Psychoanalytical Notebooks 28

The Child
London Society of the New Lacanian School
Psychoanalytical Notebooks
London Society of the New Lacanian School
Issue 28, August 2014: The Child
Director of NLS publications: Yves Vanderveken
Consulting editor: Pierre-Gilles Guéguen
Issue Editor: Éric Zuliani
Editor: Natalie Wülfing
Editorial committee: Philip Dravers, Vincent Dachy, Janet Haney
Cover design: Adrian Bostan
Text setting & design: Peter Owen
Secretary: Janet Haney
Additional translators: Bogdan Wolf, Florencia Fernandez Coria Shanahan,
Ian Curtis, John Haney, Alexandra Langley, Glenn Naumovitz, Betty
Bertrand

Published by the London Society of the NLS

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Copyright © Psychoanalytical Notebooks, August 2014

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Contents

Editorial Natalie Wülfing

Special issue editorial Éric Zuliani

Orientation
Jacques-Alain Miller The child and the object

The Lacanian clinic

Jean-Robert Rabanel The alienated child
Éric Laurent Protecting the child from the family delusion
Serge Cottet UPO: Unidentified phobic objects

Reading the classical

literature
The case of Sandy according to Jacques
Jacques-Alain Miller
Lacan
Daniel Roy The child and his objects
Reading Gabrielle and Richard with Little
Éric Laurent
Hans
Esthela Soláno-Suarez The interpretations of the Little Piggle

Pragmatics in praxis
An attempt to make a language out of the
Yves Vanderveken
symptom
Éric Zuliani For a humanising practice

Poetry rubric
VD-Collective Please use
Vincent Dachy Seven critical and invigorating remarks...
Reviews
Janet Haney Like an open sky, a film by Mariana Otero
Editorial
The Child

This Special Issue of the Psychoanalytical Notebooks is concerned with the

child. It is guest edited by Éric Zuliani, psychoanalyst and member of the
Ecole de la Cause freudienne, an important contributor to the field of child
psychoanalysis within the Institut Psychanalytique de l’Enfant, practicing in
Nantes, France.
Several texts in this issue debate the classical British case studies of
Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, amongst others, to show the
important points at which Lacan departs from the conceptual foundations
that these psychoanalysts worked with. In a very summary fashion this can
be said to be the idea of the mother-child relation that, for Lacan, is the seat
of the impasses that in this view inform much of British psychoanalysis still
today.
In the 21st century, psychoanalysis finds itself at a limit point in our
civilisation. Not marginalised, but generalised, therefore close to losing
specificity and dignity, it grapples with the excesses of culture that threaten
to reduce and consume everything in its path. We can perhaps hear a certain
parallel with the predicament of the child as object in our culture, who is
faced with the same processes of reduction and consumption and who
responds with symptoms and as symptom of the parental unconscious
wishes.
Psychoanalysis in the Lacanian Orientation fights for the dignity of
speech to be returned to the speaking being, of which the child is the
privileged proponent, to ensure a possibility to create singular solutions to
the effects that being born into language produces.
Lacanian psychoanalysis treats the child as a subject within speech,
like every other subject within speech, in contrast to a view of the child that
suggests a developmental idea of human beings and thus segregates in a
multitude of ways. The developmental view separates child psychoanalysis
into a specialised field, but it also separates the child who supposedly does
not speak, from the one who does, creating ever more categories of being
human. In the texts of this issue we find a view that does not segregate, but
instead singularise each symptomatic solution through giving it speech,
even there where it supposedly did not exist. It is an approach that takes its
foundations from a particular conception of language therefore, the
consequences of which are elaborated and demonstrated in all the articles
that follow.
Several seminal texts should here be mentioned that further
accompany the foundations of child psychoanalysis in the Lacanian
Orientation, which have been published in previous issues, or in other
publications.
Lacan’s Note on the Child, together with Jacques-Alain Miller’s The
Child, Response from the Real, both in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 20, are
important additions to the selection of texts in this issue.
Further, Lacan’s Address on Child Psychoses in Hurly Burly 8 and
Éric Laurent’s Autism and Psychosis in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 25,
underline the specific position of the child in psychosis.

