipus' life. It made him into the hero he was
prior to his fall, while he knew nothing. It gave the story's conclu
sion its dramatic character. Hamlet, on the other hand, knows that
246 Seven Classes on Hamlet
To die, to sleep -
To sleep - perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
- "This mortal coil"* is not exactly our envelope, but rather the sort
of twist of something that is wrapped around us -
What does Hamlet find himself faced with when the question "To
be, or not to be" arises? He must confront the place occupied by
what his father told him . And what his father told him as a ghost is
that he was taken by surprise "in the blossoms of [his] sin" [I, v, 76].
The son must deal with the place occupied by the Other's sin, a sin
that was not redeemed [paye] by the Other.
The one who knows here [the father] is someone who has not paid
[paye] for the crime of existing, unlike Oedipus who paid for a crime
he did not know he had committed. The consequences for the next
generation are not inconsequential, moreover, since Oedipus' two
sons dream only of killing each other with all the vigor and convic
tion one might desire. Things are altogether different in Hamlet's
case.
Hamlet can neither pay in his father's stead nor leave the debt
unpaid. In the final analysis, he must get the debt paid, but, in the
conditions in which he finds himself, the blow strikes him. Following
a dark plot, which we will discuss at length, it is only after Hamlet
has been wounded that he can strike, with the very weapon from
which he has received his mortal wound, the criminal who is there
within range - namely, Claudius.
The mainspring that constitutes the whole difficulty of the problem
Hamlet faces in assuming responsibility for his action [assumer son 295
acte], is the fact that both the father and son know - for both of
them, their eyes have been opened. We want to figure out by what
pathways Hamlet can take action. What are the roundabout path-
ways that will render possible an action that is in itself impossible,
owing to the fact that the Other knows? What are the pathways that
will finally allow Hamlet to accomplish what must be accomplished?
These are the pathways that must hold our interest; they are the
ones that we will find instructive.
This is the true problem that needed to be introduced today.
I must mention the end of the play, and point out to you how Hamlet
finally manages to take action. Let us not forget that, although he
manages to do so and although Claudius is struck dead at the end,
the job has nevertheless been seriously botched.
Hamlet has had to do nothing less than run through someone
whom he certainly cast into the abyss, as you will see - namely, his
friend and companion Laertes. Just before that, his mother acciden
tally poisoned herself with the very goblet that was supposed to have
served as a backup murder weapon in case the poisoned tip of the
foil did not touch Hamlet. It is only after a number of other victims
have fallen, and not before having been dealt a mortal blow himself,
that Hamlet can stab Claudius.
248 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Even though he does run him through, even though a sort of rec
tification of desire occurs in extremis that makes it possible for him
to act, there is nevertheless something here that raises a question for
us. How was the act accomplished? The key, what makes it such that
this incredible play has never been replaced by another, better one,
bears precisely on this point.
For, in short, what are these great mythical themes that creative
poets have been testing their mettle against throughout the ages?
This long series of variations for centuries upon centuries is nothing
but a sort of long approximation that is such that the myth, whose
every possibility has been exploited, ends up by entering, strictly
speaking, into our subjectivity and psychology. I maintain, and I
will unambiguously maintain - and in doing so, I believe that I am
296 following in Freud's footsteps - that poetic creations generate psy
chological creations more than they reflect them.
. The primordial relationship of rivalry between son and father has
always had something diffuse about it. As taken up by Shakespeare,
this is what gives Hamlet its depth and constitutes its veritable crux.
It is precisely because something - namely, castration - is missing
in the original, initial situation of the drama of Hamlet, insofar as
it is distinct from that of Oedipus, that things present themselves
in the play in the form of a slow zigzagging progression, following
many a detour, a slow birthing of the necessary castration.
It is precisely because something finally becomes equivalent to
what was missing, because something finally is realized, that Hamlet
takes the final action to which he succumbs. Things having gone so
far that he cannot live on, others, like Fortinbras, who are always
ready to receive an inheritance, will succeed him.
March 4, 1959
XIV 297
Myriad commentaries
A bird catcher's net
The unfolding of the play
The "play scene"*
The key point
during the 1 60 1 winter season, although that is not entirely clear; yet
it is what the most rigorous texts suggest. The famous first quarto
edition of the text at the time was virtually a "pirate" edition, for it
had not been reviewed by the author, but had been borrowed from
what were known as "prompt-books,"* booklets used by onstage
prompters. This edition - it is quite amusing to know these little
tidbits of literary history - remained unknown until 1 823 when
250 Seven Classes on Hamlet
298 someone finally got his hands on one of these grimy copies, grimy
because they were handled a great deal, probably having been used
during performances. The First Folio edition, the main edition of
Shakespeare's work, did not start coming out until after his death in
1 623, prior to the still larger edition in which the plays are divided
into acts; this explains the fact that the division into acts is far less
decisive and clear in Shakespeare's plays than in those by other
authors. In fact, it is not thought that Shakespeare ever dreamt of
dividing his plays into five acts. This is of some importance, because
we shall see how Hamlet is divided up.
The winter of 1 60 1 was two years before the death of Queen
Elizabeth, and we can view the turning point that Hamlet marks
between the two periods of Shakespeare's life as approximately
repeating, as it were, the drama related to the transition between
two eras in the kingdom, for the tone changes completely when
James I takes the throne. Something is already announced, as a
certain author once put it, that breaks the crystalline charm of the
reign of Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen," who had managed to
procure many long miraculous years of peace following what consti
tuted in the history of England, as in many other countries, a period
of chaos - chaos into which England promptly fell anew, with the
whole drama of the Puritan revolution.
In short, 1 60 1 already announces the death of the Queen, which
obviously could not have been foreseen, with the execution of her
lover, [Robert Devereux, the second] Earl of Essex; this took place
the same year as the first performance of the play. These historical
reference points are not irrelevant, and I am not the only one who
has tried to situate Hamlet in its historical context. But none of what
I just told you is highlighted by any psychoanalytic writers, even
though such reference points are quite important.
In truth, what has been written about Hamlet by psychoanalytic
authors can hardly be qualified as enlightening. But today I will
not critique what a certain type of analytic interpretation degener
ates into when it takes up Hamlet line by line. I have been trying to
find something of interest in it, but, as a matter of fact, one can say
nothing about it except that the more writers adopt this line-by-line
approach, the more their understanding of the whole text and of its
coherence dissipates.
I must say, too, about our Ella Sharpe, whom I make much of,
299 that in her paper* on Hamlet - which was, it is true, unfinished,*
having been discovered after her death - she greatly disappointed
me. I will nevertheless discuss her paper because it is indicative. It
so closely follows the exact same trend that we see dominating psy
choanalytic theory, a trend I have been led to explain and critique,
The Desire Trap 25 1
1 300
With his grand style of documentation and the solidity that char
acterizes his writings and highly distinguishes his contributions,
Ernest Jones provides a sort of summary of what he quite rightly
calls "Hamlet's mystery."
Now either you realize the magnitude of the question or you do
not. For those who do not, I am not going to repeat here what we
find in Jones's article. Look into it yourselves in one way or another.
I must tell you that the mass of writings on Hamlet is unequaled.
The abundance of literature on the play is nothing short of
incredible. More incredible still is the extraordinary range of
252 Seven Classes on Hamlet
murdered him and who at the same time seized the throne and the
father's wife, whom the father loved more than anything else. These
crimes must be atoned for through the most violent action: murder.
Not only is this purpose never called into question by Hamlet,
but I will read you passages in which he calls himself a coward,
while frothing at the mouth onstage, despairing of ever being able
to decide to take action. He never doubts this purpose for even a
moment. He does not call the validity of this task into question in
the slightest.
At the same period, there was a writer named Loening, whom
Jones makes much of, who decisively critiqued the theories put
forward by Klein and Werder. Let me mention in passing that Jones
gives Loening very high praise. He mentions several of Loening's
remarks that appear to me to be very insightful indeed.
303 But none of this is terribly important, since this approach is no
longer germane from the moment we consider the third direction,
the one Jones associates with psychoanalysis. The deliberateness
with which I am laying all of this out is necessary, as these earlier
views constitute the backdrop against which the mystery of Hamlet
presents itself to us.
The third conception is as follows: although Hamlet does not
doubt even for an instant that he must accomplish this task, for
some reason unknown to himself this task disgusts him. In other
words, the difficulty resides in the task itself, not in the subject or in
what is supposedly happening in the outside world (needless to say,
as regards the direction that plays up the outside world, there are
versions that are far more subtle than the one I mentioned earlier).
It is the task itself that is posited as essentially problematic.
Such is the very solid way in which Jones situates the psycho
analytic perspective on Hamlet, and it should serve us as a lesson in
method.
Jones shows, moreover, that the notion of an internal contradic
tion in the task itself was not invented by psychoanalysts; it was
already mentioned by Loening, if we are to lend credence to the
quotes from his work that Jones provides, and by a certain number
of other authors as well. These authors clearly saw that we can
grasp the problematic, conflictual nature of the task from certain
signs whose clear character no one needed psychoanalysis to notice:
namely, the myriad different, self-contradictory, and inconsistent
reasons Hamlet gives for deferring the task, for not carrying it out
when the opportunity presents itself. Long before psychoanalysis,
psychologists had already noticed the superstructural, rationalized,
and rationalizing nature of the reasons Hamlet gives, and Jones
brings this out very clearly.
The Desire Trap 255
Yet the question is to figure out wherein lies the conflict. Those
who have written in this vein allow us to glimpse that there is
something that presents itself on the surface, and then a sort of
underlying difficulty which - although it is not, strictly speaking,
articulated as unconscious - is considered to be deeper and partially
uncontrolled, not completely elucidated or perceived by the subject.
Jones critiques their theories with the considerable know-how we
generally find in his articles, which played a considerable role in
getting the notion of the unconscious itself accepted by a broad
swath of intellectuals.
On the one hand, Jones knows how to powerfully articulate what 304
these authors, some of whom are quite subtle, have argued to be the
underlying motives that are blocking Hamlet's action. They have,
for example, mentioned a juridical motive - namely, whether or not
he has the right to do what he is asked to do. Lord knows that these
German authors made no bones about appealing to all sorts of reg-
isters, all of this having taken place in a highly Hegelian era. On the
other hand, Jones can blithely wax ironic on this score, for he con
vincingly shows that the unconscious mainspring has nothing to do
with motives of a lofty or highly abstract kind, related to morality,
the State, or Absolute Knowledge, but that there must be something
far more radical and concrete at work.
It was around 1 909 that Freud's ideas first began to make it to
America, and Jones decided to write and publish an account of
Freud's theory of dreams, as we find it in his well-known lectures
at Clark University that were first published in English, if memory
serves me well.
But what we are concerned with here is Jones's study of Hamlet
that he publishes in 1 910, a study that is designed to lead us to the
following conclusion: "We thus reach the apparent paradox that
the hero, the poet, and the audience are all profoundly moved by
feelings due to a conflict of the source of which they are unaware"
["The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery,"
p. 86]. Even though this does not seem terribly substantial, it should
not stop us from realizingthat Jones's analysis of Hamlet truly goes
as far as anyone could have gone at that point in time, I believe,
in bringing out what we might call the mythical structure of the
Oedipus complex in the unfolding of the drama.
[On the topic of myth,] I must say that we are not all so enlightened
as to be able to laugh unconcernedly when we see Hamlet associated
with all kinds of people, including Telesphorus, Amphion, Moses,
Pharaoh, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Herod, everyone being lumped
together in the same package. Around 1 900, two authors published
an article entitled "Hamlet in Iran" in a well-known journal, in
256 Seven Classes on Hamlet
which they relate the myth of Hamlet to Iranian myths of the legend
of Pyrrhus, about which another writer made a great deal in an
unknown, inaccessible journal. It is essential to remark what sort of
plunge has been taken at this level, even if I am not saying that it is
the only one possible.
Indeed, although a psychological approach to the case of Hamlet
preceded the birth of psychoanalysis, as I mentioned, the first
305 psychoanalytic step consisted in transforming the psychological
approach, not by referring to some deeper form of psychology but
by referring to a mythical structure that is assumed to have the same
meaning for all human beings.
Nevertheless, something more is necessary, for Hamlet is not,
after all, the Pyrrhus saga, stories about Cyrus with Cambyses, or
about Perseus and his grandfather Acrisius.
It is something else. And we are going to see what that something
is.
Act I concerns what one might call the presentation of the problem.
And here, at the point of intersection, accumulation, and confusion
around which the play revolves, we must nevertheless come back
to something simple, which is the text. You are going to see that its
composition is worth keeping in mind, for it is not something amor
phous that wanders off in one direction and then in another.
As you will see, the play begins with a changing of the guard on
the platform of Elsinore Castle, and I must say that it is one of the
most masterful openings of all of Shakespeare's plays. Not all of
them are as masterful from the very moment the curtain rises.
The guard changes at midnight and there are some very cute,
striking things in the text. For example, it is the guard who comes to
relieve the others who asks "Who's there?" whereas it should be the
other way around. Indeed, everything happens abnormally, they are
all anxiety-ridden by something they are expecting, and this some
thing only takes forty lines to show up.
Although it is midnight when the changing of the guard occurs,
one o'clock sounds from a bell when the ghost appears. And from
the moment at which the ghost appears, things move very quickly,
but the action is interspersed with rather curious moments of
stagnation.
Immediately thereafter, there is a scene in which the king and
queen appear, and the king says that it is high time to set aside our
mourning; [it is as if he were saying,] "We can cry with one eye but
let us laugh with the other" ["With an auspicious and a dropping
eye"; I, ii, 1 1] . Hamlet, who is there, shows how revolted he is by the
swiftness of his mother's remarriage and the fact that she married
someone who, compared to his father, is totally inferior in character.
At every moment, we see in Hamlet's words an exaltation of his
father as a being on whom, as he says later,
308 It is quite a bit later in the play that this sentence is announced by
Hamlet, but he expresses similar sentiments right from this early
scene.
Hamlet presents himself as having the sense that he has been
betrayed and brought down by his mother's conduct - namely, her
hasty remarriage, two months, as we are told, after her husband's
death. We find this in the famous dialogue with Horatio:
3 311
. . . Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha! [II, ii, 556-61]
This gives us the general style of the play, which knocks our socks
off. And right after that, Hamlet talks about his current stepfather:
The important point here is that these insults are addressed both
to the person designated by the context - namely, Claudius - and to
Hamlet himself. This is the culminating moment of the second act.
Now what constitutes the crux of Hamlet's despair is that he
saw the actor, who was playing the part of Aeneas, crying as he
described the sad fate of Hecuba, before whom her husband Priam
was carved up into little pieces:
Indeed, after not having budged for a long time, with his dagger
poised above Priam, Pyrrhus takes a malicious pleasure, as the text
tells us, in cutting up Priam's body in front of this woman who is
described quite well, wrapping some sort of blanket around his raw
boned flanks.
The theme of the passage is that, despite the actor's crying,
paleness, and broken voice in speaking about Hecuba, Hecuba is
nothing to this actor. Thus there are people who can arrive at this
high pitch of emotion for something that in no wise concerns them.
This is what triggers Hamlet's despair, he feeling nothing of the sort.
One cannot overly stress the importance of this passage in pre
senting what will come afterward - namely, the play scene. Hamlet
has recourse to it because he is in some sense caught up in its mood
and he seems to suddenly perceive what can be achieved with it.
What leads him to it? There is certainly a rational motive here,
which is to suss out the king's conscience. In order to do so, Hamlet
is going to have the play performed in front of the king, with a few
changes introduced by himself, so as to observe the king's emotions
and get him to betray himself.
And this is in fact what happens. At a certain point, the king
can no longer stand it. The way in which he committed the crime is
portrayed so precisely onstage, Hamlet providing a running com
mentary on it, that the king abruptly cries: "Lights, lights, lights!"
and bolts out noisily. Hamlet says to Horatio that there is no longer
any doubt [as to Claudius' guilt].
313 The play scene i s thus essential and I am not the first psycho-
analyst to have raised questions as to its function. Otto Rank did
so before me in his article "Das 'Schauspie/' in Hamlet," which
came out in Psychoanalytische Beitriige zur Mythenforschung in
The Desire Trap 263
Things are not all that simple here, and the third act does not end
without the consequences of this articulation appearing in the fol
lowing form: Hamlet is urgently summoned to his mother's side,
she, naturally, being unable to take it any longer. These are the very
words she uses: "O Hamlet, speak no more" [Ill, iv, 90].
As Hamlet is walking toward his mother's apartments, he sees
Claudius moving, if not toward an admission of guilt [resipiscence],
at least toward repentance [repentir]. This is the so-called scene of 314
the "prayer of repentance" [Ill, iii, 76]. This man who has, in some
sense, been caught in the very web of what he continues to possess
- namely, the fruits of his crime - raises up to God some kind of
prayer that he may have the strength to find a way out of it. Hamlet,
stumbling upon the king when he is literally on his knees and does
not see him, has him at his mercy, revenge being at arm's length.
This is where he stops.
If I kill him now, he says to himself, won't he go straight to
heaven? Hamlet's father had clearly stressed that he was suffering
all the torments of some sort of hell or purgatory. Wouldn't Hamlet
264 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Here he enjoins her to begin to break her habit and not sleep that
night with Claudius. It is all put quite crudely, marvelously so. As
you will see, he tells her, it will get easier and easier after that.
The Desire Trap 265
There are two lines that must, it seems to me, be pointed out, for
they echo each other, and everything is going to revolve around
'them.
• At a certain moment, in the course of the play scene, poor Ophelia,
about whom I have not yet said much, tells Hamlet that he is doing
a fine job playing the part of the chorus - in other words, that he is
giving a good running commentary on the play. He responds:
J !
We see Hamlet and Laertes disappear into the hole. They grapple
with each other for a while down there. People finally separate them
and pull them out. This is what would be depicted in the painting: a
hole from which we would see things escaping.
We will see what this might mean next time.
March 1 1 , 1 959
xv 319
else that has been written on the subject of Hamlet by the analytic
community.
320 Jones points out highly pertinent things, such as the fact that
Hamlet is not a real person, which is just plain common sense. What
can it then mean to raise the most profound questions about his
character? This point is perhaps worth dwelling on a bit more seri
ously than people ordinarily do.
I am going to begin today by doing so.
Hamlet is the role par excellence, and that people also talk about
this person's Hamlet and that person's Hamlet - there are as many
Hamlets as there are actors of a certain caliber.
But this goes beyond simply noting a range of Hamlets.
I assume that certain people were a bit put out by all the hubbub
there was around Shakespeare's tri-centennial in 1 864, there having
been a resurgence of Shakespearean themes and a passionate revival
of his work on the part of the entire British literary establishment.
And in 1 9 1 7, John Robertson, in his Mystery of Hamlet, actually
voiced the opinion that Hamlet was, strictly speaking, vacuous; that
it did not hold water; that there is no key to Hamlet as a character;
and that Shakespeare had done what he could to patch up Hamlet,
which was attributed to an author named Kyd, and had already
been performed a dozen years before the autumn of 1 60 1 when we
are more or less certain that Shakespeare's Hamlet showed for the
first time. Philological exploration has, moreover, gone quite far in
that direction since 1 9 1 7 .
The Austrian playwright Grillparzer - to whom Freud refers in
passing, which is significant, and about whom Jones speaks at the
end of the second chapter of his book - goes so far as to articulate
in no uncertain terms that the reason for Hamlet's success is its
"impenetrability." It is, admittedly, a rather curious opinion; in any
case, one cannot deny that it is a strictly anti-Aristotelian opinion,
insofar as Aristotle considers the hero's similarity, omoios, to us as
what accounts for the effect of both comedy and tragedy.
Nevertheless, the fact that such varied things can be said about
Hamlet is worth pondering.
Let me add that we find here a whole gamut of differing opinions,
that present a whole series of nuances. It is not the same thing to
say that it is the impenetrability of Hamlet that makes for its success
as it is to say that Hamlet is a failure as a play, as is maintained by
no less than T. S. Eliot, who, in a certain milieu, is considered to be
more or less the greatest modern English poet. According to Eliot, 322
Shakespeare was not equal to the task of dealing with his hero. If
Hamlet is someone who is unequal to the task he is supposed to
perform, Shakespeare was just as unequal to the task of articulating
Hamlet's role.
These are opinions that one might well consider to be problem
atic. I am enumerating them for you in order to lead you toward
what is at stake. I believe that the most nuanced opinion is the most
accurate: there is in the relationship between Hamlet and we who
apprehend it, whether as readers or spectators, a phenomenon char
acterized by illusion.