Natalie Wülfing
Special issue editorial: The child in
discourse-land
Éric Zuliani

At the beginning of the 20th century, Freud interpreted the child as “His
Majesty the Baby!”.1 On the side of narcissistic love of the parents, Freud
outlines the unconscious wishes that the child will be the bearer of, which
can make us guess that the child will slowly become the seat of demands,
requests, and thus will be still more coupled with the third person singular.
We speak of him like an agalma, at times a fetish object; he will be the
object of anguished protection, even of the waste of the Other. Here a path
can be traced: from the child object to the child and the object, a theme that
the text by Jacques-Alain Miller (The child and the object) and that by
Daniel Roy looks into. This perspective of the child object also casts a new
light on the family, as the text by Éric Laurent (Protecting the child from the
family delusion) shows, and clarifies the alienation and separation
phenomena broached by Jean-Robert Rabanel.
Psychoanalysis must bring to light the way in which a child extracts
himself from this object position, not without the backing of the symptom
where phobia takes the function of a “turntable”, using the expression by
Jacques Lacan, explored by Serge Cottet. The recent publication of Seminar
VI, in France, shows in which way a subject constitutes himself, namely by
way of a knowledge of language (langue), singular for each one. This path
situates desire – and not reality - and provides the child that is taken up in
discourse (that of autism for example), a breathing space: the texts by Yves
Vanderveken and Éric Zuliani give us an idea of this.
In order for this new knowledge of language to be able to come
about, it is necessary that there is a lack. That the Other shuts up, for
example, contrary to what is advocated in school. The analytic discourse
assures this. The subject can then, starting from the inventive power of
language, explore in what way he is interested in the symbolic order, as any
speaking being is. Genealogy, death, the events of desire and the body, the
lack and its functions, are all problems passed through metonymically by
the child, who, giving mythical solutions to enigmas, preforms
metaphorisations, initiates new cuts and makes novel punctuations. The
case of Hans is in this regard paradigmatic for the reading of other cases,
such as Jacques-Alain Miller (The Case of Sandy according to Jacques
Lacan), Éric Laurent (Reading Gabrielle and Richard with Little Hans) and
Esthela Solano-Suarez do with reference to the analytic literature.
The child in discourse-land, a Lewis Carroll like phrase, indicates
more generally the status of the subject today, whatever his age: reduced, as
he is by our civilisation to a situation that Lacan pinned down as “the all-
pervasive child”.2 But the encounter with a psychoanalyst, proving that
there are still ‘grown-ups’3, allows the subject to learn to read the language
(langue) of his desire beyond the wall of language (langage), the latter, to
date, being essentially reduced to cognitivism.

1Freud S., On Narcissism, an Introduction, The Standard Edition, Volume XIV, p.91
2Lacan J., Address on Child Psychoses, Hurly Burly 8, p. 276
3Ibid.
Orientation
The child and the object
Jacques-Alain Miller

The title of this Colloquium, “The child, between the woman and the
mother”, is validated by Lacan’s Seminar IV, whose title looks out of place
in the series of his seminars.1 In fact, this Seminar is the only one to
expound a concept, the object relation, an expression that Lacan formally
repudiates and that is borrowed from the set of doctrines by Freud’s
students that could be designated as the post-Freudian vulgate.
The title – that of this Colloquium – gets right to the essence of the
demonstration that Lacan pursued in his Seminar, namely that the object is
only established in its right place in psychoanalysis when set in relation to
the function of castration. This dimension goes unrecognised in the post-
Freudian vulgate, as in observations of children, for example in the register
of mother-child interactions.

Three scansions
In the Seminar, Lacan’s demonstration that the object can only find its right
place when set in relation to the function of castration is deployed in three
scansions.
First, feminine homosexuality, where, for want of the paternal gift of
the child object as a substitute for the phallic lack, the consequences of the
affect of deception will go as far as to make the woman into an object,
chosen by the subject, to show the father a thing or two about love.
Secondly, masculine perversion, where the fetish object is presented
as painted on the screen, veiling the phallus the woman lacks.
In the third time we have infantile phobia, illustrated by Freud from
the seminal case of little Hans.
The first two times – the substitution of the child for the phallus,
highlighted in the Freudian psychogenesis of feminine homosexuality, and
the identification of the male child with the imaginary object of the
feminine desire – converge in the third time.
 The lesson of Seminar IV not only concerns the function of the father
– this function that remains unrecognised when one is hypnotised by the
mother-child relation, based on the dual, reciprocal form, as if mother and
child were inside a sphere. No doubt the effect of the father on the desire of
the mother is necessary to allow the subject to have a normed [normé]
access to his or her sexual position, but the mother is also not “good
enough”, to use Winnicott’s expression, when she is merely the bearer of
the Name-of-the-Father’s authority. What is necessary is that, for her, the
child does not fill the lack that supports her desire.

Mother and woman

What does it mean? The mother is only good enough by not being too much
the mother, and provided that the care she lavishes on the child does not
turn her away from desiring as woman. To take up terms used by Lacan in
his text “The Signification of the Phallus”, the function of the father is not
enough. It is also necessary that the mother does not turn away from finding
the signifier of her desire in the body of a man.
The paternal metaphor, with which Lacan transcribed the Freudian
Oedipus, does not only mean that the Name-of-the-Father has to bridle the
Desire of the Mother by putting the halter of the Law upon it. The paternal
metaphor refers to a division of desire, which entails that, in this order of
desire, the child object is not all for the maternal subject – there is a
condition of not-All – but that the desire of the mother diverges towards,
and is called for, by a man.

The child fulfils or divides

This therefore requires that the father be also a man. I will not hesitate here
to parody the immortal response of Molière’s Tartuffe – I refer to the
subject of enunciation, the hypocrite, who hides his personal mark in the
anonymity of a one: “A mother though I may be, I am no less a woman”2,
where a division of desire spreads that, stretched to its extreme, gives us the
act of Medea.
This act properly illustrates – horrifically, indeed – that maternal love
is not supported through pure reverence for the law of desire, or that it can
only bear it if a woman in the mother remains the cause of desire for a man.
In this case, when Jason leaves, Medea ceases to be in that position.
 The accent placed on the child’s value as a phallic substitute – on his
Ersatz value, as Freud said – is misleading if it leads one to push, in a
unilateral way, the child’s fulfilling function [fonction comblante] and
makes us forget that, for feminine subjects who take on the maternal
function, the child also divides the mother from the woman.
The child object does not only fulfil, he also divides. It is essential
that the mother desire beyond him. If the child object does not divide, either
he falls as a reject of the parental couple or enters with the mother into a
dual relation that suborns him – to use Lacan’s terms – to the maternal
fantasy.

The child’s symptom

The clinical consequences of this division are patent. Thus in the Note to
Jenny Aubry3, Lacan presents us with two major types of symptoms in the
child, those that truly arise from the familial couple and those that are
attached, above all, to the dual relation of mother and child.
First, the child’s symptom is more complex if it emerges from the
familial couple, if it translates the symptomatic connection, but, because of
this, it is also more receptive to the dialectic that the analyst’s intervention
can introduce. When the child’s symptom arises from the articulation of the
father-mother couple, it is already fully articulated in relation to the paternal
metaphor, fully taken up in substitution, so the analyst’s interventions can
extend the circuit and make these substitutions continue.
Secondly, the child’s symptom is, by contrast, much simpler if it
emerges from the mother’s fantasy, but it is thus a barrier [blocal] and
ultimately presents itself as a real that is indifferent to any attempt to
mobilise it by means of the symbolic. Thus, what is at stake in the mother-
subject’s desire can be read in it without difficulty.
Here, Lacan takes the example of the somatic symptom to show that,
firstly, the child’s somatic symptom nourishes the neurotic mother’s motive
of guilt; secondly, the perversity that can mark her desire translates into a
fetishisation of the child’s symptom; thirdly, in cases of maternal psychosis,
we can see that the child’s somatic symptom incarnates her foreclosure.