To say this is quite different from saying that Hamlet is simply
272 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Let us leave the hero to one side. If you follow me in the pathways
along which I am trying to lead you, you will see that he is in fact
strictly identical to words - above all, when we begin to sense that,
in Hamlet, what gives our hero his highest dramatic value is that he
is a mode of discourse. This is the second handhold that I will ask
you to latch onto. This phenomenon is of the same ilk as the aspect
that eludes the grasp of everything we can say regarding his consist
ency. In other words, Hamlet proves to be an exemplary work here.
The way in which a work touches us, and most profoundly so -
that is, at the unconscious level - has to do with its composition and
organization. Although there is no doubt but that we get caught up
in it at the level of the unconscious, it is not because of the presence
of something in front of us that can really have an unconscious. I
mean that, as opposed to what people think, we are not dealing with
the poet's unconscious. His unconscious undoubtedly manifests
itself in several traces in the work that are not deliberate, such as
slips and symbolic elements that went unnoticed by the poet, but
this is not what we consider to be of major interest.
One can find a number of such traces in Hamlet. This is what
Ella Sharpe tried to do, as I told you last time. She tried to root 324
out, here and there, traces of some sort of fixation on feminine or
oral metaphors in Hamlet's character. I assure you that, as regards
the problem Hamlet poses, this truly seems to be secondary and
almost childish, without, of course, being absolutely of no interest
whatsoever.
When you go looking in this way, from this perspective, for any
thing in a work that can tell you something about the author, you
are engaging in a biographical investigation about him rather than
analyzing the import of the work as such. If Hamlet is of major
importance to us, it is because its structural value is equivalent to
that of Oedipus. What interests us and can allow us to structure
certain problems is obviously based on the play's deepest plot, the
whole of the tragedy, and its articulation as such. This is obviously
something other than a fleeting revelation by the author about
himself.
This is what I am in the process of emphasizing. The work is of
importance to us owing to its organization - that is, owing to the
superimposed planes [plans] this organization brings with it within
which the true dimension of human subjectivity can find its place.
If you will allow me to provide a metaphor here, I would say that
in order to give its full depth to a play, as one would to a theatre
hall or to a set onstage, we need to have multiple superimposed sets
[plans], side .struts [portants], and a whole machinery [of pulleys and
ropes, for example]. It is within the depth that is thus created that
274 Seven Classes on Hamlet
2 329
his mother and keep her for himself, both of which must drive him
in the same direction - to kill Claudius. How could two positive
things zero out? It is quite odd.
I realize that this sometimes happens. I encountered a very fine
example of this when I broke my leg recently: you shorten one leg,
332 then you shorten the other leg, and in the end there is no more short
ening. It is a very fine exercise for us, for we deal with things like
this. Yet is that what is involved here?
I do not think so. If we thought it was, we would wind up in an
illusory dialectic and content ourselves with a schema that would,
after all, only be justified, no doubt, by the fact that there is this
character named Hamlet and we feel we have to come up with some
explanation for him. The fact remains, all the same, that we have
put our finger on something essential here.
There is something that makes Hamlet's action difficult for him,
that makes his task repugnant to him, and that thrusts him into a
problematic position with respect to his own action; and this some
thing, this x, is his desire. The impure nature of this desire plays an
essential role, but it does so unbeknownst to Hamlet. In some sense,
it is inasmuch as his action is not disinterested, not motivated in
some Kantian way, that Hamlet cannot carry it out.
I believe that this is something we can in fact assert. Let us not,
however, forget that it was pretty much known prior to psycho
analytic investigation. We have traces of this - and this is partly
why Jones's bibliography is of interest, for it shows us this - in the
works of certain authors who glimpsed this in writings around 1 880
or 1 890, long before Freud began to articulate the Odipuskomplex.
Nevertheless, I believe that we can analytically formulate some
thing more accurate than these authors did, and go further than
what the theories psychoanalysts have provided on this topic boil
down to. In order to do so, we need but carefully read the text of
the play.
When we do so, we cannot fail to realize that what Hamlet is
constantly dealing or grappling with is a desire which is far from
being his own. As it is situated in the play, it is the desire, not for
his mother, but a/his mother - that is, it is his mother's desire. That
alone is what is at work.
The pivotal point is his encounter with his mother after the "play
scene."* I would have to read the whole scene with you.
Hamlet has had a play performed that has had an effect on the
king's conscience. As everyone grows more and more anxious about
Hamlet's intentions, it is decided that he will be asked to have a
333 talk with his mother. This is exactly what he wants. He is going to
take the opportunity, he says, to twist the knife in the wound - he
The Mother's Desire 28 1
explicitly mentions daggers [III, ii, 381] - in his mother's heart. Then
we have a long scene, which is a theatrical climax, the closet scene
about which I said last time that it is virtually unbearable to read, in
which he pathetically implores his mother to sit up and take notice
of what she is doing.
I am sorry I cannot read the whole scene with you here, but please
do so yourselves, pen in hand, as one does in school. Hamlet says to
her, 'What the heck kind of life are you leading? You're no spring
chicken anymore, you should calm down a bit!' These are the sorts
of things he says to her in his admirable language. They are things
we cannot believe anyone would ever say, and that could not be said
in any more penetrating a manner; they are things that could not
correspond any better to what, in effect, Hamlet has rushed to say
to his mother - things that are designed to break her heart and that
she experiences as such, as she herself says to him: "O Hamlet, thou
hast cleft my heart in twain" [III, iv, 1 57]. And she literally groans
under the pressure.
The mother is at least forty-five years old at this point. We are
more or less certain that Hamlet is thirty. This is debatable, but
in the graveyard scene there is an indication from which it can be
deduced, for Hamlet remembers poor Yorick who died about thirty
years ago and who kissed him on the lips. It is important to keep in
mind that Hamlet is not some naive young man.
Back, now, to the closet scene. Hamlet compares his father to
Hyperion -
- and next to him we have this piece of rubbish, "A king of shreds
and patches" [III, iv, 1 03], a conman or pimp with whom you are up
to your ears in mud. This is what his speech is about, and it is worth
articulating. You will see further on what is at stake. But, whatever
the case may be, it is about his mother's desire, and about a plea on
Hamlet's part, which is a demand of the following sort: get hold of
yourself, get control of yourself, follow - as I told you last time -
the pathway of good manners, begin by no longer sleeping with my
uncle. He says it that directly. And everyone knows, he says, that
appetite comes with eating, and that this devil, habit, which ties us
to the worst possible things, can also work in the opposite way: once
you start behaving better, it will get easier and easier.
What do we see here if not the articulation of a demand which is 334
manifestly made by Hamlet in the name of something that is at the
level, not simply of the law, but of qignity, and which is expressed
282 Seven Classes on Hamlet
with force, vigor, and even cruelty - the least one can say about it is
that it leads to discomfort.
The point they arrive at is one where the mother is literally
panting, so much so that people have wondered if the ghost that
reappears in the closet is not there in order to say to Hamlet
'Tallyho, tallyho! Go on!' But in a certain respect the ghost also
calls Hamlet to order; he protects the mother against some sort of
overflowing aggression on the son's part, before which she herself
momentarily trembles: "What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder
me?" [III, iv, 22]. How far will you go? His father reminds him to
"step between her and her fighting soul!" [III, iv, 1 14].
At the climax of the scene Hamlet suddenly backs down and says
to her, now that I have said all that, do as you like and go recount
all of that to Uncle Claudius. You're going to allow him to give you
a little kiss on the cheek, a little tickle on the neck, a little scratch on
the stomach, and all will end as usual in a complete shambles. This
is exactly what Hamlet says.
We are following the oscillating motion we see in Hamlet here. He
storms, he insults, he implores, and then his discourse collapses - he
gives up. We see in his very words a disappearance or vanishing of
his appeal when he consents to his mother's desire, laying down his
arms before something that seems ineluctable.
His mother's desire here takes on anew for him the value of some
thing that can in no way be dominated, moved, or eliminated.
'
'
�
Figure 1 5 . 1 : The interrogative hook
shapes him - that is, within this already structured world? He must
orient himself therein, locate himself therein. The Other's demand
having necessarily fragmented and fractured him, if he is to be
able to locate himself, he must go through a fundamental stage in
which what becomes his discourse is taken beyond the Other. It is
there that the subject questions himself about what is known as his
"will,"* his own will - namely, about what is the most problematic
for him, as we analysts know - that is, what he truly desires. The
subject must go beyond the necessities of demand inasmuch as he
seeks to find anew [retrouver] his desire in its ingenuous nature.
How can desire be refound? This is a problem we always have to 336
deal with. In other words, what happens beyond the Other, at the
upper level of the graph?
We find there the interrogative hook that I have drawn here,
L1
Figure 1 5.3: The line of desire
The Mother's Desire 285
such. Call it conscious or preconscious - for the time being I will not 337
go into any further details about it.
But what does the graph tell us about desire? Desire is an x, and
that x is situated somewhere on the line that returns from the uncon
scious code [$OD] - in the opposite direction from the intentional
line which is across from it - namely, the return segment: ($0D)-7d.
Desire [d] is there, floating somewhere in what lies beyond the Other
[A].
Yet we also know that desire is subjected to a certain regulation.
The latter is represented for us here by the height at which it is fixated
[hauteur defixation], as it were, at the level of a determinate point of
the line which, returning from the unconscious message, S(A), goes
in the direction of s(A), the Other's message at the imaginary level.
This line stops midway at ($0a), for it is fantasy that regulates the
height at which desire is fixated and determines its location.
You will note in passing that the relationship between desire and
fantasy is homologous to the relationship between the ego [m for
moz] and the image of the other [i(a) ; see Figure 1 .4].
Let us now follow the whole of the circuit indicated by the dotted 338
line, that is, the unconscious circuit.
It begins on the right, at the extremity of the unconscious vector,
286 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Hamlet sees Laertes jump into the grave in order to embrace his
sister, and he jumps in after him to do the same. I must say that we
might well form curious ideas about what must be happening in the
grave, and I suggested this to you last time with my little imaginary
painting. Stated otherwise, Hamlet proceeds by the pathway of
mourning, but it is a type of mourning that is adopted in the narcis
sistic relationship that obtains between m, the ego, and the image of
the other, i(a) .
The backdrop is this scene in which Hamlet suddenly sees the
passionate relationship of a subject with an object, this relationship
being manifested by someone else [Laertes]. This scene grabs him
and offers him a prop by which his own relationship as a subject, $,
with Ophelia - little object a, which had been rejected owing to the
confusion or compounding of objects - is suddenly re-established.
The Mother's Desire 289
THERE IS NO OTHER OF
THE OTHER
'Give me my desire!' This is the meaning I told you Hamlet has for
all those - whether critics, actors, or spectators - who take it up.
This is so, as I also said, because of the exceptional and brilliant
structural rigor the Hamlet theme reaches in this play, after an
obscure development that began in the twelfth and thirteenth centu
ries with Saxo Grammaticus, continued on in the novelistic version
by Belleforest, and then, no doubt, in a sketch by Kyd. There was
another sketch by Shakespeare himself, it seems, before it arrived at
the form in which we have it today.
This form is characterized, in my view, using the method we
employ here, by something that I call structure.
I am trying to give you a key to this structure that allows you to
orient yourselves with complete confidence - namely, the topologi
cal shape that I call the graph and that we might call a gramma [or:
writing, letter, or element with which terms are formed, gramme].
the subject Western philosophy has been talking about since there
has been a theory of knowledge; a subject who is in no wise the uni
versal prop of objects, but who is in some sense the negative of that
subject and his ubiquitous prop; a subject insofar as he speaks, and
insofar as he is structured in a complex relationship with the signi
fier, the very relationship we are trying to formulate here with the
help of the graph.
To trace it out once again, the intersection of demand's intention
and the signifying chain occurs for the first time at point A, which
we have defined as the Other with a capital 0, qua locus of truth.
This is the locus in which speech is situated. Taking up its place
there, speech establishes the order of truth, an order that is evoked
and invoked whenever the subject articulates something, whenever
he speaks. Indeed, speech does something that is different from all
the immanent forms of captivation of one [person] with respect to
another, since it establishes a third element - namely, the locus of
the Other in which speech is inscribed as truth even when it lies.
Nothing in the imaginary register can be equated with that.
This discourse for the Other, or reference to the Other, extends
beyond the Other, inasmuch as it is taken up by the subject on the
basis of the Other in order to constitute the question, "What do I
want?" Better stated, the question is addressed to the subject here,
and in an already inverted form: "What do you want?"
Beyond alienated demand - in the system of discourse that is
located at A, residing in the locus of the Other - the subject, pro
pelling himself, wonders what he is as a subject. What must he
349 encounter beyond the locus of truth? Beyond the locus of truth, he
must encounter what the very genius, not of language, but of the
extreme metaphor that tends to be formulated when we are faced
with certain significant spectacles, calls by a name that we will rec
ognize here in passing: the moment [literally: hour, heure] of truth.
In an era in which all of philosophy has taken the path of articu
lating what links time [temps] with being, let us not forget that past,
present, and future, the constitutive times [or: tenses, temps] of tem
porality, are those of grammar. The notion that time is mapped only
with respect to the act of speaking is quite elementary. The present
is the moment at which I am speaking, and nothing else. It is strictly
impossible for us to conceptualize a temporality in the animal
dimension - in other words, in the dimension of appetite. Even the
ABCs of temporality require the structure of language.
In going beyond the Other - in this discourse which is no longer
a discourse for the Other, but the Other's discourse, strictly speak
ing, in which the dotted [or: discontinuous or broken, brisee] line
of unconscious signifiers is constituted, in this Other in which the
There is No Other of the Other 295
2 352
I already symbolized this answer for you because I was forced to,
owing to which I asked you to lend me credence. It is, in short, the
message [S(A)] at the point at which it is constituted on the upper
line, that of the unconscious.
But it is easier and more honest to ask someone to lend you
credence regarding something which at the outset has no meaning
whatsoever, for that does not tie your hands in any way, except that
it perhaps requires you to seek out this meaning, which nevertheless
leaves you free to create it by yourself.
I began to articulate this answer in the following form. First of all,
we have capital S, which stands for "signifier. " This already distin
guishes the answer at the level of the upper line from the answer at
the level of the lower line, which is written with a lowercase s, stand
ing for "signified."
In effect, at the level of simple discourse, the meaning of what we
meant is shaped by the speech that unfolds at the level of the Other.
The answer is thus always, with respect to this speech, the Other's
signified, s(A). But there is something beyond simple discourse
where the subject asks himself the question, "Who is speaking?"
"Who meant this or that at the level of the Other?" "What have I, in
the final analysis, become in all of that?" At this level, the answer is,
as I told you, the signifier of the Other with a bar through it: S(A).
There are a thousand ways to begin to discuss what this symbol
includes, but since we are talking about Hamlet, we will choose the
clear, obvious, emotional, and dramatic pathway today. It is fur
nished to us by Hamlet, and the value of the play is that it allows us
to accede to the meaning of S(A).
The meaning of what Hamlet learns from his father is right in
front of our noses and very clear indeed. It is the irremediable, abso
lute, unfathomable betrayal of love - of the purest love, the love this
king had. Like all men, this king may, of course, have been a serious
rascal, but with his wife, in any case, he went so far as to shield her
298 Seven Classes on Hamlet
face from "the winds of heaven" [I, ii, 141] - at least if we are to take
Hamlet's word for it. The meaning of what Hamlet learns from his
353 father is the absolute duplicity of what had seemed to Hamlet to be
the very epitome and essence of beauty and truth.
The answer lies there. Hamlet's truth is a hopeless truth. There is
no trace in the whole play of an ascension toward something that
might lie beyond this, some sort of redemption. We are told that the
first encounter [was with what] came from hell. Hamlet is, in effect,
situated in the infernal relationship to the Acheron, which Freud
chose to move, since he was unable to bend the higher powers to
his will.
Nothing is more clear, simple, or obvious, and it is nevertheless
quite curious to see that certain writers barely highlight this regard
ing Hamlet, out of some sort of sense of propriety - one must not
alarm sensitive souls, no doubt.
But however painful this answer may be, I am only giving it to
you as a single step forward in the realm of what is sensed or felt.
For any conclusion or verdict, as radically as it may take on the
guise of what is known as pessimism, is nevertheless designed to cast
a veil over what is at stake.
We must be able to formulate this answer in a way that homes in
more closely on what led me to choose this abbreviation, S(A). This
abbreviation does not imply that whatever happens at the level of
A is of no value whatsoever - otherwise stated, that all truth is fal
lacious. This is the kind of comment that can make people laugh in
those amusing postwar periods, when people come up, for example,
with things like the philosophy of the absurd, which is appreciated
above all in underground nightclubs [caves]. Let us try to articulate
something more serious, or lighter in tone.
I believe that the moment has come to deliver up to you what,
in essence, this abbreviation means, even though you are likely to
think I am coming at it from a rather peculiar angle. Still, I do not
believe it to be a contingent one.
Barred A means the following. At A - which is not a being, but
rather the locus of speech, the locus where the whole system of signi
fiers, that is, a whole language, resides in a developed or enveloped
form - something is missing. What is missing can only be a signifier,
hence the S. The formulation that gives S(A) its most radical value is
as follows: the signifier that is missing at the level of the Other.
This is the big secret of psychoanalysis, if I may say so myself. The
big secret is that there is no Other of the Other.
354 Indeed, psychoanalytic experience reveals to us that the subject
who speaks is necessarily structured in a way that distinguishes him
from the perennial subject, even if the latter has been revamped in
There is No Other of the Other 299
356 3
quite in love, but who is also, it must be said, rather nutty, even if
he is a good man. In order to win his heart, a girl who loves him
approaches him - even though nothing in his behavior calls his
interest in women into question, since he is in love with a woman -
disguised as a boy, which is, all the same, an odd way to get oneself
appreciated as a girl. I am not giving you these details at random,
but because of what they contribute to the creation of a character
whom I am going to introduce to you, Ophelia.
This disguised girl, Viola, is a creation that predates Ophelia.
Twelfth Night precedes the writing of Hamlet by about two years. We
,have here an example of the way in which the women Shakespeare
created come in succession and are transformed, their truly immor
tally poetic nature manifesting a whole facet of his genius. They are,
as you know, among the most fascinating, attractive, captivating,
and simultaneously equivocal women in literature. The boy-girl or
girl-boy is quite a typical creation here, and a feature appears in it
that is going to introduce us to our topic today, introduce us to the
next step we are going to take - namely, the role of the object in
desire.
302 Seven Classes on Hamlet
You tell her so. Must she not then be answered? [II, iv, 91]
'You must not, thus, hold against others what you yourself would
certainly do.' The Duke, who is blind and stuck in the enigma,
358 addresses a whole speech to her about the difference between
woman's desire and man's desire:
that it took him forever to see - that there is someone who plays the
role of Ophelia in Belleforest's tale. In Belleforest's text we are just
as perplexed by what happens to Hamlet - namely, that he plainly
seems to be crazy. We are not very reassured, for it is clear that this
madman nevertheless knows rather well what he wants, and what he
wants is what we do not know - it is many things. What he wants is
a question for all the other characters.
He is sent a prostitute who, drawing him into the deepest depths
of the woods, is supposed to get him to reveal his innermost
thoughts while someone else eavesdrops, someone who will then
know a bit more about what he wants. The strategy fails, as it
should, thanks, I believe, to the girl's love for him. What is clear is
that the cretin in question was thrilled to come across this sort of
arche-Ophelia, believing that she accounted for the ambiguities in
Ophelia's character.
I will obviously not examine with you all of Ophelia's lines here, 359
but you are aware that this incredibly emotional, overwhelming
character - whom we might call one of the great figures of humanity
- is presented in an extremely ambiguous light. No one has ever
yet been able to say if Ophelia is innocence itself that is speaking
and that alludes to the most carnal impulses with the simplicity of
purity that knows no shame, or whether she is, on the contrary, a
slut who is ready for anything. Her lines are tantamount to smoke
and mirrors, and they allow for every possible sort of interpretation.
Above all, they exude a great deal of charm, something we sense
quite palpably in the madness scene, for example.
In truth, it is surprising that our biases concerning the character,
nature, signification, and, in a word, mores of women are still so
deeply ingrained in us that people can continue to raise such ques
tions about Ophelia. The thing is, in fact, altogether clear. If, on the
one hand, Hamlet behaves toward Ophelia with quite exceptional
cruelty - cruelty that troubles us, that smarts, as they say, and that
gives us the impression that the young woman is a victim - we sense,
on the other hand, that she is not, and far from it, the disembodied or
disincarnate creature she was made out to be in the pre-Raphaelite
painting I mentioned. She is something else altogether.