The fetish-child
The more the child fulfils the mother the more he makes her anxious, in
accordance with the formula according to which what is anguishing is the
lack of lack. The anguished mother is first of all someone who either does
not desire, desires little, or desires badly, as a woman.
One refuses to apply perversion to women because this clinic is
reserved for men to alienate their desire or to incarnate its cause in the
fetish object. This fails to grasp that perversion is, in a way, normal on the
side of a woman – maternal love can stretch to the fetishisation of the
infantile object. It conforms to the structure whereby, as a love object, the
child is just waiting to take on the function of veiling the nothing, which is
the phallus as lacking in the woman.
Even fetishised, the child is distinguished from the object little a in
the fantasy in that he is himself animated, whereas the object a is, par
excellence, not animated. The expression “my mother’s puppet”, which was
the constant complaint of a neurotic woman in analysis, reveals the way that
a child’s liveliness [animation] is quite compatible with her fetishisation as
it is through having been a kind of fetish-child for her mother that this
woman is still suffering, many years later.
This is, no doubt, a normal fetish. The relation of maternal love,
though marked by illusions that readily become the basis for jokes in her
entourage, is characterised by a stability entirely marked by the imaginary
vacillations of perversion, properly speaking. But the child is only the
“normal” fetish, in inverted commas, provided that this maternal desire
responds to her male norm [norm mâle], which is not different here from
the structure proper to feminine sexuation defined by Lacan as the “not-All”
. The child fetish is only normal if the child is not all for the desire of the
mother.
We need only refer to the series structure that the “not-All” gives rise
to, to grasp the fundamental reason that gives the position of being an only
child its random or difficult character. To temper the child’s position of
uniqueness [unicité], one often sees the father taking on the role of son for
his wife.
The position of being an only child is perhaps less problematic than
that of being the only child singled out from many as the object of maternal
love. The subjective ravages that result ring out much louder than those of
the negligence of a woman who goes to work. With regard to the case of the
adulteress mother, it is the rule that the symptom of the familial couple
reverberates for the male child, while it seems to be much lighter to bear for
a girl.
The metaphor of the phallus
Lacan started by mapping out the child’s position by situating it in relation
to the phallus, which he still qualifies as an object in this Seminar, before
making it the signifier of desire. Nothing prevents us from transcribing the
Freudian equivalence between the child and the phallus in terms of
metaphor; on the contrary, everything invites us to do so. The infantile
metaphor of the phallus can be registered as the consequence of the paternal
metaphor.
This infantile metaphor of the phallus threatens, first, to pass the
desire for the phallus off as being of little or no value on the woman’s side,
and, secondly, to fix the subject to phallic identification to the extent that
Lacan could make the desire to be the phallus the constant formula of
neurotic desire.
The infantile metaphor of the phallus – the fact that the child is
equivalent to the phallus or that the child’s desire is substituted for the
Wunsch to have the penis – only succeeds by failing. It succeeds only if it
does not screw the subject to phallic identification but, on the contrary,
gives him access to phallic signification in the form of symbolic castration
– which necessitates the preservation of the not-All of feminine desire.

The not-all of feminine desire

Respect for the Name-of-the-Father is not enough. It is also necessary that
the not-All of feminine desire be preserved and that the infantile metaphor
does not repress, in the mother, her being as a woman.
In the famous article “The Signification of the Phallus”, which
transcribes Freud’s studies on love life, Lacan assigns, to the masculine
function, a divergence between love and desire and, on the woman’s side, a
convergence. But Lacan also notes that the feminine convergence is
compatible with a division [dédoublement] of the object, a division of the
man’s being, which she carries out in her position as phallophore, by
arousing or by demanding his love. This has the effect of making the man
lack, demanding that he give something that he does not have.
Within what would otherwise be the convergence of feminine desire,
where Lacan nonetheless admits a certain form of the internal division of
the man’s position, how can we not add the divergence that the man’s love
introduces there when he uses the child’s intrusion within the conjugal
couple as an excuse.
 It is necessary to complete what Lacan says in “The Signification of
the Phallus” by considering the child as bringing out the flagrant divergence
of feminine desire. It is what sometimes brings anguish for the father, this
time in accordance with the other formula of anguish that relates this affect
to the emergence of the desire of the Other as an enigma of being. On
occasion it is the birth of the child that makes the anguish return to the
father: “What does she want, therefore, what am I for her?”

Paternity
A man only becomes the father if he consents to the not-All that constitutes
the structure of feminine desire. In other words, in paternity, the virile
function is only achieved if it consents to the fact that this other is Other, in
other words, if it desires outside itself.
False paternity, pathogenic paternity – let’s base it on the father of
President Schreber – is the one that sees the subject identifying with the
Name-of-the-Father as the universal of the father in order to try to make
himself the vector of an anonymous desire, in order to incarnate an absolute
and abstract order.
The felicitous function of paternity is, on the contrary, to bring about
a mediation between, on the one hand, the abstract requirements of order,
the anonymous desire of universal discourse, and, on the other, what, for the
child, follows from the particular of the mother’s desire.
This is what Lacan happened to call – it is a word that I commented
upon a long time ago, without situating it precisely – humanising desire. “It
is necessary that the father humanises desire”, he said. I now believe that I
have grasped and developed the meaning of this expression, whose
significance in other respects appears obvious to me. Failing to admit the
particular of the desire in the Other sex, the father crushes the subject, in the
child, under the Other of knowledge. In this way, the father, the false father,
compels the child all the more to find refuge in maternal fantasy, the fantasy
of a mother denied as a woman.

To conclude
First, it is good that desire be divided, that the object not be unique. One
only celebrates Elsa’s eyes [les yeux d’Elsa] so as not to be seen by them
when knocking around with young boys. A man is only made a God the
better to castrate him. This is not to love as one should.
 Secondly, desire cannot be considered anonymous or universal or
pure, it cannot be considered the desire of a we [on]4 – nor that of God, nor
that of people – if the subject has to be transmitted across generations. Nor
can the analyst’s desire, as normed [normé] as it may be, be considered a
desire that is anonymous, universal and pure.

Debate

J.-A. Miller replied to questions from the audience in the following terms
(summary).

The function of the “Fort-Da”

Jouissance in the mother’s arms is not necessarily that of contentment. It
can also cause tantrums.
Here is an example of an episode where there is true contentment.
The moment I advance towards the couple formed by the mother and child,
who is my little daughter, and who, only two months before, had asked to
be passed from arms to arms, goes, with a little smile, to hide part of her
face behind her mother’s shoulder.
This responds to a major alternation. The function of the Fort-Da is
present here in a perfectly articulated structure. It is already learning about
the principal form of appearance and disappearance. I suspect that it is
linked to the sexual difference.

To particularise the universal

Lacan employed the expression “to humanise desire” – speech that
humanises desire – in his essay on Gide. After that, he will no longer use
this language, which is humanist. The father has a function of mediation in
relation to the anonymous desire of humanist culture. What does it want
from us, and what does it want to transmit? Within it, there is the pressure
of an anonymous Other that, when it falls upon the subject in one fell
swoop, or without mediation, either crushes a subject or makes him flee. If
the father identifies with the anonymous requirements of culture, the child
will certainly seek refuge in the fantasy of the mother or find himself
crushed under this burden.
The felicitous function of paternity would be to particularise this
universal, authorising one to choose – one takes this and leaves that, one
has a distance – and this is what particularises it. The raw universal is, in
fact, entirely alienating. It is to alienate the always particular truth of the
subject. At the same time, one cannot live in the particular.