It seems that Ophelia is quite simply what every girl is, whether or
not she has gone beyond the taboo against deflowering - after all,
we know nothing about it, and the question seems not to be raised
regarding Ophelia. What we want to know is why Shakespeare
brought in this character who seems to represent a type of extreme
point on a curved line running from his first heroines, who are
boy-girls, to something that later returns to the same formula, but
transformed, in another guise.
304 Seven Classes on Hamlet
The first step we took along this pathway was thus to articulate
to what degree the play is the drama of desire insofar as desire is
related to the Other's desire.
308 Seven Classes on Hamlet
a'<Cent, the very accent of the drama of Hamlet, what one might call
its constant dimension.
What we need to do now is see in a more articulated way -
entering into psychological detail that would remain, I must say,
fµndamentally enigmatic if it were not enlisted in the overall aim
that constitutes the meaning of Hamlet as a tragedy - how this
reverberates in the very heart of Hamlet's will, which, on my graph,
is the hook or question mark constituted by the " Che vuoi?" of the
subjectivity that is constituted in the Other and articulated in the
Other [see Figure 1 .3].
This is the thrust of what I have to say today. It concerns what
<;me might call the imaginary setting [or: regulating, reg/age] that is
brought about by what constitutes desire's prop.
, Here, at the beginning of the curve that represents the assump
#on by the subject of his essential will, we have an indeterminate,
variable point [d]. This point is determined [reg/el on the basis of
something that lies somewhere across from it, and as we can imme
diately say, at the level of the unconscious subject [see, for example,
Figure 1 5.4]. I designate the endpoint of what constitutes the sub
ject's question as S barred in the presence of little a ($0a), and call it
fantasy. In the psychical economy, it represents something you are
familiar with; this something is ambiguous because, when we broach
it from a certain phase, it is in fact a final term in the conscious, the
endpoint of all human passion insofar as it is marked by some of the
traits that we refer to as "traits of perversion."
The mystery of fantasy, insofar as it is in some sense the final 367
term of a desire, is based on the fact that it always presents itself
in a more or less paradoxical guise. This explains why the Ancient
Greeks rejected the dimension of fantasy as absurd. The essential
step in interpreting it was only made in the modern era, by psychoa-
nalysis. In effect, it could only be conceptualized by being related to
an unconscious economy that underpins it qua perverse. If fantasy
appears as the endpoint of desire, as its final term and enigma, it
can only be understood in terms of an unconscious circuit that is
articulated through a signifying chain that is profoundly different
from the one that the subject commands, s(A)�A. which initially
lies at the level of demand.
In the lower chain, fantasy both intervenes and does not inter
vene. Some aspect of fantasy does not normally arrive there by the
pathway ($0a)�s(A); it does not usually reach s(A). If it does reach
s(A), we find ourselves in an atypical situation. Fantasy usually
remains unconscious; it is separate, it does not arrive at the message,
at the Other's signified [s(A)], which is the module or sum total of all
the significations acquired by the subject in interpersonal exchange
3 10 Seven Classes on Hamlet
is praying. Shaken to his very foundations by the scene that has just
shown him the visage of his own actions, his own scenario, Claudius
prays. Hamlet stands there before the king, and everything seems
to suggest that the latter is not only disinclined to defend himself,
but that he does not even perceive the threat that hangs over him.
Hamlet stops at that point because it is not the right time [heure].
It is not the other's time [heure]. It is not the right moment [heure]
for him to account for himself to God. To kill him now would be
too good for him and too bad for Hamlet's father. It would not
sufficiently revenge the latter's death because, owing to Claudius'
repentance in his prayer, salvation might be open to him. Be that
375 as it may, one thing is clear, which is that, having just caught the
king's conscience as he had hoped - "The play's the thing I Wherein
I'll catch the conscience of the king" [II, ii, 590-1] Hamlet stops.
-
Not for a single instant does he think this is the right time. Whatever
may happen afterward, this is not the other's time, and he. refrains
from acting. Similarly, whatever Hamlet does, it is only and always
on the other's time that he does it. He puts up with anything and
everything.
Let us not forget, all the same, that at the outset of the play -
disgusted as he was already, even before his encounter with the
ghost* and the unveiling of the crime, by his mother's remarriage
- he was thinking of one thing and one thing alone: leaving for
Wittenberg. Someone recently underscored this by commenting
on a certain practical style that is tending to become established in
contemporary mores; he noted that Hamlet was the finest example
of the fact that one can avoid many dramas by issuing people pass
ports, allowing them to leave town, in time. If Hamlet had been
granted his passport to leave for Wittenberg, there would have been
no drama.
It is owing to his parents' agenda [heure] that he stays put. It is in
accordance with the other's schedule [heure] that he puts his crime
on hold. It is owing to his stepfather's plans [heure] that he departs
for England. It is owing to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's mission
[heure] that he is led to send them to their deaths, thanks to the
rather prettily executed trick that so impressed Freud. And it is all
the same owing to Ophelia's time, the time at which she commits
suicide, that the tragedy finds its terminus at a moment at which
Hamlet - who has just, it seems, perceived that it is not so difficult
to kill someone, the time "to say 'one"' - will not even have time to
say "Phew!"
People propose that he do something that in no way resembles an
opportunity to kill Claudius - namely, fight in a very pretty fencing
contest. All the details of the contest have been minutely worked
Ophelia, the Object 317
out. The stakes involve what we will call a series of objects, in the
collector's [collectionniste] sense of the term, for they are all pre
cious objects, collector's objects. We would have to re-examine the
text, for even here there are subtleties and we enter into the realm of
collections - they involve "rapiers" and "their assigns" [V, ii, 1 45],
things that have value only as luxury objects. Hamlet is in fact pro
voked to engage in a sort of jousting, it being asserted that he is the
inferior fencer and must be granted a handicap in the challenge.* In 376
short it is a complicated ceremony.
We, of course, realize that it is a trap concocted by his stepfather
and his friend Laertes. But let us not forget that for him it is tanta
mount to accepting once again to take the long way around [l'ecole
buissonniere]. They are going to have a lot of fun.
He nevertheless feels a little warning in his heart; something
stirs him up. The dialectic of presentiment on the hero's part gives
emphasis to the drama for a moment. But it is still essentially on
the other's time, and far more ridiculously, in order to win the
other's bet for him - recall that it is not Hamlet's possessions that
are wagered - that he agrees to fight this battle for his stepfather's
benefit and as his advocate. In theory, the battle will be courteously
fought, yet Hamlet will be facing off against someone who is pre
sumed to be a more accomplished fencer than him and who, as such,
will arouse feelings of rivalry and honor in him, a trap in which they
are sure they will catch him.
And he runs straight into the trap. The only thing that is new at
this point is, I would say, the heat and heart with which he runs.
Right up till the end - right up until the final hour [heure], an hour
that is so determinate that it will be his own hour, for he will be
mortally wounded before he can strike his enemy - it is always by
the other's watch [heure] that the plot of the tragedy proceeds and is
brought to an end. This is an absolutely essential framework if we
are to conceptualize what is involved.
If Hamlet, the character, and the drama of Hamlet metaphysi
cally resonate with the problematic of the modem hero, it is
inasmuch as something has, in effect, changed for heroes in relation
to their destiny. As I told you, what distinguishes Hamlet from
Oedipus is that Hamlet knows. Led to this critical point, we are now
in a position to explain what I have called superficial features, such
as Hamlet's madness.
In the tragedies of Antiquity we encounter heroes who are crazy,
but to the best of my knowledge there are none who - in tragedy, as
I said, I am not talking about legends - act crazy. Does everything
in Hamlet's madness come down to pretending to be crazy? Let us
consider this.
318 Seven Classes on Hamlet
If the play truly has in its structure everything that I have just laid
out, why bother to bring in Ophelia?
Some of you reproach me for having only timidly made headway.
I do not think that I have shown exceptional timidity. I would not
like to encourage you to proffer the sort of twaddle with which psy
choanalytic texts abound; I simply was astonished that no one had
mentioned that Ophelia is omphalos, given that one finds so many
other wild and crazy things, things that do not pull any punches,
merely by opening up Ella Sharpe's "Unfinished Paper on Hamlet,"
378 which was perhaps regrettably uncompleted at her death and that
maybe should never have been published.
Ophelia is obviously essential. She will forever be linked to the
figure of Hamlet, for centuries to come. Since it is too late for me to
be able to complete my discussion of Ophelia today, I simply want
to punctuate for you what happens in the course of the play.
We first hear her spoken about as the cause of Hamlet's sorry
Ophelia, the Object 319
. . . Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion
- this is one of the key words of the dimension of his being in the
tragedy -
It is in this regard that the final action shows us the very struc
ture of fantasy. The hero is finally at his maximal resolve. Yet, as
always, just before his resolve, we see him literally rent himself out
to someone else, and for nothing whatsoever, as gratuitously as pos
sible, this other person being his enemy and the very man he must
strike down. He places what he must accomplish in the balance with
the things of this world that interest him the least, for these collec-
tor's objects are not at that moment his major concern, and, what is 390
more, he is going to strive to win them for someone else.
There is, of course, this i(a) at the lower level of the graph with
which the others believe they can captivate him. It is not altogether
foreign to him, naturally, though not in the way the others think.
But he is nevertheless intrigued at the level at which the others
situate him. In being pitted against a rival who is, as it turns out,
admired, his honor is at stake - in other words, he is intrigued at the
level that Hegel calls the fight to the death of pure prestige.
We cannot fail to dwell for a moment on the sureness of the
connection established by Shakespeare, for you recognize in it an
element that has long been part of our discourse and dialogue here
- namely, the mirror stage. It is expressly stated in the text that
Laertes is, at this level, a semblable for Hamlet. He is indirectly
Hamlet's semblable - at least within a parody.
I am referring to the response he makes to Osric, the overly
narrow-minded courtesan. Corning to Hamlet to propose that he
participate in a duel, Osric highlights the outstanding skill of the
adversary to whom Hamlet will have to prove his mettle. Hamlet
cuts him off and ups the ante:
fight, the poisoned weapon changes hands, God only knows how.
This must be one of the difficulties of the staging, and the script
writer does not work terribly hard to explain it to us. After Laertes
has dealt Hamlet the blow from which he cannot recover, from
which he must perish, there is a sort of scuffle in which they are grap
pling with each other, and a few moments later the poisoned rapier
is in Hamlet's hand. No one gives much thought to explaining how
such an astonishing switch can occur.
No one need, moreover, give it any thought, for what is at stake
is to show that the instrument of death, the instrument that kills
- which is in this case the most veiled instrument of the drama,
one which Hamlet can only receive from the other - lies elsewhere 392
than in what can be represented materially here. For the accom
plishment of Hamlet's desire does not take place at the level of
the skill displayed [or: parrying, parade] in the contest, at the level
of the rivalry with he who is his semblable, albeit more handsome
than him, the rivalry with the himself [moi-meme] that he can love.
The drama is played out beyond that. And the phallus is what lies
beyond that.
In the end, Hamlet identifies with the fatal signifier in the course
of his encounter with the other. Curiously enough, this is found in
the text itself, where we come across the word "foil."
The King mentions foils when they are handed out: "Give them
the foils, young Osric" [V, ii, 248). Before that, Hamlet had said,
"Give us the foils." But, in between these two occurrences of the
word, Hamlet makes a pun:
seven hits to Hamlet's five, Laertes will have lost. Hamlet is thus
given a handicap.
One of Hamlet's functions is to constantly play on words, proffer
double entendres, and equivocate. The pun involving "foil" is not
included here by accident, and it is justifiable to explore what is
included in its depths. When he says to Laertes "I'll be your foil,"
Hamlet uses a word that also means rapier. The subject thus identi-
393 fies with the mortal phallus itself here. "I'll be your foil," he says
to Laertes, "to showcase your skill," but a moment later Laertes'
sword strikes, the sword that fatally wounds Hamlet before he
himself has it in hand and completes his trajectory by killing both
his opponent and he who is the final object of his mission - namely,
the king.
Let me repeat that it is no accident that this word is used in the
text. It is altogether justifiable to highlight it. The play of signifiers
belongs to the very texture of Hamlet. A whole discussion should be
devoted to this specific dimension.
You are aware of the essential role played by the clowns known
as court jesters [fous]. With their no-holds-barred way of speaking,
they can allow themselves to reveal people's most hidden motives
and character traits that politeness prohibits people from mention
ing directly. It is not just cynicism that is involved, nor is it just
a more or less insulting, playful way of speaking. These charac
ters operate primarily by equivocating, speaking metaphorically,
punning, concocting concetti, speaking preciously, and replacing
one signifier with another, the essential function of all of which I
emphasize here.
This way of proceeding gives Shakespeare's theatre as a whole
a tenor that is absolutely characteristic of his style and creates its
psychological dimension. The fact that Hamlet is such an anxiety
provoking character must not hide from us the fact that, in a certain
way, this tragedy raises someone who is, strictly speaking, a fool,
clown, or jokester, to the rank of a hero. As someone once pointed
out, to remove the jests from Hamlet would be to cut out four-fifths
of the play.
Indeed, one of the dimensions in which the play's dramatic
tension unfolds is constant equivocation. The latter is in some sense
dissimulated, as it were, by the masked aspect of things - what gets
played out between Claudius, the tyrant and usurper, and his killer,
Hamlet, is the unmasking of the latter's intentions. Namely, why is
he pretending to be mad [or: playing the fool,faire lefou]? We must
not, for all that, forget the way in which he pretends to be mad,
which gives his discourse an almost manic quality.
Hamlet never stops latching onto ideas and chances to equivocate
Mourning and Desire 333
on the fly, and these ideas allow him to momentarily blind his 394
adversaries with a sort of flash of meaning. The latter do not see
discordant speech in them. They find them strange, in that they are
especially relevant, and they are struck by them so much that they
themselves sometimes become inventive and even tell tall tales. It is
thus not simply a hiding game Ueu] that is being played, but a mind
game [or: play ofwit,jeu d'esprit] that is being played out at the level
of signifiers and in the dimension of meaning. Therein lies what one
might call the very spirit [or: wit, esprit] of the play.
This ambiguous disposition makes all of Hamlet's remarks - as
well, thus, as the reaction of those around him - into a problem in
which the spectator himself gets lost in ceaseless wondering. It is at
this level that the play takes on its full import. I am only recalling
this to mind here in order to emphasize that there is nothing exces
sive or arbitrary about giving its full weight to this last pun on the
word "foil. "
Such is the nature of the constellation within which Hamlet's final
action unfolds during his duel with Laertes.
For Hamlet, Laertes is a sort of semblable or double who is more
handsome than Hamlet himself. As I have already said, this element
is located at the lower level of our graph, at i (a) . Hamlet, for whom
men and women are no longer anything but insubstantial and putrid
shadows, finds a worthy rival in this remodeled semblable, whose
presence allows him, at least for a moment, to uphold the human
wager [soutenir la gageure humaine] that he, too, is a man.
The remodeling here is but a consequence, not a point of depar
ture. I mean that it is the consequence of what is manifested in the
situation - namely, the subject's position in the presence of the other
qua object of desire. The presence of the phallus is immanent in this
object. The phallus cannot assume its formal function except with
the disappearance of the subject himself.
What makes it possible for the subject to succumb even before
taking in hand the foil* with which he himself becomes a killer?
This brings us back to that very odd crossroads whose essential
character I have already indicated - namely, the cemetery scene and
what occurs in the vault.
3 395
We will now broach a topic that should interest one of our col
leagues who, as it turns out, has done especially fine work on both
jealousy and mourning. The jealousy involved in mourning is, in
effect, one of the most salient aspects of this tragedy.
334 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Reread the end of the act in which we find the cemetery scene,
which I have now commented on three times in the course of this
Seminar. There Hamlet articulates exactly what he finds unbear
able in Laertes' attitude, bearing, and ostentation at the moment at
which Ophelia is being buried. His partner's ostentatious mourning
has the effect of ripping him away from himself; he is overwhelmed
and shaken to his very foundations, to the point of not being able
to handle it.
This first manifestation of Hamlet's rivalry with Laertes is far
more authentic than the second. Hamlet approaches the duel
with all the ceremony of courtly manners and with a buttoned
foil, whereas in the cemetery scene he goes straight for Laertes'
throat, jumping into the hole in which Ophelia's body has just been
lowered. And he hurls:
I will leave some of you the task of bringing out the full value of
this proverbial element, as I cannot dwell on it now. Hamlet later
explains to Horatio what is essential here: he could not bear to see
"the bravery of [Laertes'] grief' [V, ii, 79).
This brings us to the very heart of the dimension of mourn
ing, which is going to open up an entire problematic for us. What
396 relationship is there between what I have formulated in the form
of (SOa), concerning the constitution of the object in desire, and
Mourning and Desire 335
manifested, not some specific form of madness, but one of the most
essential forms of collective madness in the human world. If some
rite has not been performed for the departed, for the person who
has just disappeared, strange things begin to happen. This is what
explains, for example, the appearance, at the most basic level in the
tragedy of Hamlet, of an image that can affect the soul of each and
every one of us - namely, the ghost.*
What, in the final analysis, are funeral rites designed to do? To
propitiate [satisfaire a] what we call the memory of the departed.
And what do these rites involve if not the total, massive intervention,
from hell to heaven, of the entire symbolic system Ueu symbolique].
I would love to have the time to devote several classes to the
subject of funeral rites through an ethnological investigation. I
recall having spent some time, many years ago, reading a book
which admirably does so and which is exemplary in that it is from a
civilization that is distant enough from our own for the function of
such rites to be strikingly brought out in it. It is [Confucius' Book of
Rites:] Liji, a sacred Chinese book.
Funeral rites have a macrocosmic nature, since there is nothing
that can fill the hole in the real with signifiers unless it is the totality
pf.the signifier itself. The work of mourning is carried out at the level
oflogos - I am saying this so as not to say at the level of the group or
community, even though the group and the community as culturally
brganized naturally support this. The work of mourning presents
itself first of all as a palliative for [satisfaction donnee a] the chaos
that ensues owing to the inability of all signifying elements to deal
with the hole in existence that has been created by someone's death. 399
The entire signifying system is brought to bear on even the slightest
case of mourning.
This is what explains the fact that all folk beliefs establish the
closest relationship between two facts: if something is overlooked,
elided, or refused in the propitiation [satisfaction] owed to the
departed, all kinds of phenomena occur that stem from the coming
into play and operating of the power of ghosts and worms [larves] in
the place left unfilled by the missing signifying rite.
We see here a new dimension of the tragedy of Hamlet.
I told you at the outset that Hamlet is a tragedy of the underworld.
The ghost* appears owing to an unatonable offense. In this perspec
tive, Ophelia appears to be neutral, as nothing other than a victim
offered up to [propitiate] the primordial offense. Polonius's death;
the extraordinary scene of his cadaver being ridiculously dragged
by the foot and hidden in defiance of the sensibility and concern of
all and sundry; Hamlet who is suddenly and literally out of control
[dechafne], who makes fun of everyone who asks where the cadaver
338 Seven Classes on Hamlet
PHALLOPHANIES
a simple relationship between the object and desire. But can the
rendezvous between desire and its object be articulated as if it were
a mere appointment*? Perhaps it is something else.
We broach the question from a different angle when we speak of
the object with which the subject identifies in mourning, and which
he can, so people say, reintegrate into his ego.* What do we have
here? Aren't there in fact two phases, which are not articulated and
synchronized in psychoanalysis? Isn't this a problem that requires us
to try to make headway here?
What I have just said about mourning in Hamlet must not hide
from us the fact that, in both Hamlet and Oedipus, mourning is
premised on a crime. Up to a certain point, all the instances of
mourning that come cascading down on us are the aftermath and
consequences of the crime that sets the drama in motion. It is in this
respect that Hamlet is, I am saying, an Oedipal drama, a drama that
I consider to be Oedipus' equal, and that I rank at the same func
tional level in the genealogy of tragedy.
It is the role played by crime in Hamlet that put Freud, and his
disciples after him, on the scent of the importance this play takes on
for us as analysts. In the psychoanalytic tradition, Hamlet is situated
at the heart of speculation about origins, since we are in the habit
of recognizing in Oedipus's crime the most essential plot [trame]
involving the subject and what we call the Other here - namely, the
locus in which the law is inscribed. Connecting these things should
give us the opportunity to return to the way in which relations
between the subject and what one might call the original crime have
been articulated up until now and to recall a few essential terms.