Translated from the French by Bogdan Wolf

1 This intervention was given at Lausanne on 2 June 1996 at the Colloquium “L’enfant, entre la
femme and la mère”. The text was edited by Catherine Bonningue and kindly authorised by J.-A.
Miller.
2 [As Tartuffe, the eponymous hypocrite, explains, as he tries to seduce his patron’s wife: “Pour être
dévot, je n’en suis pas moins homme”, “Though I may be devout, I am no less a man” (Molière,
Tartuffe, Act 3, scene 3). T.N.]
3 Lacan, J., Note on the Child, transl. N. Wulfing, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 20, London Society
of the NLS, 2010
4 [TN: In French “on” is also the impersonal pronoun – e.g. “on ne fait pas ça”, “one doesn’t do
that”, but it translates into English often better as “we”.]
The Lacanian clinic
The alienated1 child
Jean-Robert Rabanel

Very early on, Jacques Lacan took on the question of the child in the
psychoanalytic discourse. If his psychiatry thesis of 1932 on paranoia2 was
a point in his transition from psychiatry to psychoanalysis, the question of
the child in the psychoanalytic discourse had been one of the elements of
the psychoanalytic status, which, in 1953, led to his return to Freud.
Lacan’s text, ‘Règlementet Doctrine de la Commission de
l’enseignement’3, written for the SPP in September 1949, already ends by
mentioning the specific problems of psychoanalysis with children.
Thus, the themes of psychosis and child psychoanalysis underline the
direction in which Lacan takes them up again, at the time he started his
teaching in Rome with ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis’.4 This resumption highlights the dimension of the symbolic
with regard to the hegemony of the imaginary in psychoanalysis at that
time, since the diagnosis Lacan gives it, is that psychoanalysis is ill with the
imaginary and this illness is characterised by two major omissions: the one
of symbolic interpretation and the one of narcissistic passion.
For Lacan, the child in the analytic discourse has the status of a
subject in his own right, Jacques-Alain Miller reminds us. The periodisation
of Lacan’s teaching, underlined in Miller’s seminar ‘The Lacanian
Orientation’, allows us to distinguish the first presentation of the child as a
subject defined by his relationship with the pre-existing Other, structured
according to the laws of speech related to the time of inter-subjectivity, and
structured according to the laws of language related to the time of the
unconscious structured like a language. Whilst the second presentation of
the child as a subject doesn’t emphasise the aspect of alienation from the
Other, but the one of separation as causation of the subject by the object a
in Seminar XI.5

Psychosis and alienation

In Seminar I6, the first presentation regarding the psychotic child is
illustrated by the case of Dick, from Melanie Klein and by the case of
Robert from Rosine Lefort. Here, Lacan puts in perspective, at the clinical,
as well as the therapeutic level, the differences between Melanie Klein and
his own student Lefort, with the ways in which they approach these difficult
to locate subjects, who can be considered psychotic.
In the case of Dick, the intervention of the analyst is characterised as
an injection of the symbolic in the subject.7 In the case of Rosine Lefort,
‘The wolf!’8makes Robert a speaking child according to Lacan, even if it is
a speech reduced to its core. This word, to which his language is reduced,
“whose meaning and significance for the child we are not even able to
define”9, this word connects him with the community of mankind, and it is
from this link that it was possible for Rosine Lefort to initiate the dialogue.
Here, the paternal function is residual and reduced to the superego.
In this presentation of child psychosis, Lacan tries to link the audacity
of the work of M. Klein – with the early appearance of the superego,
compared to Freud’s construction, and the application of psychoanalysis to
psychotics that she initiated – with his own successive conceptions of
psychosis: from his psychiatry thesis in 1932, to the ‘Presentation on
Psychical Causality’ in 194610, where psychosis is related to an ideal
imaginary identification, without mediation, to the Rome Discourse of
1953. At that time, Lacan related psychosis to a halt, to a fixation in the
development of personality to a libidinal stage, sadistic-anal, the stage of
the formation of the superego. He presents psychosis as the negative
freedom of a speech which has renounced being recognised and is
characterised by the formation of a delusion that objectifies the subject in a
language without dialectic.
At the beginning of his teaching, it is in the way in which the law has
something intangible as enunciation, or constraining imperative, that is
nonsensical and far away from the effects of signification, that Lacan
accounts for the superego. Thus, in Seminar I, he can say of ‘The wolf!’
“that it is essentially speech reduced down to its core”11, as an incarnation
of the superego.12 The breach of the signifying chain becomes the first
presentation of psychosis and heralds the signifier on its own: S1.
Therefore, the dimension of the superego is to be linked to the usage of
speech, to the speech outside discourse, to nonsensical speech, and this is
indeed what makes Lacan’s presentation of child psychosis original.
This conception has allowed Lacan’s students to emphasise the
familial and social reference in the approach of psychosis, as this pre-
existing Other. Jean Oury aims to create places of limits derived from the
idea of healing the symbolic fabric to prevent the excess of jouissance. Thus
the institutional Other presents itself as the effort to constitute a substitute
Other. Maud Mannoni sees the desire of the mother as the true aetiology of
psychosis.