Instead of doing what people always do, leaving things vague in
a way that does nothing to facilitate speculation, we are going to 404
introduce a clear distinction. We are presented with two stages.
First, there is Freud's myth, which deserves to be called one.
Totem and Taboo lays out what we can, strictly speaking, call a
myth. I already touched on this point when I told you that Freud's
construction is perhaps the only example of a myth that has been
concocted in our own time.
This myth indicates to us the early, essential, and altogether nec
essary link that is such that we cannot conceptualize the law, as an
order, except on the basis of a still earlier fact that presents itself
as a crime. This is the meaning of Freud's myth. The crime is the
primal killing of the father. In Freud's view, it forms, let us note, the
horizon or endpoint of the problem of origins in all psychoanalytic
matters, for Freud finds it everywhere and no topic seems to him to
have been exhausted if it has not yet been connected up with it. It is
all too obvious that this primal killing of the father has a mythical
342 Seven Classes on Hamlet
to kill his father and rape his mother, but that this [desire] comes to
dwell in the unconscious.
And it so clearly dwells in the unconscious that, in the course of
the so-called latency period - which is, in human beings, the source
of the building blocks [points de construction] of their entire objec
tive world - subjects are no longer thinking about this. This goes so
far, as you know, that Freud suggests - at least when he first pro
vides this theoretical formulation - that the ideal case would be that
no longer being concerned with it becomes definitive, happily so.
Let us consider what Freud says. Afterward we will see in what
respect this can help us in our current undertaking. The Oedipus
complex begins its Untergang - its decline or dissolution, which 408
is decisive for the whole of the subject's later development - after
what?
Freud tells us that the subject must have tried out and experienced
both vertices of the Oedipal triangle. Inasmuch as a boy, as his
father's rival, wants to take his father's place, he becomes the target
of a concrete threat, which is no other than that of castration: he
will be castrated. If, instead, he takes his mother's place, he will lose
the phallus anyway - Freud says this literally - since at the point at
which the Oedipus complex comes to fruition, the boy has also fully
realized that women are castrated.
At the level of the relationship to the thing known as the phallus,
the subject thus finds himself in a bind that leaves him no way out.
This situation, in which the phallus is the key, constitutes the essen
tial drama of the Oedipus complex insofar as it marks, I would say,
the juncture and turning point that conveys the subject from the
level of demand to that of desire.
I said "thing" [known as the phallus], not "object," inasmuch as
what is involved is something real, something that is not yet symbol
ized but that may, in some sense, become symbolized. In short, it is
what we can call a signifier, vaguely speaking.
Freud thus presents the phallus to us as the key to the Untergang
of the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex begins to .dis
solve when the subject enters into a relationship, we might say, of
lassitude - this is what we find in Freud's text - with regard to grati
fication. This is when the subject realizes that no gratification can
be expected in this context; he knows that the articulated emergence
of the thing will not occur; and he gives up trying to be equal to the
task. Freud articulates it for the boy and still more for the girl, for
he places her in a position about which I will not say that it is not
dissymmetrical, but it is not so very dissymmetrical.
In short, the subject must mourn the loss of the phallus. This
comes across very clearly - the Untergang of the Oedipus complex is
346 Seven Classes on Hamlet
played out around mourning. How can we not but relate this to the
general problematic of mourning?
Let me underscore that the moment at which the dissolution of
the Oedipus complex occurs plays a decisive role in what follows,
not only because the fragments and detritus it leaves in its wake,
which are more or less incompletely repressed, will come out at
puberty in the form of neurotic symptoms, but above all because,
409 as the shared experience of psychoanalysts attests, the subject's nor
malization at the genital level depends on this moment - not in the
subject's unconscious economy alone but in the subject's imaginary
economy as well. Which is to say that there is no happy outcome
as regards genital maturity except by going through the entirety of
the Oedipus complex, insofar as its consequence, in both men and
women, is the scar [or: mark, stigmate] of the castration complex.
Synthesizing this with the mechanism of mourning, as it is described
to us by Freud, will perhaps allow us to clarify the mechanism of
mourning the loss of the phallus, which is no doubt peculiar since
the phallus is an object like no other.
But, I ask you, what defines the scope and limits of the set of
objects that we may be led to mourn? This, too, has never before
been articulated. We suspect, of course, that the phallus is different
from the other objects that we may be led to mourn. Here as every
where else, it must have its own separate place; but this is precisely
what must be specified. And, as in many cases, to specify something
is to indicate its place against a backdrop. It is in pinpointing it
against this backdrop that the place of the backdrop also manages
to get retroactively specified.
What I am calling the place of the object in desire is completely
new territory. Our analysis of Hamlet is designed, in the end, to
help us make headway in this realm. I am tilling this ground here
by plowing a series of concentric rows. I am conveying it to you in a
way that is at times emphatic, at times resonant. And I hope to make
it more and more precise as we go on.
What does Freud tell us about mourning the loss of the phallus?
He presents the subject's narcissistic demand [exigence] as one of its
fundamental mainsprings, insofar as this demand is what gives the
phallus its value, which is precisely what we are seeking. He brings
in this factor without the slightest precaution, as he always does. I
mean that he shakes us up, as is his wont, and thank God he did it
his whole life long; if not, he would never have gotten to the end of
what he needed to sketch out in his field.
The subject thus gets to the point at which he is in the presence of
the final exit from his Oedipal demands; he is at the critical moment
410 at which he realizes that he will be castrated and deprived of the
Phallophanies 347
phallus in either case. Well, Freud tells us, rather than abandon the
phallus, he prefers to abandon, as it were, a whole part of himself,
which will henceforth and forever be prohibited to him. This part is
what is transmitted by the dotted signifying chain found at the top
of the graph of desire [see Figure 1 5.4].
Stated otherwise, the subject lets go of what was most important
to him - namely, the love relationship as it presented itself to him
in the parental dialectic into which he had to enter one way or
another - because, Freud tells us, of his narcissistic relationship
with a term that was introduced right from the outset and that has
enigmatically and yet clearly run throughout his experience: the
phallus.
What can this mean to us, in our vocabulary? This vocabulary
can shed light on what is at stake in what Freud designates as a
narcissistic demand, and which he had to leave to one side, as I was
just saying, because he did not have the time to dwell at length on his
premises, and because he needed to go right to the quick, to the core
of the subject. Which is, moreover, how every action is grounded,
still more every true action, as is, or should be, the action we are
concerned with here - namely, psychoanalytic action.
Let us thus translate this into our own terms and reference points:
to say that the demand in question is narcissistic implies that it is situ
ated at the imaginary level. On the other hand, the subject's demand
for love has begun to express itself in the field organized by the
symbolic, what we call the locus of the Other. The critical moment
arrives once the subject has run the gamut of all possible relations
there and has reached the end. The upshot is the loss of the phallus,
experienced as a radical loss that no satisfaction can plug up.
I have already indicated that what happens then is akin to a
psychotic mechanism: the subject can only respond to this mourn
ing with his imaginary texture. What Freud presents us, in a veiled
form, as the narcissistic link between the subject and the phallus,
allows us to identify the phallus with something that represents
lack as such in the subject at the imaginary level. This lack places
something in reserve - in the form of nihilation [or: obliteration or
"nothingizing," sous une forme neantisee], as it were - something
that will serve as a mold in which the subject's assumption of his
position in the genital function will later be recast.
But isn't this to conclude too quickly about what is involved? 41 1
Doesn't this lead us to believe, as we ordinarily do, that the relation-
ship to the genital object is a relationship that changes from positive
to negative? As you will see, it is nothing of the sort. Our notation
is superior because it allows us to articulate how the problem really
presents itself. Let me specifically remind you of what I already laid
348 Seven Classes on Hamlet
Castration i
s
Symbolic mother Frustration r
I
Deprivation s
R
The "something . . . rotten" [I, iv, 90] that poor Hamlet needs to set
right is closely related to his position as a subject with respect to the
phallus.
Throughout the play, we sense that the phallus is present every
where in the obvious mess [desordre] that is Hamlet's whenever he
approaches the hotspots, as it were, of his action. Today I can only
quickly indicate to you the points that allow us to follow him step
by step.
There is something very strange in the way Hamlet speaks about
his dead father; he does so with an idealizing exaltation that more
or less boils down to the following: his voice fails him when he tries
to say what he has to say about him. In truth, he chokes, only to
conclude with one of the specific forms of the signifier known as
"pregnant"* in English [II, ii, 206---7] - in other words, an expression
that has meaning beyond its meaning - he finds nothing other to say
about his father than that he was "a man" like any other. What he
means to say is obviously the exact opposite. This is the first trace
of what is involved.
There are many other traces as well. The rejection, abuse, and
scorn he heaps on Claudius smacks mightily of negation [denega
tion]. He generates a slew of insults about him, especially in front of
his mother, culminating in an expression that cannot fail to indicate
352 Seven Classes on Hamlet
hand the phallus is bound to nothing and always slips between your
fingers.
Immediately thereafter, he adds, "The king is a thing -" "A thing,
my lord?" his interlocutors ask [IV, ii, 27-8], completely shocked
as they are whenever he comes out with one of his aphorisms, and
Hamlet replies, "Of nothing" [29]. At which point commentators
tend to calm down, thinking that it must be a quotation from the
Psalms in which it is said that "Man is like a thing of nought."
I think that in order to shed light on this it is better to rely on
Shakespeare's own work.
An attentive reading of the Sonnets inclines me to believe that,
in his own life, Shakespeare was imbued with a rather extreme and
peculiar desire. Somewhere, in one of the sonnets, whose audac
ity we can hardly imagine - I am astonished that people can talk
about them as though they were ambiguous - he speaks to his love
object who, as everyone knows, was of the same sex as him, quite a
charming young man, it seems, who appears to have been the Earl
of Essex. Your looks leave nothing to be desired, he says to this
young man; you look like a woman in every regard; there is but "one
thing" that nature wanted to give you, God only knows why, and I
unfortunately could not care less about this little thing: it is "to my
purpose nothing." Too bad it delights women. And Shakespeare
adds, oh well, as long as "Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their
treasure."
The terms "thing" and "nothing" are used in their strict sense
here, and they are indubitably part of Shakespeare's standard
vocabulary. Yet this vocabulary is of but secondary importance
here, after all. The question is whether we can fathom Shakespeare's
creative position.
At the sexual level, his position can undoubtedly be called
inverted, but it is perhaps not all that perverted at the level of love.
To enter into the path of the Sonnets will allow us to indicate a
419 little more precisely the dialectic of the subject with the object of
his desire. In particular, we shall see what happens at moments
when the object - disappearing and vanishing step by step by some
pathway, the major one being the pathway of mourning - exposes
the true nature of what corresponds to it in the subject for a while, a
while that can last no more than an instant: what I will call appear
ances of the phallus, "phallophanies."
I will leave it at that today.
April 29, 1 959
THE DIALECTIC
OF DESIRE
xx 423
THE FUNDAMENTAL
FANTASY
We are thus talking about desire. The path I have been following
this year, like any path, sometimes obliges me to take long detours.
This is why I tried, during the break over the last two weeks, to re
center things in order to conceptualize anew the origin and aim of
our work here.
This led me to come up with a clarification of the topic, which is
also, I believe, designed for you, and which will be but yet another
way for us to focus our attention in order to make headway in our
research.
At the point we are at, let us try to articulate that with which we
have a rendezvous. It is not simply the rendezvous of this Seminar,
nor the rendezvous of our daily work as analysts. It is above all
the rendezvous we have with our function as analysts and with the
meaning of analysis.
If psychoanalysis were merely a therapeutic enterprise - like
others that have appeared in the course of history - which is more
or less founded and successful, we could not fail to be surprised by
its longevity. There is no prior example of any theory or psychical
orthopedics that has lasted for more than half a century.
What has allowed for the longevity of psychoanalysis, and of the
role it plays beyond its use by physicians, that no one, in the end,
dreams of disputing? We cannot fail to sense that it is the fact that
psychoanalysis brings something with it that concerns man in a way
that is simultaneously new, serious, and authentic - new in what
it contributes, serious in its import, and authenticated by what? 424
358 The Dialectic of Desire
a need to believe that desire coincides with what everyone else thinks
it is. They do everything possible to deduce their idea of optimal, or
at least desirable, development from the notion that experience sup
posedly converges on maturation.
At the same time, if these writers could in fact formulate psy
choanalytic theory in such terms and be content with the idea that
the subject ontologically adapts to his experience of the world, this
would mean they had abandoned all contact with their practice as
analysts. The further they try to take this project, the more they
make revealing mistakes - mistakes that reveal that they need to
formulate things differently - and the more they arrive at paradoxes.
I will give an example, which I will take from one of the best
analytic authors around, one who pays the most attention to for
mulating things correctly, not only regarding our practice but also
regarding the sum total of our practice's initial data, and who also
deserves credit for having striven to survey the notions and concepts
we employ. I am talking about Edward Glover.
His work should be read because of the vast number of cases that 428
it summarizes. It is among the most useful to anyone who wishes to
know what he is doing, which is still more indispensable in analysis
than elsewhere. I will take up one of his many articles, one you must
read, which came out in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis
in October 1933, volume 14, number 4 [pp. 486--504]. It is entitled
"The Relation of Perversion-Formation to the Development of
Reality-Sense. "
Many things i n this article are worth discussing, i f only the initial
terms Glover provides in view of correctly broaching what he
intends to show us. Specifically:
with the object we are talking about; it goes by the name of the
object of knowledge, even if it is altogether veiled there.
This object has been the goal, aim, and endpoint of research for
millennia. Such research is still there, behind the fruits it yielded
when it became what we call "science," after having had to follow
the pathways of the subject's rootedness in the world for a long
time. It was undeniably on the basis of this rootedness, I mean at the
philosophical level, that science was able to find its point of depar
ture at a certain moment, even if science - like a child who becomes
independent after having been nourished for many years - has now
taken its distance from this form of reflection. We see traces of this
original rootedness in the guise of the theory of knowledge.
In this realm, people came as close as they could to a profound
identification between the two terms in the subject/object rela
tionship. For them, knowing is related to a co-naturalness, and
any attempt to grasp the object manifests something related to a
harmony that has to exist.
Let us not forget that this is certainly but the result of a special
ized practice, one that stands out in a history that gave rise to several
branches. I will confine my attention here to our branch, that of
Greek philosophy.
The attempt to pinpoint and promote what is known as the object
involves a theoretical attitude which we would be completely wrong 433
to think that, now that results have been obtained, we can eliminate,
as if this theoretical stance had no impact on its effect.
What did this attempt to know imply about the status of desire?
We analysts are certainly able to raise this question, but it was not
unnoticed by religious thinkers, and we can, here as elsewhere,
merely follow in their wake. Inasmuch as religious practice has other
aims than psychoanalysis, it has specified this desire as the desire to
know, cupido sciendi. We merely add our own two cents' worth to
this when we indicate that it has a more fundamental basis: some
ambivalent drive like scopophilia or even oral incorporativeness.
Be that as it may, one thing is clear, which is that the development
of knowledge, including the implicit notions about the object it
brings with it, results from a choice. The establishment of every phil
osophical position has, throughout the ages, necessarily involved
being recognized as a stance that involves sacrificing something.
The entrance of the subject into the realm of what is known as pure
research [recherche desinteressee], the fruit of which is objectivity -
after all, attaining objectivity has never been defined in any other
way than as grasping a certain reality from an unbiased [desinteres
see] perspective - entails the exclusion, at least in theory, of a certain
form of desire.
366 The Dialectic of Desire
This is the perspective from which the concept of the object was
developed. It is not pointless for us to reintroduce it here. After all,
we know what we are doing, because this perspective is implicit in
the presupposition of a virtual and latent correspondence - which
must always be found anew or obtained - between the investigation
of desire and the object that this investigation explores.
We have reason to distinguish, on the contrary, between the
object that satisfies the desire for knowledge - the philosophical
notion of which has been the fruit of centuries of elaboration - and
the object of a desire.
It is owing to a confusion between these two notions that analysts
434 have been so easily led to posit a correspondence between a certain
constituting of the object and a certain maturing of the drive.
Taking a stand against this, I have tried to provide you with a dif
ferent formulation of the relationship between desire and its object,
which I claim to be closer to our experience.
We are now going to turn to the true articulation, which I call
synchronic.
The symbolic formula ($0a) gives form to what I call the fundamen
tal fantasy.
This is the true form of the supposed "object-relation," not the
form in which it has been articulated up until now.
To say that we are talking here about the fundamental fantasy
means nothing more than that, from a synchronic perspective, it
gives desire its minimal supporting structure.
It contains two terms and their twofold relationship to each
other constitutes fantasy. Their relationship is still more complex
insofar as the subject is constituted qua desire in a tertiary relation
to fantasy.
Today I will take up this tertiary perspective. Moreover, I will
show that the subject's assumption [assomption] involves a. This is
just as legitimate as to show that it involves the barred subject, given
that desire is sustained in a confrontational relationship to ($0a).
I believe that I have already taken things far enough here that
it will not shock you, throw you off, or surprise you if I claim that
object a is defined first of all as the prop that the subject gives
himself inasmuch as he falters [defaille] . . . I will interrupt myself
-
certainty as a subject. Now I will give you the exact term, but it is
The Fundamental Fantasy 367
not very intuitive, which is why I did not want to give it to you right
away: inasmuch as he falters in his designation as a subject.
What is at stake here is based entirely on what happens in the
Other, inasmuch as the Other is the locus of the subject's desire.
Now, in the Other, in the Other's discourse which the unconscious 435
is, the subject is missing something [or: something is not available to
the subject, quelque chosefait defaut au sujet]. We will come back to
this later, we will come back to it as often as necessary, and we will
come back to it right up to the end.
Owing to the very structure that establishes the relationship
between the subject and the Other qua locus of speech, something is
missing [fait defaut] at the level of the Other. What is missing there
is precisely that which would allow the subject to identify himself
as the subject of his own discourse. Insofar as this discourse is the
discourse of the unconscious, the subject instead disappears in it.
In order to designate himself, the subject must consequently
employ something that is taken at his own expense. Not at his
expense as a subject constituted in speech, but at his expense as a
real, live subject, at the expense of something which, taken by itself,
is not a subject at all. The subject who pays the price necessary to be
able to locate himself as faltering is thus brought into the dimension
that is always present whenever desire is involved: having to pay for
castration.
Stated otherwise, something real, which he has a hold on in an
imaginary relationship, is raised to the pure and simple function of
a signifier. This is the final and most profound meaning of castration
as such.
Freud's essential discovery is the fact, which had been overlooked
hitherto, that castration is involved as soon as desire manifests itself
clearly as such. This fact opened up for us all sorts of historical
perspectives, which people have translated in various mythical fash
ions, and which people then tried to reduce to developmental terms.
This developmental approach - involving the diachronic dimension
- was undoubtedly fruitful, but it cannot spare us the trouble of
exploring the other dimension, the synchronic dimension, to see
what the essential relationship involved there is.
The latter is the relationship between the subject and the signify
ing system [le signifiant], inasmuch as the subject cannot designate
himself in it, or name himself as a subject in it. He must make up
for this inability [defaut] through personal sacrifice [payer de sa per
sonne], as it were. I am trying to be as evocative as I can be here, and
thus am not always employing the most rigorous terms.
We can find an analogue of what happens next in the function of 436
certain symbols that linguists distinguish in the lexical system, which
368 The Dialectic of Desire
A D
rS J/J
IA. s
a $
A'
A"
"
A"
We are going to pick up today where we left off last time. I had
formalized a sort of operation for you in the form of a subjective
division involving [or: in, dans] demand. We shall return to it, and
this will lead us next to examine the formula for fantasy, inasmuch
as it props up the pivotal relationship that I am trying to lay out this
year in the functioning of psychoanalysis.
You may recall that I put the letters AID on the board in order to
designate demand's imposition or proposition [or: proposal, propo
sition] in the Other's locus, which I presented to you as the earliest
ideal stage [see Table 20. 1].
This is no more than a reconstruction, naturally. And yet nothing
is more concrete or real. It is to the degree to which a child's demand
begins to be articulated that the process begins - or at least I intend
to show that it begins - by which the Spa/tung [splitting] brought
on by [du] discourse, that is expressed in the effects the unconscious
has, forms.
Now I am going to write rA/S on the board. To the right, we have
the subject's first position, grasped in the act of the first articulation
of demand. Its necessary counterweight is the position of the real
Other, rA, insofar as it is all-powerful in responding to this demand.
This stage is essential if we are to understand the foundation of the
In the Form of a Cut 375
first relationship to the Other, who is the mother here, where we find 444
the first form of omnipotence.
Nevertheless, as I said, it is not by examining the Other, but rather
by considering what occurs at the level of demand that we are going
to extend the process oflogical generation. I had expressed it to you
last time with the letters rS!J/). On the left, I introduced the Other
as a real subject, whereas demand, which is initially demand for the
satisfaction of a need, turns out to take on a different import as it
becomes demand for love, and this is what is designated by the D
shown here with a bar through it.
I no longer recall if it was in this form that I wrote it on the board.
[The audience says yes.] Fine. It does not matter much, anyway,
since this is designed to generate the entire palette of the subject's
real experiences, which will be inscribed in a certain number of
responses, whether gratifying or frustrating. Even though they are,
of course, highly essential, inasmuch as a certain modulation of the
subject's history is inscribed in them, they do not affect the formal,
synchronic analysis that I am currently conducting here.
If we begin from an initial stage at which the Other is the real
Other who responds to demand, we see that at the next stage, the
subject questions the Other as a subject, our subject appearing to
himself to be a subject inasmuch as he is viewed as a subject by this
Other. The relationship, designated by A/S, is the first stage of the
actual constitution of the subject.
This means that the subject is constituted in relation to another
subject, one who speaks. He must get his bearings in the funda
mental strategy that arises with the appearance of the dimension of
language, and that begins with this dimension alone. Owing to the
fact that the Other has become structured in language, she becomes
the possible subject of a strategy, with respect to which the subject
himself can be constituted as a subject recognized in the Other, as a
subject to another subject.
On the one hand, there can be no subject who is not a subject to
another subject; on the other hand, it is only as a speaking subject,
as a subject of speech, that the first subject can be established as
such. And since the Other is herself marked by the necessities of
language, she is no longer a real Other; rather, she is established
as the locus of the articulation of speech [or: locus in which speech
is articulated]. The first possible position for a subject as such - a
subject who can grasp himself as a subject, who can grasp himself
as a subject in the Other, insofar as this Other thinks of him as a 445
subject - is created in that locus.
As I mentioned last time, there is nothing more concrete than
this. It is in no wise a stage in philosophical thinking; it is something
376 The Dialectic of Desire
it, for at this level he encounters in the Other the hollow or empty
space that I formulated by telling you that "there is no Other of the
Other"; that no possible signifier can guarantee the authenticity of
the series of signifiers; that there is nothing, at the level of the signi
fier, that guarantees or authenticates the signifying chain or speech
in any way. This is. why the subject depends so essentially on the
Other's goodwill.
It is at this point that the subject brings in from elsewhere -
namely, from the imaginary register - a part of himself that is
involved in the imaginary relationship to the other. This is little a. It
arises at the very place where S wonders what he truly is and what
he truly wants.
What we call object a is undoubtedly the object of desire, but on
condition that we make it clear that it does not, for all that, adapt to
desire. It comes into play in a complex that we will call fantasy. The
subject manages to prop himself up with this object at the moment
at which he vanishes when faced with the signifier's failure [or:
inability, carence] to answer for his place as a subject at the level of
the Other.
At the level at which the subject attempts to reconstruct himself,
to meet back up with himself in the demand he makes to the Other,
and to authenticate himself as a subject of speech, the operation of
division stops. For the quotient that the subject is seeking to reach
remains in abeyance [or: suspended] in the presence of the appear
ance, at the level of the Other, of the remainder [object a] owing to
which the subject himself pays the ransom for, and comes to make
up for [suppleer] the deficiency [or: absence, carence] of the signifier
that responds to him at the level of the Other. This quotient [$] and
this remainder [a] remain in each other's presence here and prop
each other up, as it were. Fantasy is nothing but the perpetual con
frontation between barred S and little a.
The barred subject marks the moment of the subject's fading*
in which the subject finds nothing in the Other that can clearly
guarantee the subject, that authenticates him, that allows him to
situate and name himself at the level of the Other's discourse - in 447
other words, qua subject of the unconscious. It is in response to this
moment that an imaginary element, the correlative term of fantasy's
structure, arises to make up for [or: to stand in for, comme suppleant
du] the missing signifier. I designate this element in its most general
form as S's prop at the moment at which S tries to designate himself
[s'indiquer] as the subject of unconscious discourse.
It seems to me that I need say nothing further on this point. I
am going to say a bit more anyway to indicate what this means in
Freud's discourse. Let us reconsider, for example, Freud's claim,
378 The Dialectic of Desire
is, in short, borne along [porte1 by the question about what he is,
which is the very definition ofneurosis.
I agree that today's class has perhaps been one of the most difficult
of all those I have ever given here. You will, I hope, be rewarded
next time, when we will proceed by less austere pathways.
I have asked you · today to hold onto the notion of interest
[interet]. He who is concerned [interesse] is the subject inasmuch
as he resides in the gap constituted by unconscious discourse
[/'intervalle du discours de /'inconscient]. The subject is, strictly
speaking, the metonymy of the being who expresses himself in the
unconscious chain.
If the voices and senseless sentences get the subject especially
interested in the delusion, it is for the same reason as for all the
other forms of the object that I have enumerated for you today. It is
In the Form of a Cut 389
at the level of the cut or gap that he becomes fascinated and fixated
in order to sustain himself [or: thereby sustaining himself] - at the
instant at which he targets himself and questions himself - as a
being, as the being of his unconscious.
464 The lower chain is that of the subject's actua� discourse. As a first
sketch, let us say that it is accessible to consciousness. That said, it is
because it is based on illusions, as psychoanalysis has taught us, that
we assert it to be completely transparent to consciousness.
If it were not, why would I have spent several years emphasizing
what is illusory in this transparency effect, and used every means
to convince you of this? I tried to show you, using a fable that you
perhaps recall, that it is theoretically possible to imagine that a
specular image can subsist independently of any subjective prop; it
can persist long after the subject has ceased to exist; and it can even
produce effects owing to a mechanism that persists in the subjective
nothingness realized by the destruction of all life. I showed you this
not for the simple pleasure of constructing such an apparatus, but
to illustrate the fact that a montage structured like the montage of
the signifying chain can be assumed to last far longer than any of the
subjects who prop it up.
Our practice, which constantly brings us into contact with the
subject's systematic misrecognition [meconnaissance], teaches us
that consciousness - insofar as it gives us the feeling of being "me"
[moz] in discourse - is not an immediately given fact, but is, rather,
first experienced in an image, that of one's semblable. This experi
ence throws an appearance of consciousness over what is implied
by the subject's relations to the earliest, naive signifying chain, by
his relations to innocent demand and actual discourse. I am talking
about the type of discourse that flies .from one mouth to the next,
that gets repeated by one person after another, that organizes what
there is by way of discourse in history itself - this actual, shared,
everyday speech [discours universe� that envelops everything that in
fact occurs at a greater or lesser distance from it, that envelops all
real, social activity of hwnan groups.
The other signifying chain.[i.e., the upper chain] is the one that is
clearly shown in psychoanalytic experience to be inaccessible to con
sciousness. That said, given that we doubt whether the first chain is
altogether conscious, to characterize the second chain as inacces
sible to consciousness raises many questions about the meaning of
this inaccessibility. We must thus indicate what we mean by it.
465 Must we assume that the chain that is inaccessible to conscious-
ness is constructed like a signifying chain? I will return to this later.
Let us consider it first as it presents itself to us.
We have here the line S(A)-7($0D), which is drawn as a dotted
line in order to indicate that the subject does not articulate it as
a discourse. What he currently articulates is something different,
something that is situated in the intentional loop ($0D)-7S(A). In
effect, it is inasmuch as the subject situates himself as operating
Cilt and Fantasy 393
As you see on the graph, I locate fantasy across from the [vertical]
line A-7($0D) where the subject situates himself in order to accede
to the level of the unconscious chain.
Let me remind you of what I said last time. Everything transpires
as if, in fantasy, the object plays the same role qua mirage as the
image of the specular other, i (a), plays with respect to the ego, m,
at the lower level. Except that in fantasy, the object is the imaginary
469 prop of a relationship involving cutting with which the subject must
prop himself up at this level. This leads us to a phenomenology of
cutting.
We have seen the object at three levels: the pregenital object,
castrating mutilation, and hallucinatory voices. Let me point out in
passing that, as the third object here involves an incarnated voice, it
is less an interrupted discourse than a voice that is cut from the text
of the subject's internal monologue.
Let us see today if there is not a good deal more to say about this,
assuming we return to the meaning of what I already discussed last
time, concerning the difference between the vantage point of the real
and the vantage point of knowledge.
The point is to know what level we are at here regarding the
subject, when we introduce him as barred S. Is this Est-ce? [pro
nounced exactly like S] anything other than an equivocation, which
can be given whatever meaning we like? Are we going to dwell on
the fact that it is a conjugation of Esse, the verb "to be" in Latin?
I already commented on this a bit last time when I talked about
reality. Indeed, the subject does not simply refer to discourse, but
also to some facet of reality. If there is something that we can coher
ently call reality, I mean the reality we make a point of mentioning
in analytic discourse, I would situate it on the graph in the field that
is below actual discourse.
In fact, actual discourse envelops the field of reality and encloses
it within itself; it constitutes a reserve of knowledge that can be
extended to everything that speaks to man. I mean that man is
not obliged to constantly recognize every aspect of his reality and
history that he has already included in his discourse. It is here, for
example, that alienation, as it is presented in Marxist dialectic, can
be coherently articulated.
I would go further still: let us not forget the cut. It is already at
Cut and Fantasy 397
work in the first type of fantasy object, the pregenital object. What
are fantasy objects here if not real objects? As separated as they may
be from the subject, they are nevertheless closely related to his life
drives.
In short, it is only too obvious that reality is not a compact con-
tinuum; it is made up of cuts, including and going far beyond the 470
cuts made by language.
Plato long ago compared the philosopher to a good cook, one
who knows how to place his knife in the right place, and cut through
the joints [of an animal carcass] without crushing them. Up to a
point, the relationship between real cuts and linguistic cuts thus
seems to agree with what the philosophical tradition has always
assumed - namely, that what is involved is merely the overlapping
of one system of cuts with another. Yet if I say that Freud's ques
tion comes in here, it is inasmuch as the distance that science has
now covered allows us to formulate that the scientific venture goes
far beyond the notion that natural cuts are overlaid by cuts made by
discourse, made by any discourse whatsoever.
Efforts - that essentially involved eliminating the mythological
elements from all scientific explanation - have led us to the point
we are at right now, which seems to me to be adequately character
ized, without being overly dramatic, by the term "disintegration of
matter." This term is well designed to suggest to us that it is not pure
and simple knowledge that is at work in the scientific venture.
Situating ourselves at the level of the real, or, if you will, of what
I will provisionally call "the great All" - with all the necessary
irony, for I am certainly not inclined to call it that - science and its
venture do not in any way show us the real lining up with its own
cuts [se renvoyant a lui-meme ses propres coupures], but rather cuts
which are elements that create something new that has the virtue of
proliferating.
As human beings, we certainly cannot deny that a question arises
here: that of knowing whether the consequences of what manifests
itself in this way do not go somewhat beyond us in our mediating
function. This remark, which I am deliberately keeping sober and
limited in scope, nevertheless takes on a current and dramatic accent
which I assume has not escaped you. In short, it is only too clear
that man enters into this game at his own expense.
There is perhaps no reason for us to go further here. Indeed, if I
have referred to the scientific venture, it was not in order to mention
all the dramatic effects it has had on human history. It was in order 471
to home in on the relationship between the subject and the sort of
cut constituted by the fact that he is not in a certain unconscious
discourse, and that he does not know what he is in it.
398 The Dialectic of Desire
The subject as real insofar as he enters int9 the cut, the advent
of the subject at the level of the cut, his relationship to something
that we must call the real, but which is symbolized by nothing: this
is what is at stake. I designate the specific point of the subject's rela
tionship to what we might call his "pure being as a subject" - and
this will perhaps seem to you to be going too far - at the level of the
cut, which I have called a pure manifestation of this being.
Desire's fantasy [le fantasme du desir] thus takes on the function
of designating this point. This is why, at another point in time, I
defined the function fulfilled by fantasy as a metonymy of being, and
identified desire itself at this level.
It should be clear that the question remains entirely open at this
level whether we can call what is indicated in this way "man." Indeed,
what can we call "man," if not what has already been actually sym
bolized and which, whenever people talk about it, turns out to be
laden with all sorts of historical admissions [reconnaissances]? The
word "humanism" generally designates nothing here, even if there is,
of course, something real in it, which is necessary, and which suffices
to assure, in psychoanalytic practice itself, the dimension - which
we usually, and rather improperly, I believe, call a depth, so let us
instead say a beyond - which is such that being can be identified with
none of the roles (to employ the term currently used) that it takes on.
To my mind, the dignity, so to speak, of this being has nothing to
do with the fact that he is cut - ifl may express myself thus, with the
whole backdrop, and especially the castrating references, you may
attribute to this - nor with the fact that he is un coupable [a guilty
party, but also someone who is cuttable], to allow myself a play on
words. His dignity is based on the cut itself.
The cut is, in the end, the final structural characteristic of the
symbolic order. It is in this direction - and I am saying so in passing
- that I have already taught you to seek the meaning of what Freud
called the death instinct, that by which the death instinct may turn
out to converge with being.
472 As all of this may be a bit problematic to you, I would now like to
try to fill it out by referring to a work of art, and to works of art in
general, in order to illustrate what is involved here.
I will begin with a very interesting article, that does not go too
far: Kurt Eissler's "The Function of Details in the Interpretation
of Works of Literature," which came out in The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly.
Cut and Fantasy 399
Eissler begins his discourse, and ends it, too, with a remark that
one may qualify in various ways, depending on whether one consid
ers it to be confused or simply unexplained. The term "detail" seems
to him to be particularly apposite when it comes to the work of a
specific author [Ferdinand Raimund] who is completely unknown
outside of Austrian circles, an "actor-poet" who Eissler considers
to be a sort of unrecognized Shakespeare. I am taking up his article
here because I am going to return to Hamlet later today.
Regarding this quasi-Shakespeare who lived in nineteenth-cen
tury Vienna, Eissler tells us one of those pretty little stories that are
quite typical of what is known as "applied psychoanalysis." In other
words, like others before him, he finds in the life of this author a
certain number of indicative and paradoxical elements that allow
him to raise questions that must forever remain unanswered. We
thus learn that Raimund was especially affected, five years before
writing one of his chefs-d'oeuvre, by the death of someone who
was a sort of model for him, but a model who was so thoroughly
embraced that all kinds of questions about paternal, maternal, and
sexual identifications arise, as well as any other identifications you
might like to add to the mix. The question in itself leaves me rather
cold. It is one of those gratuitous papers which, in this genre, appear
again and again with an annoying note of conviction. But that is not
what is at issue.
Eissler emphasizes the function of what in English he calls the
"relevant detail,"* the one that does not fit in with the rest and
attracts attention [p. 19]. Eissler's ears perk up when, in a rather 473
well-constructed play by Raimund, something comes out of the
blue, as it were, something that nothing has prepared us for. One
thing leads to another and Eissler manages to find a certain number
of biographical facts of obvious interest. What is at stake is thus the
value of relevant details as a guide.
Eissler contrasts what happens in clinical work to what often
happens in the so-called applied psychoanalysis of a literary work.
He repeats this contrast twice, and if I had time I would read the
passages to you to convey. their curious opacity [pp. 3 and 1 9].
In short, he says that a symptom and a relevant detail play more
or less the same role, with the following proviso: in analysis, we
begin from a symptom that is taken to be relevant by the subject,
and it is by interpreting it that we move toward a solution. In the
case of a literary work, on the other hand, it is the detail that intro
duces us to the problem. It is when we find something in a text- he
does not even go so far as to define what a text is - that is not espe
cially well motivated, a discordant element, that a path opens up
that can lead us to the author's personality.
400 The Dialectic of Desire
4 475
There are all sorts of relevant things in Hamlet, too, in the sense of
details that do not fit or make sense.
I would even say that it is owing to them that we made headway,
but in a completely enigmatic way, for we were unable to ever do
otherwise than wonder about what such relevance* means. One
thing is clear, which is that we can never rule out the possibility that
Shakespeare wanted it this way.
Kurt Eissler may find it bizarre - rightly or wrongly, it does not
matter - that Ferdinand Raimund mentions, at a certain moment in
his play, a period of five years that no character had ever mentioned
before, and claim this is a relevant* detail that puts him on the scent
of something. I did not proceed in the same way at all regarding
Hamlet. For I was sure that the fabric of relevant details could not in
any case be purely and simply resolved by saying that Shakespeare
allowed himself to be led here by some sort of divine inspiration [bon
genie]. I had the impression that Shakespeare himself had contrib
uted to it.
But had he contributed to it nothing other than the manifestation
of his deepest unconscious, it is in any case the architecture of these
relevant details that shows us that he managed to make the major
assertion that I described earlier. Namely, that he brought out the
most profound facet of the subject as a speaking subject - in other
words, his true relationship to the cut.
This is what the architecture of Hamlet shows us, inasmuch as the
tragedy is founded on the subject's relationship to truth.
In contrast to the dream with which we began our exploration this
year - that in which the dead father appears before his son, a son
who is suffering greatly- in Hamlet the father knows he is dead and
tells his son how he died, they then being the only two who know
this. Shakespeare's text differs on this point from the Hamlet story
as it is found in the prior literature where the murder took place
publicly; in prior accounts, everyone knew that there was a crime
and Hamlet acted crazy in order to dissimulate his intentions.
402 The Dialectic of Desire
Which radiant angel are we talking about here? It is the angel who
introduced lewdness into this broken love relationship. The entire
responsibility for the sin falls on the angel. But is it really possible
that, here more than anywhere else, he who bears witness in this case
to the harm that has forever been done him bore no responsibility
whatsoever? This is, of course, the key that can never be turned, the
secret that can never be found out.
Yet doesn't a clue put us on the scent here of the word that will
tip us off as to what is at stake? This word, here as elsewhere, is
fantasy. And the clue? However primitive we may assume the brains
of Shakespeare's contemporaries to have been, and rightly so, it was
quite a curious choice, all the same, on the playwright's part to cast
a never-to-be-resolved enigma in the form of a vial of poison poured
into someone's ear. Let us not forget that the ear in question is that
of Hamlet, Hamlet the father, for both he and his son are named
Hamlet.
Psychoanalysts have only glancingly touched on this point. A
few have indicated that some symbolic element must perhaps be
recognized here. Yet it is something that can, in any case, be situated
using our method: it is the father's revelation, whose paradoxical
nature I just highlighted, that lives on in its consequences.
His revelation is presented to us in the form of the wall that
it forms, the hole that it digs, and the impenetrable enigma that 478
it constitutes. We have here a structure that is not merely fanta-
sized, but that fits in perfectly well with what takes place - for, if
there is anyone who gets poisoned through the ear, it is Hamlet
himself. And what plays the role of poison in his case is his
father's speech.
Shakespeare's intention is somewhat clarified thereby. First he
404 The Dialectic of Desire
Not one
The Last Judgment
An artificial perversion
Voyeurism and exhibitionism
When little a is the Other's desire
with his feelings, but, if you will allow me th�s play on words, he
would be more often content [content, another homonym] with the
object, whereas, instead, he has to content himself with it [s'en con
tente], which is a horse of a different color.
This is obviously related to the fact that, when it comes to desire,
the object that is able to satisfy us is not, to say the least, easily
accessed. I would even say that it is not easy to find it, and this is true
for structural reasons which we are now going to try to examine. I
do not seem to be making headway quickly here, but it is because
it is difficult, even if, let me repeat, we are talking about everyday
experience.
If the object of desire were the most mature and "adult" of objects,
as people put it in the sort of blithering drunkenness in which they
exalt "genital desire," we would not constantly be dealing with the
division that regularly enters into the register of the object, and that
forces us to distinguish between the level at which the object is an
object of love or, as people put it, of tenderness - whereby we give
another person the gift of our uniqueness - and the level at which
this same other person is considered to be an instrument of our
desire.
Since the supposition that subjects can be very conciliatory and
can harmonize these two levels seems to be more or less problem
atic, people rely on the other's love [or: love for the other, /'amour
de l'autre] to resolve everything. But in doing so, they go beyond the
limits of our model, because they rely in the final analysis not on
our own dispositions, but on the other's, on his affection [tendresse].
We expect that the other - and undoubtedly at the cost of a certain
decentering of himself - will live up to the most exacting standards
of what desire requires by way of an object.
In the end, it seems that people quite simply bring back in here
485 old religious distinctions, in a more or less disguised fashion - for
example, the distinction between loving affection, in the concrete
(or, as it is put, "passionate" or "carnal") sense of the term, and
charitable love [or: Christian love, amour de charite]. If this is truly
what is involved, why not send our patients to pastors who will
preach it to them better than we can?
Thus one cannot say that we do not receive a warning from our
patients, who are very good at anticipating slippage in our terminol
ogy. They tell us now and then that if we are going to preach fine
moral principles, they can go and get them elsewhere. Curiously
enough, it sometimes happens that this gets on their nerves so much
that they do not want to hear any more about it. I am being flip
pantly ironic here. Nevertheless, it is not pure and simple irony.
I would go further still. I would say that, in the final analysis, the
The Subjective Slit in Perverse Fantasies 411
must name himself. What interests us i s the correlation between the 488
two.
The correlation is such that the object has the precise function of
signifying the point at which the subject cannot name himself. It is
in this respect that modesty [pudeur] is, I would say, the royal form
of what shows up in symptoms in the guise of shame and disgust.
Nevertheless, before going into this, I will ask for a moment of
your attention to make a remark that I am obliged to leave here as a
marker, without being able to explore it as I would like.
Comedy, as opposed to what stupid people think, is what gives
us the most profound access to the workings of the [theatrical] stage
insofar as it grants human beings a spectral decomposition of their
situation in the world. Comedy goes beyond modesty, whereas
tragedy ends with the name of the hero and with total identifica
tion of the hero. Hamlet is Hamlet, he is [the person who goes by]
that specific name. And this is even so because his father before him
was already Hamlet. In the final analysis, everything resolves there:
Hamlet is definitively abolished in his desire. I think I have now said
enough about Hamlet.
But comedy is a very curious sort of desire trap. Whenever a
desire trap functions, we are in the realm of comedy. It is desire
insofar as it appears where we were not expecting it. The ridiculous
father, the hypocritical pious person, the virtuous man in the throes
of adultery - that's the stuff of comedy. There has to be an element
which is such that desire is not owned. It is masked and unmasked,
it is buffeted about, and it is occasionally punished, but only for
appearances' sake. For in true comedies, punishment never even
grazes the raven's wing of desire,. the latter getting off absolutely
scot-free. Tartuffe is exactly the same when the exempt taps him on
the shoulder as he· was before. Arnolphe goes "whew" - in other
words, he is still Arnolphe, and there is no reason why he would not
start up again with another Agnes. Harpagon is not cured by the
more or less artificial conclusion of Moliere's comedy. In comedies,
desire is unmasked, not refuted.
I have given you but a quick sketch here. What I would like to go
into with you now is how we must situate ourselves in analysis with
regard to desire. Thus I am going to present something to you that 489
will serve this purpose.
As one of our great poets - even though he was a- still greater
painter [Picasso] - put it, desire can be caught "by the tail," in other
words, in fantasy. The subject, insofar as he desires, does not know
where he is at with regard to unconscious articulation, that is, with
regard fo the sign or scansion he repeats qua unconscious. Where
is the subject himself? Is he where he desires? The aim of my class
414 The Dialectic of Desire
today is to show you that the subject is not wher� he desires, but that
he is somewhere in fantasy, and that the way we interpret depends
on that.
Some time back I discussed a fine case study that came out in
Belgium in a little bulletin, which concerns the appearance of a tran
sitory perversion during a psychoanalytic treatment.
The patient was incorrectly diagnosed as suffering from a form
of phobia, whereas something else was clearly involved. The case
study is very conscientious, and is useful to us owing to questions
that the author - that is, the woman who directed the treatment
[Ruth Lebovici] - herself raises. Had she been better guided herself,
she would no doubt have had all the qualities necessary to see
much more clearly and to go much further. In the name of certain
principles, in the name of the so-called reality principle in this case,
the analyst was wrong to allow herself to meddle with the subject's
desire as if she were dealing with something that had to be put back
in its place [or: put away, remis en place].
The patient thus begins to fantasize that the treatment will not
be over until he has had sexual intercourse with the analyst. It is
obviously no accident if something as crude as this comes to the fore
during analytic treatment. It is undoubtedly a result of the general
orientation of the treatment.
The crucial point was the interpretation of a fantasy. The fantasy
involved, quite magnificently, I will not say a man in a suit of armor,
but a suit of armor advancing behind the subject and armed with a
syringe full of bug spray - the funniest and most stereotypical repre
sentation of the destructive phallus one can imagine. In retrospect,
490 the author was embarrassed to realize that it was her interpretation
that set off the subsequent artificial perversion.
In effect, she interpreted his fantasy in terms of reality, as reflect
ing a real experience he had had of the phallic mother. Yet a close
examination of the case - starting from any point at which one
cares to take it up - clearly shows that the subject brought out here
the necessary, yet missing, image of a father, inasmuch as a father
is required to stabilize the subject's desire. Nothing could be more
satisfying than to see this missing character appear in the form of
a montage, which gives us the living image of the subject as recon
structed with the help of cuts or joints in the suit of armor, which are
truly pure articulations [jointures].
It is in this direction that one could concretely rethink the type
of intervention that would have been necessary. The "cure" in
this case could perhaps have been obtained more easily than by
creating a transitory perversion that was played out in reality; this
indisputably shows us in what respect the reference.to reality, in a
The Subjective Slit in Perverse Fantasies 415
clearly signify that in some way he wants to desire [i/ se desire desir
ant]. This is the structure of the neurotic's - pay attention here - the
neurotic's desire.
I will not take up neurosis right away because that would strike
you as involving an overly simple doubling of the type "I desire
to desire" Ue me desire desirant] and "I want to desire and to be
desired" Ue me desire desirant desire], etc. That is not what is
involved here at all.
To show this to you, it is worth once again spelling out perverse
fantasy.
492 3
that the graph shows you i n the trajectory o f speech. I n the drive's
exuberance to show itself - the drive such as we find it in nature - a
temporal projection is tangible.
As a side note, I will recommend that the person who spoke last
night about this topic take note of the following: in certain cir- 493
cumstances, we undoubtedly observe a temporal anticipation or
expectation on the part of animals. But what can justify you in char
acterizing the disappointment of this expectation as a "deception"
[tromperie]? There is reason to temper this, and in my view, until
someone convinces me of the contrary, I will say that the medium
[of deception] seems to me to be constituted by a promise. In order
to be able to talk about deception, instead of disappointment of
an expectation, we have to assume that the animal promises itself
to succeed with one or another of its behaviors, and therein lies the
whole question.
Let us return now to our exhibitionist.
Is he inscribed in the dialectic of "showing"? In no way, shape, or
form. Yet, showing is connected here to the pathways of the Other.
In effect, in the exhibitionist's relationship to the Other - the terms
I am going to employ somewhat awkwardly in order to convey
something to you are certainly not the best, or the most literary - it
is necessary that this Other be, as far as desire is concerned, com
plicit (and Lord knows that she is truly complicit at times) in what
is happening in front of her and which takes on the value of a break.
Note that this break is not just any old break. It is essential that it
be a desire trap. It is perceived by the Other to whom it is addressed,
insofar as it goes unnoticed to, let us say, most people. Everyone
thus knows that there is no true exhibitionist in private life - apart
from some supplemental subtlety, of course. In order for there to be
pleasure, the exhibition must take place in a public space.
So here we show up in our big clodhoppers and we tell the exhi
bitionist: "My little friend, you expose yourself from so far away
because you are afraid of getting close to your object. Move closer,
move closer." What a load of malarkey! Do you think exhibitionists
don't fuck? Clinical experience shows us this is not the case. They
are at times very good husbands with their wives. But their desire
lies elsewhere and their satisfaction requires other conditions. These
are conditions on which we must dwell here.
The satisfaction of so-called exhibitionist desire requires that a
specific kind of communication occur with the Other. It is neces
sary that the exhibition, as a manifestation of being and the real,
be inscribed in the symbolic frame as such. This is precisely what
necessitates a public space, in order that one be quite sure that one
is within the symbolic frame.
418 The Dialectic of Desire
important that the person who is seen be involved in the scene. This
is part of the fantasy.
There is no doubt but that the object seen is very often seen unbe
knownst to her. The, let us say, female object - since it seems that
it is no accident that the object spied on is female - undoubtedly
does not know that she is being seen. But the voyeur's satisfaction,
I mean what props up his desire, involves the following element. As
innocently, as it were, as she presents herself, something in her lends
itself to the function of a spectacle. The object is out in the open;
she is potentially participating in the dimension of indiscretion. The
voyeur's jouissance reaches its true height when something in the
gestures of the woman he is spying on allows him to suspect that,
in some way, she is capable of offering herself up to his jouissance.
The secretly observed creature is all the more "eroticizable," I
would say, when something in her gestures reveals her to be offer
ing herself up to what I will call the "invisible hosts of the air." It
is no accident that I am alluding here to the angels of Christianity
that Anatole France had the gall to invoke in this context. Read his
Revolt of the Angels, and at the very least you will see a precise link
between the dialectic of desire and the virtual nature of an eye that
can never be grasped but that can always be imagined. In his book,
La Rotisserie de la reine Pedauque, the aim of which is very focused,
Anatole France knows what he is doing when he refers to the Comte
de Gaba/is regarding the mystical wedding of men with sylphs and
undines.
The voyeur's pleasure is thus at its height when he catches the
creature in an activity in which she appears in a secret relationship
to herself, in gestures that betray the permanence of an unavowed
witness.
Isn't it obvious to you that, in both cases, the subject is reduced to
the artifice of the slit? This artifice occupies the place of the subject,
and shows him to be truly reduced to the miserable function that is 496
his. Insofar as he is in his fantasy, the subject is the slit.
The form that corresponds to it in the place of a woman's sexual
organ is, according to our field, what is symbolically the most
unbearable. What relationship is there between the subjective slit
and the female slit? This is a separate question that I will leave for
future discussion.
Let us now reconsider the whole. Let us begin with the famous
poetic metaphor from La Jeune Parque, "Je me voyais me voir"
[I saw myself seeing myself]. It is clear that no desire realizes this
dream of perfect closure or complete self-sufficiency, if not the
poetic virgin's superhuman desire.
What justifies the voyeur's and the exhibitionist's entry into the
420 The Dialectic of Desire
one side the role played in this economy by the phallus, the good old
phallus of yesteryear.
Twice - once in our re-examination of the Oedipus complex last
year, and once in my article on the psychoses - I showed you that
the phallus is linked to the paternal metaphor - namely, insofar as
it gives the subject a signified. But it was impossible to bring it back
into the dialectic at issue today without first introducing a structural
element into the constitution of fantasy, an element whose symbol
ism I will ask you to accept - in a last effort before we part today.
I have written on the blackboard all the different types of cuts,
including those that reflect the subject as a cut [la coupure du sujet
(this schema is missing)].
This is how we will henceforth notate the barred subject in
fantasy. Remember that I asked you to accept the notion of the "not
one." You see that I allow myself to be so ridiculous here as to even
refer to the notation of the square root of minus one, Fr, concern
ing imaginary numbers.
When I told you about the vanishing of the subject, I left you
on the verge of this "not one." I will begin with it next time and
even with the comme pas un [like no one else], which brings up the
subject's uniqueness. lf l am asking you to notate it in this way, it is
precisely in order that you not see in it the most general form, and 498
therefore the vaguest form, of negation.
If it is so difficult to speak of negation, it is because no one knows
what it is. Yet at the beginning of this year I pointed out the differ
ence between foreclosure and discordance. For the time being, it
is in this closed - but for that reason decisive - symbolic form that
I am pointing out another form of negation, one that situates the
subject on another scale altogether.
As for little a, with which the subject is confronted in fantasy, you
realize that I showed you today that it was more complicated than
the three forms I had given you as a first sketch, since, in the cases
that I presented to you, little a is the Other's desire.
June 3, 1959
499 XXIV
In our last class, I laid out the structure of fantasy insofar as it props
up, as I put it, the subject's desire.
Where it is possible to grasp fantasy in a structure that is suf
ficiently complete, it can in some .sense serve as a hub for what we
are led to relate to it as regards different, let us say, nosological
structures, those we encounter in our practice - in other words, the
relationship between the subject's desire and what I have long desig
nated, from a psychoanalytic perspective, as not simply its reference
point but its essence: the Other's desire.
As announced, today I will try to situate the position of desire for
you in the different clinical structures, and to begin with, in neurotic
structure.
why he is there, and what comes to light regard,ing his being - that
he cannot say.
This is the essential point - aphanisis occurs. The term is no doubt
a felicitous one. In any case, it serves us, even if - as opposed to the
function given to it by Jones in his interpretation of the castration
complex - its form remains enigmatic to us.
Indeed, if the word "aphanisis" - disappearance or· "fading,"* as
I put it - can serve us regarding fantasy, it is not as the aphanisis of
desire; it is insofar as an aphanisis of the subject occurs at the height
of desire. Where it speaks in the unconscious chain, the subject
cannot situate himself in his place, or articulate himself as /. He
can only indicate himself qua disappearing from his position as a
subject.
As I have defined it, this is the extreme, imaginary point where
the subject's being resides, as it were, in its greatest density. This
is merely an image that I am providing so that you can have a
metaphor to latch onto. The subject's being must be articulated and
named in the unconscious, but in the end, it cannot be. It is solely
indicated at the level of fantasy by what turns out to be a slit, a
structure based on a cut [structure de coupure].
In each and every domain, it is legitimate to situate an imaginary
point if we can spell out its structure by what begins from there.
Here the imaginary point will allow us to situate what actually
occurs in the different forms of the subject.
These different forms need not be homogeneous - a form that is
comprehensible to a subject situated on one side is not necessarily
comprehensible to a subject situated on the other side. We know
only too well what can lead us astray in understanding a psychosis.
When we try to reconstruct and lay out a structure, as is the case
here, we must be careful not to understand.
Let me remind you that we find a trace of the notion of the dis
appearance of the subject in Freud's work when he talks about the
502 dream's navel as the point at which all the dreamer's associations
converge only to disappear. At that point, they can only be related
to what he calls the Unerkannt. This is what is at issue here.
What does the subject see opening up [s'ouvrir] across from him
at the moment at which he disappears? Nothing but another gap.
This may go so far as to engender an infinite reflection of one desire
in another desire. But the concrete thing that experience shows us
in the voyeur's and the exhibitionist's fantasy - even if it is not very
easy to grasp - is that the subject turns out to be dependent on the
Other's desire, indeed, at its mercy.
This is precisely what is involved in little Hans's neurosis, which I
spoke to you about at length two years ago.
The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis 425
the subject from? Freud tells us that it protects him from desire's
approach [l'approche de son desir]. If we look more closely, we see
that his desire is at stake insofar as Hans is defenseless in relation
to what emerges [s'ouvre] for him in the Other - the mother in this
case - as the sign of his absolute dependence on her.
She will take him to the ends of the earth; she will take him further
still; she will take him with her as often as she herself disappears,
slips away. At that moment she no longer appears to him only as
someone who can satisfy all of his demands; she appears to him with
the supplemental mystery of being herself prey [ouverte] to a lack
whose meaning appears to Hans to be in a certain relationship to the
phallus - a phallus that he does not have.
It is at the level of the mother's want-to-be [manque-a-etre] that
for Hans a drama begins [s'ouvre] that he cannot resolve without
forging the phobic signifier whose polyvalent function I showed
you. This signifier is a kind of skeleton key, a key that open� all
doors, allowing him to protect himself against the emergence of an
anxiety that is far more dreadful than the fear that is localized by
the phobia.
All experienced analysts have perceived this, and in an unequivo
cal way. But what is worth examining is the following: how - at this
moment, which involves a relationship based on desire - can the
504 subject (the subject who in the structure of fantasy is juxtaposed as
$ to a) find something that lightens his load [or: improves his situa
tion, allege sa part], find something that sustains his presence, find
something to latch onto? This is, in short, where a symptom is going
to be produced, inasmuch as, in neurosis at its most profound level,
it concerns the subject's position most generally.
I will proceed as follows, if you will be so kind as to allow me
to. First, we are going to unpack this, then we are going to inquire
whether the structure of fantasy is as fatal as all that. At the onset
of the whirlwind of fantasy, on the verge of the point of loss or dis
appearance indicated in the structure of fantasy, there is something
that holds or stands firm - how is this something possible?
The neurotic accedes to fantasy. He accedes to it at certain spe
cific moments at which his desire is satisfied. But as we all know, this
is merely a functional use of fantasy. On the other hand, his relation
to his whole world, and to the real others in it, is profoundly marked
by what? By a repressed drive, as people have always said.
It is this repressed drive that we are trying to explain a bit
better, a bit more precisely, and in a way that is more clinically
obvious.
We are going to begin by indicating how it presents itself.
The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis 427
approach - into his weapon and his hiding place. He has learned
how to use $ in order to be elsewhere.
He can only do so by putting off or deferring until later his com
mitment to a true relationship involving desire. Whereas the relation
to desire in hysteria has an instantaneous structure, the obsessive
always puts off until tomorrow committing his true desire. This does
not mean that he commits to nothing while awaiting that day, far
from it - [in the meantime,] he proves himself. Moreover, he may
go so far as to consider what he does as a means of acquiring merit.
What does he think he merits? The Other's deference to his desires
[Des merites a quoi ? - a la reverence de l'Autre a /'endroit de ses desirs].
You will clearly observe this mechanism, which shows up every
where, even when the obsessive does not recognize it. But it is
important that you are able to recognize and designate it. It would
be inopportune, indeed, if you were led to crush this mechanism in
the analysis under the weight of all the intersubjective relations it
brings in its wake, and which can only be conceptualized as organ
ized with respect to the fundamental relation or relations that I am
trying to spell out for you.
What shows its face in this neurotic position is a call for help by
the subject, for help sustaining his desire, for help sustaining it in
the presence of the Other's desire, for help constituting himself as
desiring.
As I said last time, the only thing he does not know is that his
approach is profoundly marked by the danger constituted for him
by desire's drift. In constituting himself as desiring and in the very
constitution of his desire, he defends against something. His very
desire is a defense and can be nothing else. This is what the subject
does not perceive.
Yet in order to sustain his desire he must always call on something
that presents itself in a tertiary position for help in dealing with the
Other's desire. This is where he situates himself in order for the
The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis 429
4 510
for each of us, and, through an act that was not ope of exhibition
ism but of demonstration, he proved it brilliantly by masturbating
in public.
The obsessive's fantasy bears a relation to jouissance, and this
relation can even become one of its conditions. But it also has a
structure whose value as an index, as I call it, Freud demonstrated
to us, inasmuch as this fantasy indicates nothing other than a feature
of the subject's history, a feature that is inscribed in his diachrony.
Namely, that the subject, in a forgotten past, saw, Freud's text tells
us, a rival - whether of the same sex or of the opposite, it does not
matter - being subjected to punishment by the beloved being, the
father in this case, and was overjoyed by this early situation.
51 3 In what way does the fantasized instant perpetuate, as it were, this
favorite instant of happiness? It is here that the intermediary stage
that Freud designates takes on its demonstrative value. This stage,
he tells us, [is never remembered; it] can only be reconstructed.
Freud sometimes tells us that certain unconscious stages are
altogether inaccessible. Whether he is right or wrong in this precise
case is not germane. Thus he is not wrong, but that is not what is of
importance here; what is important is that he designates this inter
mediate stage as something that can only be reconstructed.
At the first stage of the fantasy's construction, we find the
memory of a moment of triumph on the subject's part, a memory
that is merely repressed, at worst, and can thus be brought to light:
a memory of the other, the rival brother, falling prey to the anger
of the beloved object [the father here] and to the punishment that
the beloved object is meting out to him. At the third stage, the
fantasized instant plays the role of an index inasmuch as it immor
talizes, as it were, this stage by making it into a point that something
entirely different is attached to - namely, the subject's desire. But the
process involves an intermediary stage which is, I will say, strictly
speaking metaphorical.
What is at work in the second stage, which is, as Freud tells us,
essential to understanding the functioning of this fantasy? The
subject puts himself in his rival's shoes: it is the subject himself who
is punished. What is the subject seeking in this metaphor or trans
ference? We find ourselves faced here with an utter and complete
enigma.
How strange it is to proceed, after the moment of his triumph, to
a scene in which he himself suffers the other's humiliating defeat!
Freud does not hide the fact that we find ourselves faced here with
the ultimate enigma of what in psychoanalysis we call masochism.
A conjunction presents itself here in a pure form, a conjunction
by which something in the subject perpetuates the happiness of
The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis 435
THE EITHER/OR
CONCERNING THE OBJECT
There is something instructive, I will not say "even in," but "above
all in" mistakes [erreurs] or instances of going astray [errances], if
-
you will.
This is why you have noticed that I rather constantly refer to the
hesitations and impasses that manifest themselves in psychoanalytic
theory, and use them as being in and of themselves revealing as con
cerns the structure of the reality we deal with.
In this regard, there is something interesting, noteworthy, and
significant to us in a paper that is not very old, since it came out
in 1 956 in the July--October issue of the International Journal of
Psychoanalysis. It was written by several of our Parisian colleagues,
whose names I will not mention, since I am not targeting their posi
tion insofar as it may be personal.
They endeavored to closely define the meaning of perversion.
Curiously enough, the article's conclusions are as reserved as they
could possibly be. The only formally articulated conclusion included
is, however, rather striking: "Thus there is no specific unconscious
content in the sexual perversions, since we find the same content in
cases of neurosis and psychosis."
The entire article illustrates this, but in a way that is not alto
gether convincing. Even without taking a bird's eye view, we realize
that the article is based on a constantly maintained confusion
between perverse fantasy and perversion. The authors note that
there are conscious and unconscious fantasies in the neuroses and
516 the perversions that seem t o overlap, and t o our astonishment they
The Either/Or Concerning the Object 437
First a word about what has happened in the course of the history
of psychoanalysis, which can be laid out more rigorously in light of
our progress here.
Very shortly after having spelled out the functions of the uncon
scious, especially in hysteria, the neuroses, and dreams, Freud was
led to posit the presence in the unconscious of what he called poly
morph perverse An/age: a "polymorphously perverse disposition"
[GW V, p. 9 1 ; SE VII, p. 1 9 1 ] .
For a time, one that has long since passed, naturally, things
remained at that point. Nevertheless, what people failed to realize,
it seems, is that in formulating the notion of a polymorphously per
verse disposition in the unconscious, Freud discovered nothing less
than the very structure of unconscious fantasies. He observed that
their structure resembles the relational mode that blossoms, comes
fully to the light of day, and is demonstrated in the perversions.
In effect, the form taken by unconscious fantasies overlaps what
occupies the imaginative field of the pervert's desire.
What perverts stage in their fantasies presents itself in a way that 517
i s obvious in clinical work. I t presents itself a s a movie* sequence, by
which I mean a sequence that is isolated [coupee] from the develop-
ment of the drama - is that what is called a "rush"*? I'm not sure
of the term - like trailers that are designed to whet our appetite to
come back next week to see the film from which the images we are
438 The Dialectic of Desire
522 Indian jungle." One could retort that this is not tqe register in which
the problem arises. One could even reverse his claim and say that
a tiger-phobia would be quite advantageous in helping an Indian
child adapt to his real situation, whereas it is quite cumbersome to
suffer from a tiger-phobia if one lives in London, whether one is a
child or further along in one's development. For in London, the
behavior of a subject who is prey to such a phobia would surely be
quite constricted and would bear no relation whatsoever to reality.
Glover then finds himself faced with the following problem: how
can one situate perversion in a developmental perspective when it
includes the widest variety of distortions of reality? He can only do
so by isolating different types of perversion and inserting them into
every supposed or presupposed stage of development. He is thus
obliged to accept the existence of very archaic perversions, ones that
are more or less contemporary with the paranoid or even the depres
sive phase, alongside other perversions that are situated at very
advanced stages of development - not simply phallic, but Oedipal
and even genital, strictly speaking.
Breaking perversion down into different types does not seem to
Glover to constitute an objection to his conceptualization, and here
is why. The perspective from which he begins forces him, when all
is said and done, to define perversion as one of the various forms of
reality testing.* When reality testing fails in some way or location,
perversion comes to cover over the hole* through a specific mode
of apprehending reality - which is, in this case, a psychical reality, a
projected and indeed introjected reality.
Perversion thus serves the function of safeguarding reality for the
subject, for otherwise the equilibrium of the whole of reality would
be threatened by some overload [decharge] or moment of instabil
ity. Perversion serves to repair [reprise] - in the sense in which one
speaks in French of a fabric that is darned [reprise] - reality and,
moreover, serves as reality's keystone. In short, perversion is unam
biguously conceptualized by Glover as a form of salvation when
compared with the supposed threat of psychosis.
That is one way of looking at it. Perhaps certain case studies do,
523 in fact, include elements that seem to corroborate this, but many
others would have us look elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it seems quite paradoxical to grant perversion
an economic role that is contradicted by many elements - not to
mention the fact that it is certainly not the precarious nature of the
pervert's edifice that strikes us, at least at first glance, either clini
cally or in psychoanalytic experience.
Before moving on, I will point out here in what regard Klein picks
up on and takes a first stab at the question I am raising here.
The Either/Or Concerning the Object 443
Klein postulates two stages, the paranoid phase and the depressive
phase that follows it.
In the second phase, the subject relates to his major, prevalent
object, his mother, as a whole [person]. Prior to that, he deals only
with separate elements that a split divides into good and bad objects,
giving rise thereby to the operations of projection and introjection.
All of this characterizes the paranoid barrier.
What is going on in this initial process, situated at the outset of
the subject's life, if we reformulate it from our own vantage point?
What Klein shows us is, in short, that reality, as based on the
child's first apprehensions of the object, comes from the fact that
the object - whether it is good or bad, beneficial or frustrating - is
first and foremost meaningful [significatij]. The strict opposition
between good and bad, without any nuances or intermediary states
[transitions] - without taking into account in the slightest degree the
fact that it is the same object, the mother, who can be good or bad
at different times - makes it clear that what is involved here are not a
child's actual experiences, with everything such experiences usually
bring with them that is transitional, but rather a shift in the function
of the object itself to that of a signifying opposition.
This is what is at the crux of the whole of Klein's theory.
People rarely notice, it seems to me, that, as well-founded as it
may be, it is diametrically opposed to what I have brought out in
our practice - namely, that the lively communication that takes
place in the course of mothering plays an essential role in the child's
development. It belongs to a different register, one that is contempo- 524
rary with hers, but cannot be confused with hers.
What Klein proposes is a sort of primitive algebra that we can
say connects up perfectly with what I am trying to bring out here
under the following heading: "function of the signifier. " What Klein
rightly or wrongly describes to us, and we need but register this, are
the earliest forms of the functioning of the signifier, whether the
signifier is in fact present at that early moment in time or simply a
Riickphantasie, a fantasy that is constructed retrospectively.
What value does the frontier between her two phases thus take
on? I am referring to the stage between the paranoid phase - with its
division between good objects that are "internalized"* by the child
and bad ones that are rejected - and the depressive phase where the
notion of the subject as a whole comes into view. Let us note that
it is, in fact, only from the moment at which the subject consid
ers himself to be a whole [entity] that there can be an inside and
444 The pialectic of Desire
Between the two there is a field, x, where i(a) is both part of the
subject and not part of the subject. What is it? It is what Klein cans
the bad internal object.
People do not seem surprised by the paradox that it constitutes
with respect to the premises we began from, whereas it presents
itself immediately in Klein's dialectic, and in the most manifest way
possible, as a problematic object.
The Either/Or Concerning the Object 445
And everything that will ever be said on this topic will always boil
down to the "either/or" that introduces the realm of an object that
one cannot demand.
How is the neurotic characterized? He of course makes use of
this alternative [either/or], and since he fully situates himself in the
Oedipus complex, in its signifying structuring, he makes use of it in a
way that I will call metonymic. I would even say that this metonymy
is regressive to the degree to which "he is not it" presents itself there
as prior to "she does not have it."
Allow me to explain this. The neurotic uses the fundamental alter
native in a metonymic form in that, for him, "not to have it" is the
form in which he disguisedly asserts himself "to be it." He "does not
have" the phallus "in order to be" the phallus in a hidden, uncon
scious way. It is on this somewhat enigmatic "in order to be" [pour
etre] that I ended last time.
Note that "it is an other who has it," whereas "he is it" uncon- 533
sciously. In his desiring function, the subject elects a substitute. This
is the crux of neurosis. Consider what actually happens at the end
of the obsessive's complicated maneuvers - he is not the one who
enjoys. Similarly for the hysteric: she is not the one who is enjoyed.
The imaginary substitution that is at work here is a substitution
of the ego for the subject - that is, for the $ that is involved at the
level of desire. It is because the ego takes the place of the subject that
he brings demand into desire's question. Someone who is not the
subject, but who is his image [i.e., the ego], is substituted for him in
the dialectic of desire.
This is why the neurotic can only demand substitutes, in the final
analysis. What is characteristic about his experience, and he may
even sense this, is that he demands everything that he demands for
something else [or: for some other reason, autre chose]. This is the
other consequence of the role that the imaginary comes to play and
what I called the neurotic's regressive metonymy, for in this realm
he cannot be stopped - once the subject has been replaced at the
level of his desire, he can only demand replacements while believing
he is demanding what he desires.
To take this a step further, experience shows that the ego, owing
to its very form - that is, insofar as it is the reflection of a reflection,
and is the other's form - also takes the place of the person from
whom [don t] the subject demands something. Nowhere more easily
than in the neurotic does this separate ego come to take the place of
the separate object that I designate as the earliest form of the object
of desire.
The neurotic's altruism is, as opposed to what people say, perma
nent. To obtain the satisfactions he seeks, nothing is more common
452 The Dialectic of Desire
than to see him take a pathway about which yve can say that it con
sists in devoting himself to satisfying as much as he can here - all
-
These are things that are not, I think, comprehensible outside of the
perspective that I am trying to articulate for you here.
For the neurotic, the barred S of the formula ($0a) transforms
534 - I am saying this summarily and with caveats - into something
in which identification of his unconscious being with the phallus is
inscribed. For this reason, I will give it the same sign as the subject:
just as there is a "barred subject," I will write "barred phallus." This
barred phallus finds itself in the presence of an object that I will
write in the most general form of an object of desire - namely, in
the form of the imaginary other in which the subject situates himself
and finds himself anew: <f>Oi (a) .
We must now turn to perversion, but as it is late, I will defer this
till next time. I cannot advance any more quickly here. See nothing
in this but an effect of the difficult ground we must cover.
June 1 7, 1 959
XXVI 535
THE FUNCTION OF
SPLITTING* IN PERVERSION
The difficulty we are facing is not a new one; it is one of those about
which the entire ethical tradition has speculated. Need I echo here
from long, long ago the bitterness of the sages or pseudo-sages
regarding the disappointing nature of human desire?
The question takes on an explicit form in psychoanalysis, where
the partial nature of the drives appears right from the outset, as does
the fact that our connection with the object depends on the complex,
complicated, and incredibly risky arrangement of those drives.
All access to the object, insofar as it depends on a combination of
partial drives, is fundamentally problematic in character.
If there is a theory here, it runs counter to the notion of instinct,
as counter to that notion as one can possibly imagine. However
flexibly one may posit its hypothesis of finality, the whole theory of
instinct is, as it were, based on the centering of the object. In other
words, the natural process of the living organism is such that an
object is progressively fixated in a certain field and caught there in
a certain behavior. The process presents itself in the guise of a pro
gressive concentration of the field.
The process and dialectic that psychoanalysis shows us is alto
gether different. Here, we progress on the contrary through the
addition and combination of partial drives. It is only after taking
the trouble to synthesize all sorts of interchangeable and variable
drives, and at the endpoint of highly diverse combinations, that we
manage to conceptualize the advent of a satisfying object, one that
corresponds to the two poles of masculinity and femininity.
454 The Dialectic of Desire
536 This might lead you to think that ($0a) situated on the graph
-
around the mainspring of desire. There are things that are better
constructed than Lolita at a theoretical level, so to speak, but it is a
rather exemplary product all the same.
For those who open the book, nothing will seem obscure as to the
function that is reserved for i(a) in it. This function is manifested
in it in a way that is all the less ambiguous as, curiously enough,
the author expresses a frank opposition to what he calls "Freudian
voodooism." He nevertheless clearly attests, several times and in
a way that he truly does not perceive, to the symbolic function of
the image i(a) . For example, the hero, shortly before approaching
Lolita decisively, has a dream in which she appears in the form of "a
small hairy hermaphrodite."
But that is not what is of the essence. What is of the essence lies
in the structure of the work, emphasizing, as it does, the brilliant
contrast between the first and the second part, between the spark
ling nature of desire as long as it is contemplated by the subject
for some thirty years of his life, then its prodigious decline into an
embroiled reality in the course of the miserable voyage of this couple
across America the beautiful, during which the subject finds himself
without any means whatsoever to get through to his partner. This is
why Lolita presents all the characteristics of the subject's relation to
a fantasy that is strictly speaking neurotic.
What is exemplary here is the way in which, owing to the very
coherence of the construction, perverse desire shows itself. This
desire does not appear in the hero, but in someone else [un autre]
who is both more and something quite other than his double, for he
is literally his persecutor. He appears in the margins of the story, as
if the desire at stake in the subject could only live in another person,
where it is literally impenetrable and altogether unknown. This sub
stitution is clearly avowed in the novel.
The character who takes the hero's place at a certain moment
in the plot is a pervert, strictly speaking. He really accedes to the 538
object. The key to this character is only given to us by his final
groans when he is shot by the hero with a revolver. The relation
to the object relies, in effect, on a sort of negative of the hero. This
configuration has something exemplary about it, which can serve us
as a schema for understanding that it is only by extrapolating that
we can grasp perverse structure.
The structure of desire in neurosis is of a very different nature
from the structure of desire in perversion, but we can nevertheless
say that the two structures are opposites.
What will serve us here as a pole in broaching perversion is the
most radical of the perverse positions of desire, the one that is
placed by analytic theory at the basis of development, as its earliest
456 The Dialectic of Desire
We find here one of the first steps - a step, good Lord, that is
rather important, since it is starting from it that a certain number
of symptomatic manifestations will develop - a step from which we
can see the following relationship sketch itself out on the horizon:
the relationship there may be between the death instinct, considered
to be one of the most central instances, and what in discourse gives
us a prop without which we cannot accede to the death instinct -
namely, the cut - a prop of nonbeing, the latter being one of the
earliest, constitutive, and implicit dimensions which is at the root of
all symbolization.
For a whole year, the one I devoted to Freud's Beyond the
Pleasure Principle [Seminar II], I explained that the true function of
symbolization must be located in the foundation of the cut. A cut is
that by which the current of an early tension, whatever it may be, is
taken up into a series of alternatives that inaugurate what one might
call the most basic machine. This machine is precisely what we redis- 540
cover in a detached and isolated form at the core of schizophrenia.
In schizophrenia, the subject identifies with the very discordance
between this machine and his life-sustaining [vita� current.
We are putting our finger here - I am pointing this out in passing
- in an exemplary way, which is both radical and altogether accessi
ble, on one of the most eminent forms of the function of Verwerfung
[foreclosure]. Assuming that the cut is both constitutive of discourse
and irremediably external to it, one can say that the subject is ver
worfen [foreclosed] insofar as he identifies with the cut. It is because
of this that he apprehends himself and perceives himself to be real.
Here I am merely indicating to you another form of Descartes'
"I am thinking, therefore I am," a form that is, naturally, articu
lated and explored quite differently than in Descartes' work, but
that I do not view as fundamentally distinct from his. What we
have in addition to the Cartesian dimension is that the discourse
in which the subject participates escapes him [lui echappe], and he
is [divided in] two unbeknownst to himself. Insofar as he is the cut
in this discourse, the subject is at the pinnacle of an "I am" whose
singular property is to. get its bearings [se saisir] in a reality that is
truly the last reality in which a subject can get his bearings - namely,
in the possibility of cutting the discourse somewhere, of providing
punctuation.
The subject's essential being lies in this property. For the only real
intrusion that he radically brings to the world as a subject neverthe
less excludes him from it.
The upshot being that it will require, on the basis of all of his
other life-sustaining relations, every detour that we analysts are
aware of in order for the I to become reintegrated into the world.
458 The Dialectic of Desire
Last time I spoke briefly about the way things work for neurotics.
As I said, for neurotics, the problem involves the paternal meta
phor - that is, the fiction, whether real or not, of he who enjoys the
object in peace. At what cost? At the cost of something perverse.
541 I also said that the paternal metaphor actually masks a meto-
nymy. Behind the metaphor of the father as a subject of the law [or:
law-abiding subject, sujet de la /oz], as a peaceful possessor of jouis
sance, the metonymy of castration is hidden.
If you examine it closely, you will see that the son's castration is
but the consequence or equivalent of the father's castration here.
All the primitive myths that underpin Freud's myth of the [primal]
father indicate this sufficiently: prior to the establishment of the
heavenly monarchy, Cronos castrates Uranus, and Zeus castrates
Cronos.
The metonymy in question is based, in the final analysis, on the
fact that there is never just one phallus in the game. And this is
precisely what must not be seen in neurotic structure. The neurotic
can only be the phallus in the name of the Other [or: on the Other's
behalf, au nom de /'Autre]. He does not have it - this is, as everyone
knows, what we call the castration complex. There is thus someone
who has the phallus, someone upon whom the neurotic's being
depends. But if no one has the phallus, the neurotic has it still less,
naturally.
What is the neurotic's desire?
As the entire development of Freud's work indicates, the neurotic
is altogether dependent on the signifier's good faith. The neurotic
latches on to this mythical guarantee in order to live in something
other than a permanent state of vertigo. Moreover, as everyone
knows, there is a close, historical relationship between Freud's
anatomy of this desire and the characteristics of the era in which
we live and about which we cannot know to what form of human -
vaguely predicted by prophets of various ilks - it will lead or stumble.
This allows us to arrive at a condensed formulation, which in a
certain way summarizes what I would like to convey to you: the
neurotic's desire is, I would say, what is born when there is no God.
This is tangible in our practice as long as we do not hesitate to
articulate it. But don't put words in my mouth; don't say that I am
saying the situation is simpler when there is a God. I am saying that
the suspension of the supreme Guarantor is what the neurotic hides
· within himself, and that it is at this level that the neurotic's desire is
situated, stops, and is in abeyance.
The Function of Splitting in Perversion 459
One gets the impression that the author is fl. free spirit who
gauges rather well the different directions from which people have
attempted to broach perversion. Perversion is, naturally, far more
complex than one might imagine when one confines one's attention
to the summary view that it is the drive nakedly showing itself, and
that's it. Which is not, for all that, to lend credence to the approach
that tends to lump perversion and neurosis together.
I will go straight to what must be expressed, and which will hence
forth serve us as a landmark for examining perversion in certain
ways.
The notion of splitting* [in French, refente] is essential to
Gillespie's conception of perversion. We could applaud him for this
- but don't believe that I am going to rush to do so - believing that
his conception overlaps the function in which I teach you to recog
nize the subjective component of fantasy: the subject's identification
with the slit [fente] or cut provided by discourse. It just so happens
that the type of precipitation implied by this recognition has already
led certain writers who have studied perversion to insights of which
they were a bit ashamed.
In order to corroborate this, I need but refer to the third case
Gillespie discusses in the second of his articles. I will briefly depict
the patient for you. He is a thirty-year-old fetishist. In the course of
his analysis, it comes out that his fantasy is to be split in two by his
mother's teeth while he penetrates her, she suddenly changing "into
a hairy gorilla-like creature." The creature's cutting edge, as it were,
is represented by the fact that "she bites off his female nipples,"
which he turns out to have; and [in another fantasy] she kicks him,
her shoe "splitting up his anus and rectum" [p. 75].
In short, there is a whole decomposition/recomposition that goes
544 on here, Gillespie relating it to what he calls castration anxiety,
including his mother's demand [that he be a girl] or regret [that he
wasn't], and identification with the female genitalia as split. This
identification, which grows out of one of Melanie Klein's theories,
is not, I must say, demonstrated in this case; it is simply assumed by
the analyst at the end of the analysis.
Gillespie concludes with a sort of insight or intuition that is only
half-owned, it remaining a question for him. This is, in my view,
indicative of the extremes to which he - someone who attentively
followed the way the explanation, that only analysis was able to
give, of the deepest recesses of perverse structure has developed over
the course of time - was led. Gillespie writes, "The configuration of
the material at this point led me to a speculation about the phantasy
associated with the split ego" [p. 75].
As I believe you know, Freud died before he could complete his
The Function of Splitting in Perversion 461
article Die Ichspaltung, "The Splitting of the Ego." The article was
found after his death and it led Gillespie to speculate about the con
nection between the split ego and the split object.
Gillespie asks:
Is not the female genital the split object par excellence, and
cannot the phantasy of a split ego arise from an identification
with this split genital? I am aware that when we speak of split
ting of the ego and of the object we are referring to mental
mechanisms which we assume to underlie the phenomena,
"No one can imagine the love of an Uranist." What is at issue here
is his hyper-idealized love for his wife.
Its origins are very clearly spelled out by Delay, and I had no
trouble at all bringing them together and highlighting everything
that connects this love to his relationship with his mother. It is
not solely a question of the real mother as we know her, but of the
mother insofar as she harbors within herself a structure whose true
nature we will try to detect. I will immediately say that the presence
- I would go even further and say the topography - of the bad object
is essential to that structure.
I cannot dwell here on each point of Gide's history, such as his
work, at its different stages, lays it out. I will confine my attention to 547
citing the following passages:
steals up behind her and puts his.arm around 4er waist; Justine
is ticklish and drops the pile. Crash! The whole of the crockery
is smashed to pieces. This disaster made me swoon with delight.
[p. 5 1]
TOWARD SUBLIMATION
its heart, and without which there cannot be, I believe, any accurate
assessment of psychoanalytic action - namely, the question of the
place of desire. My theorization of desire is designed to foreground
- in a way that is not ambiguous, but truly crucial - the notion that
what we are dealing with is a subjectivity.
Is desire [the same thing as] subjectivity? This question did not
have to await the arrival on the historical stage of psychoanalysis
to be raised. It has always been there, since the origin of what one
might call "ethical practice." Desire is both subjectivity - it is what
is at the very heart of our subjectivity, what is most essentially
subjective - and at the same time its opposite, for it opposes subjec
tivity like a resistance, a paradox, or a rejected, refutable nucleus.
It is on this basis, as I have said several times, that ethics devel
oped in a tradition at the end of which we find Spinoza's enigmatic
formulation: "desire, cupiditas, is the very essence of man." This for
mulation is enigmatic inasmuch as it leaves a question unanswered:
is what we desire the same as what is desirable?
Even in psychoanalysis, we observe a distance between what is
desired and what is desirable. Psychoanalytic practice has been
established and formulated on this very basis. Desire is not simply
exiled, or pushed away when it comes to action and to the crux of
our servitude, as it had been prior to analysis. It is questioned as
being the key or the mainspring in us of a whole series of actions and
behaviors that are understood to represent what is most profoundly
559 true about us. This is the ideal aim from which analytic practice
constantly tends to deviate.
Does this mean that the desire in question is a pure and simple
vital impulse, as people thought for a long time? Not at all, since,
as soon as we spell out our practice, we find that the more we
examine this desire, the less it resembles a pure and simple impulse.
Rather, it disintegrates, falls apart, and deviates ever more from
anything that might be characterized as a harmonious relationship.
In the progressive regression involved in psychoanalytic experi
ence, no desire ever fails to present itself as problematic, dispersed,
polymorphous, contradictory, and, in short, far from any oriented
coaptation.
We need to set our sights on experience involving desire [expe
rience du desir], which is absolutely original and irreducible. We
cannot leave it without exploring it, without producing some theory
that gives us a fix on its meaning - whereas, as I have said, every
thing in the way in which psychoanalytic experience is currently
formulated is designed to veil the meaning of desire and to make us
turn away from it.
Transference is the only way the pathways toward the object can
Toward Sublimation 475
terms: in most cases, the child has only the most indirect experience
of this object and accepts it only as a signifier. It is as a signifier that
the impact of the phallus is justified most clearly.
We are perhaps doomed to never know whether a child, at his
age, takes the phallus to be a signifier or an element of reality.
But what is clear is that whenever Klein refers to the phallus, it is
because, whether she knows it or not, she has no better signifier of
desire at her disposal.
If there is something that the phallus qua signifier signifies, it is
desire for the Other's desire [desir du desir de l'Autre], and this is why
it plays its specific role at the level of the object. Nevertheless, I am
far from remaining in the phallocentric position that is attributed
to me by those who look only at the outer appearance of what I am
in the process of formulating. The true problem lies elsewhere. The
true problem is that the object we are dealing with from the outset
when it comes to desire is in no wise an object that is predestined
to satisfy the instincts, in no wise an object destined to satisfy the
subject by serving as his instinctual complement; the object of desire
is the signifier of desire for desire [signifiant du desir du desir].
The object of desire - in other words, object a on the graph, if
you will - is actually the Other's desire insofar as it comes to the
attention [or: knowledge or consciousness, connaissance] - assuming
the word has a meaning - of an unconscious subject. Which is to
say that the object is in a contradictory position with respect td the
unconscious subject; this is indicated by the formulation "conscious
ness of an unconscious subject." The latter is not at all unthinkable;
it remains an open question, which means that, if the object comes
to [the attention of] the unconscious subject, it comes there insofar
as the object is itself the wish to recognize it, being a signifier of its
recognition [reconnaissance]. In short, desire has no other object
than the signifier of its recognition.
The character of the object qua object of desire must thus be
sought out where human experience shows it to us in its most para
doxical form - that of fetishes, as we commonly call them.
Fetishes are always more or less implicit in everything that gen-
564 erally constitutes objects of exchange among people; but they are
of course masked there by the regular or regulated nature of these
exchanges. People have spoken about commodity fetishism, and it
is not simply a homophony, for the two uses of the word "fetish"
definitely share a meaning. Nevertheless, when we talk about the
object of desire, we must first and foremost emphasize the fact that
it is borrowed from signifying material.
"I saw the devil the other night," Paul-Jean Toulet says some
where, "and when you look under his fur . . . " The poem ends with
Toward Sublimation 479
"The fruits of Science do not all fall, you see!" Well, let this be the
case for us here, too, that they do not all fall - so that we will per
ceive that it is less the hidden fruits than the mirage, or fur, present
in desire that counts. A fetish is in fact the fur, edge, fringe, or frill,
the thing that hides, and nothing is better designated to serve the
function of signifier of the Other's desire.
Let us start again from the child's relationship to the demanding
subject [or: the subject to whom he addresses his demands, sujet de
la demande]. In this relationship, the child first deals with the moth
er's desire - in other words, with what the demanding subject truly
is apart from demand. Now, the child cannot decipher this desire,
if not in the most virtual way, by means of a signifier - a signifier
that we analysts, regardless of what we do in our discourse, relate to
the phallus as a yardstick [commune mesure], a central point of the
signifying game here.
The phallus is nothing other than the signifier of the desire for
desire. Desire has no other object than the signifier of its recogni
tion. This is what allows us to no longer be dupes of the exchange
that occurs at the level of desire, when we realize that the subject has
shifted to the other side of the subject/object relationship - namely,
· that he has become a. We must conceptualize the fact that in this
position, the subject is no longer anything but the signifier of the
recognition of desire, no longer anything but the signifier of desire
for desire.
Yet it is important to maintain an opposition, that of $ across
from a, on the basis of which this exchange occurs. As for the barred
subject, he is a subject here who is undoubtedly imaginary, but in
the most radical sense, in the sense that he is the pure subject of dis
connection or of spoken cuts [de la coupure par!ee], insofar as such
cuts constitute the essential scansions on which speech is built. This 565
subject is grouped here with a signifier that is nothing other than the
signifier of the being with whom the subject is confronted, insofar as
this being is himself marked by the signifier. As for little a, the object
of desire, it is a residue or remainder by nature - namely, the residue
left by the being with whom the speaking subject is confronted, the
remainder of any and every possible demand.
It is in this way that the object meets up with the real; it is in this
way that the object shares in it. I am saying "the real" here, not
"reality," because reality is constituted by all the halters that human
symbolism, more or less perspicaciously, throws around the neck of
the real insofar as it fabricates the objects of its experience with it.
Let us note that what characterizes objects of experience is precisely
that they leave aside - as La Palice would say - everything in the
object that is not encompassed by this experience.
480 Conclusion and Overture
SEMINAR ON DESIRE
4. Fairbairn
Nowadays, when you come across a name like Fairbairn that you do
not know, you look it up on Wikipedia and you find a solid article
which, even to someone like me who knew him, is informative. There
is a photo of him in uniform, but my impression is that it must be
of someone who has the same name as him, the Lieut. Col. William
E. Fairbairn [the photo has since been taken down]. In this case, I
will simply provide the Wikipedia article [Miller provides the article
found at https://fr. wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ronald_Dodds_
Fairbairn; the English-language Wikipedia site is far more extensive.]
After the entry, references are provided. His Psychoanalytic 576
Studies of the Personality was published in 1 952 by Tavistock and
republished in paperback* in 1 994 (under the Routledge imprint in
the United States and Canada).
[Let us sing - as true friends, just like our fathers did, clinking our
glasses - to roses and lilies.]
What sorts of examples can we find of what Lacan calls "figura
tive poetry"? The simplest are the Blasons du corps feminin.
6. John Donne
Your turn to look up Donne. I could write at length about the man
and his work. At Janson-de-Silly high school, I had an excellent
English teacher by the name of Kerst, who wrote some fine text
books. He had no compunction about making us read, translate,
and comment on a poem by Donne entitled The Flea, one of the fun
niest and most erotic poems I have ever read. That gave me a taste
for Donne and he remains my favorite English poet. When I met
Lacan, I was happy that he knew and liked Donne's work. The fact
that Lacan's theory accounts for what I had always experienced -
namely, the strong libidinal content of signifying subtleties - played
an important role in rallying me to his ideas. I very much admired
Jean Fuzier's translation of Donne's poems into French.
and absurd notion, rotten to the core, but as Andre Maurois, who is
quoted in the Robert dictionary under the heading/aux [false], once
said, "nothing is more difficult to refute than what is completely
false."
planned, and was not made l\nown to the public OJ'. to myself until
1 966 with the publication of Ecrits.
1 6. The "bar"
See Ecrits, pp. 4 1 4-17.
1 7. Hilflosigkeit
On this topic, see Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, and
Lacan's Seminar X.
·
1 8 . Urbild
This term is repeatedly found in Lacan's earliest texts and Seminars
devoted to the imaginary in its relations with the symbolic. The
same is true of references to mirror schemas.
Who was Sydney Smith? "An English wit, writer and Anglican
cleric," according to Wikipedia.org, which provides a fine article
on him. We learn there that he may have been the model for Henry
Tilney, the hero of Northanger Abbey, which is perhaps Jane
Austen's most beautiful novel.
22. Volpone
This is a reference to the play by Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox, a
fox hated by Christine Angot who only liked hedgehogs.
The entire text has been made available online by Project
Gutenberg, and includes the following introduction:
Charles Dullin. I liked the film because the , minor role of Voltore
was played by Jean Temerson, the younger brother of Louis
58 1 Temerson (known as Bebe), who was a neighbor of mine and had
been wounded in the First World War; he and his wife Juliette
(often called Yeyette) would look after my brother and me when my
parents went out. Bebe's wisdom had a profound influence on me.
He was a serious marcheur [womanizer], as people put it at the time,
and he strongly advised me not to defer experiencing the pleasures
the opposite sex could offer me. It is to him that I owe having under
stood already at ten years of age the meaning of the expression,
rarely used today, "half-virgin" [demi-vierge]. The Temersons were
Jewish, and acting in a film in 1941 must have been rather compli
cated for them. When I read the stenography of this Seminar for the
first time, I was enchanted to see that Lacan knew the play.
The article provided by Wikipedia.org is solid. I would like to
have read everything listed under the heading "further readings,"
but the truth is that I have read none of the works included there.
II Further Explanation
7 1 . Binet
This example has become famous since the publication of Seminar
XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in which
Lacan referred to it. It comes from Alfred Binet and Theodore
Simon, La Mesure de developpement de !'intelligence chez !es jeunes
en/ants (1905), in the chapter entitled "critique of absurd sentences,"
which can now be found in the form of an e-book published by
L'Harmattan. I'd like to publish e-books from now on. I want to, I
just don't know how to.
Binet was born Alfredo Binetti and was from Nice. He was
Babinski's protege. "He married the daughter of the embryologist,
Edouard-Gerard Balbiani, and began studying natural science at the
Sorbonne 'under his father-in-law's supervision." Isn't that unbeliev
able! He studied under the supervision of his wife's father! Isn't that
against the law? And such a one claims to measure intelligence!
1 1 5. Trotsky's dream
See Trotsky's Diary in Exile, 1935 (Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 1976). Trotsky was better than the
Trotskyites, just as Lacan was better than the Lacanians. For Jesus
and his followers, that is obvious. Have masters always been better
than their disciples? No. Consider, for example, Aristotle and
Alexander the Great. Or Raymond Aron and Kissinger. In science,
the disciple is there to go further than the master. But a problem
arises when the scientific spirit disappears. Yet in science, too, it is
something of a knife fight.
1 66. Darwin
Darwin granted his young disciple George John Romanes access to
his notes. The anecdote is recounted in a book written by Romanes,
Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty [London:
Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 888], in Chapter 1 3 entitled "Roots of
Language," p. 283. Psychologists who specialize in language acqui
sition consider the following passage to be the first observation of
the phenomenon that is known today as "overextension":
498 Appendix
For instance, the late Mr. Darwin gave me the following par
ticulars with regard to a grandchild of his own, who was then
living in his house. I quote the account from notes taken at the
time.
"The child, who was just beginning to speak, called a duck
'quack'; and, by special association, it also called water 'quack.'
By an appreciation of the resemblance of qualities, it next
extended the term 'quack' to denote all birds and insects on the
one hand, and all fluid substances on the other. Lastly, by a still
more delicate appreciation of resemblance, the child eventu
ally called all coins 'quack,' because on the back of a French
sou it had once seen the representation of an eagle. Hence, to
the child, the sign 'quack,' from having originally had a very
specialized meaning, became more and more extended in its
signification, until it now serves to designate such apparently
different objects as 'fly,' 'wine,' and 'coin.'"
1 78. Limericks
I am inclined to think that the collection Lacan consulted was the
one that was, at the time, the most complete: The Limerick: 1 700
Examples with Notes, Variants, and Index by Gershon Legman,
published in English in Paris by the Ecole des Haute Etudes in 1953.
The author, who was an American persecuted for obscenity by the
U.S. Postal Service, was forced to go into exile. He later brought
out The New Limerick: 2750 Unpublished Examples, American and
586 British (New York: Crown Publishers, 1 977). The article about him
on Wikipedia.org depicts him as a rather colorful nonconformist.
Just for the heck of it, I will provide here a few other vaginal
limericks:
2 1 8 . St. Augustine
This passage, which is often mentioned by Lacan, is found m
Chapter 7 of Book I of Augustine's Confessions.
234. These two Alice tales are virtually an epic poem of phallic
avatars
Lacan commented on this in a charming little paper that I published
in the journal Ornicar? [50 (2002): 9-12], entitling it "Hommage
rendu a Lewis Carroll."
Marginalia on the Seminar on Desire 501
246. Letoumeur
Pierre-Prime-Felicien Letourneur, libraire du Roy (the King's book
seller), was the first person to bring Shakespeare to France. He
translated all of Shakespeare's work, including Hamlet in 1 779. This
was the translation that Raymond Queneau included in his collec
tion, Ecrivains celebres (Paris: Mazenod, 1 971).
252. Goethe
See Wolfgang Hollrigl's Wenn Shakespeare und Goethe Bridge
gespie/t hatten. Ein heiterer Versuch, Dichtern und Schriftstellern,
die iiber Bridge nichts geschrieben haben, zu untersteen, sie hatten das
getan! (Munich: Idea Verlag, 1 999).
253. Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and
Other English Poets (London: G. Bell, 1 883).
253. Hazlitt
William Haziett, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,
and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London: R. Hunter, 1 8 1 7).
Marginalia on the Seminar on Desire 503
267. M. Valdemar
Valdemar is a character invented by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1 845
story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," which was sepa
rately republished as Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis, and later as
"The Last Days of M. Valdemar. " Like "The Purloined Letter,"
it was included in a collection prepared by Baudelaire, Histoires
extraordinaires (1 856). Lacan refers to it on page 486 of Ecrits: he
compares the IPA to M. Valdemar, and tells us that his own "return
to Freud" amounts to giving a decent burial to an organization that
has outlived its purpose.
27 1 . Kyd
It seems that the source of Shakespeare's Hamlet was a play by
Thomas Kyd that has now been lost, and that scholars designate as
the Ur-Hamlet.
27 1 . T. S. Eliot
See Eliot's "Hamlet and His Problems," an essay written in 19 19,
which came out in 1920 in the collection The Sacred Wood: Essays
on Poetry and Criticism. It was subsequently included in Eliot's
Selected Essays, 191 7-1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1 932).
XIX Phallophaoies
show in what respect "it is not by examining the Other, but rather
by considering what occurs at the level of demand that we are going
to extend the process of logical generation":
378. Let us reconsider, for example, Freud's claim, Wo Es war, soil 599
/ch werden
This is the penultimate sentence in Lecture 3 1 of Freud's New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, entitled "The Dissection
of the Psychical Personality." The last sentence is "It is a work of
culture - not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee" [SE XXII, p. 80].
384. Breathing
Lacan mentions a breathing stage here, comparable to the oral or
anal stage, in order to suggest that there is no such thing. Jean-Louis
Tristani tried to demonstrate just the opposite in his book Le Stade
du respir (Paris: Minuit, 1 978).
on in Seminar II. The novel came out in 1 940 and bears some affinity
to H. G. Wells's novel, The Island ofDoctor Moreau.
600 393. The fable of the white disks and the black disks
Lacan is referring his audience to his paper, "Logical Time and the
Assertion of Anticipated Certainty," which came out in the journal
Cahiers d'art, 1940--4, and was republished in Ecrits, pp. 1 61-75. A
whole book was devoted to the study of this paper: Erik Porge, Se
Compter trois. Le temps logique de Lacan (Paris: Eres, 1990). I did
a detailed examination of the article in my course, L' Orientation
lacanienne (forthcoming).
398. A very interesting article by Kurt Eissler, that does not go too
far
The reference here is to Kurt Eissler's "The Function of Details in
the Interpretation of Works of Literature," which came out in PQ
28 (1 959): 1-20.
4 1 3 . Tartuffe
Lacan is alluding here to the famous scene in Act V. It was in Lacan's
company that I recall seeing the best production of Tartuffe I have
ever seen, which was directed by Planchon. When I knew Lacan, he
almost never went to performances anymore, except those of Fellini,
Moliere, and Mozart.
4 13 . Arnolphe
Lacan commented on Moliere's L'Ecole des femmes in his Seminar.
Arnolphe's " Oufl" comes in Act V, Scene 9, line 1 765. In the latest
edition of Corneille's theatrical works published by Gallimard in
the Pleiade edition, one finds a note by Georges Couton regarding
"ouf"
4 1 4. A fine case study that came out in Belgium in a little bulletin 602
Lacan is referring here to Ruth Lebovici's case study; see Ecrits,
p. 540.
424. Unerkannt
The German term means less what is unknown than what is unrec
ognized. Lefebvre translated it into French as the non connu (not
known). The word can be found in The Interpretation of Dreams,
VI, D, regarding the dream's navel: "This [tangle] is the dream's
navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown" [this is
Strachey's translation in SE V, p. 525].
439. The supposed "bad distance at which the obsessive stays from
the object"
The reference here is to Maurice Bouvet's notion that Lacan often
takes aim at in the years that followed the 1 953 split. See Bouvet's
1958 article, "Les variations de la technique (distance et variations)"
[Variations in Technique (Distance and Variations)] in volume one
of his Oeuvres psychanalytiques (Paris: Payot, 1967), pp. 25 1-93.
449. Nestroy
The sentence can be found in "The Question of Lay Analysis,"
which came out in 1 926, regarding psychoanalysis as practiced by
those who are not medical doctors [SE XX, pp. 1 83-258]. This was
a crucial episode: Freud argued against the attempt that was being
made by doctors to monopolize psychoanalysis. Here is the relevant
passage:
454. Lolita
Lolita needs no introduction. The book, and then the film by Stanley
Kubrick, have been discussed by numerous literary critics. Lacan's
clinical commentary here stands in stark contrast to everything else
I have read. Nabokov had nothing but scorn for psychoanalysis.
459. Gillespie
Here are the exact references to the articles by W. H. Gillespie that
are cited by Lacan: "A Contribution to the Study of Fetishism," /JP
608 21 (1940): 401-1 5; "Notes on the Analysis of Sexual Perversions,"
/JP 33 (1952): 397-402; "The General Theory of Sexual Perversion,"
/JP 37 (1956): 396-403.