Psychosis and separation: When jouissance returns

In Seminar XI, Lacan gives another presentation of the child as a subject,
which no longer highlights the aspect of alienation from the Other but the
one of separation as causation of the subject by the object a. This will be the
starting point of the renewed approach to the psychoses at the ECF (École
de la Cause Freudienne) in the 80s, through the question of the object which
will find its major punctuation with Jacques-Alain Miller’s text ‘Ironic
Clinic’.13 This presentation is more logician than familial and social. Indeed
in 1964, child psychosis will inspire Lacan with a new theory of psychosis
around the notion of the holophrase, a term by which he designates a
particular state of the signifier characterised by the freezing of the
signifying couple, a non-dialectisable state of the signifier which,
incorporated, produces an effect of the reunion of jouissance and the body.
Thus, Seminar XI leads to a new presentation of psychosis, no longer the
one of foreclosure but one of the holophrase of the S1 and of the ‘object in
the hand’ for the psychotic. The series: psychosomatic phenomenon,
psychosis and debility, organised by Lacan in this seminar, finds in the
holophrase its common denominator with the action of the signifier on its
own. The failure of significantisation of jouissance that follows, that is to
say the defences against the real, is in some ways what summarises what
psychosomatic phenomena and psychosis have in common.
Where the holophrase allows the organisation of this series, the
returns of jouissance, after incorporation of the signifier on its own, allow
the individualisation of its components, that is to say the distinction
between psychosomatic phenomena and psychosis. Let us be reminded here
of the specified modes of the return of jouissance indicated by Jacques-
Alain Miller in ‘Some Reflections on the Psychosomatic Phenomenon’14:
return of jouissance in the place of the Other in paranoia; return of
generalised jouissance at the level of the body in schizophrenia; return of
jouissance, localised, but displaced in the body as Other with the
psychosomatic phenomenon.

The great debate about freedom

In his ‘Address on Child Psychoses’15 given on 22nd October 1967
concluding the Study Days initiated by Maud Mannoni under the title
Child, Psychosis and Institution, Lacan gives the coordinates of what we
could call ‘the alienated child’. In their follow-up, these Study Days will
give Lacan the opportunity, in his Note on the Child16, in 1969, to rectify
the position of some of his students. In this text, he puts a stop to the work
of Jean Oury and M. Mannoni by acknowledging the failure of
communitarian utopias and by responding to M. Mannoni’s claim with what
he says about the position of the child in the maternal fantasy.
M. Mannoni had gathered a great number of delegates from various
institutional horizons: members from the EFP study groups – students of
Lacan -, Anglo-Saxon analysts – Kleinians, disciples of Winnicott -,
representatives of the psychotherapy and institutional pedagogy movement,
representatives of British antipsychiatry, influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre’s
ideas, specialists from the paediatric or psychiatric horizon beyond any
Schools’ affiliations.
These Study Days aimed at debating questions posed by the alienated
childhood at the clinical and therapeutic level, as well as the theoretical and
political level. They were marked by M. Mannoni’s attempt to bring
together those following Lacan’s thesis, and those following the Anglo-
Saxon thesis -antipsychiatric and Winnicottian.

Some misunderstandings regarding alienation

As M. Mannoni indicates in her closing speech: ‘These Study Days have
unfolded around two themes: the effects of Sartrian concepts on the clinic
(Laing and Cooper) and the effects of Lacanian theory on the clinical
approach to the problem of madness. It is a question on the status of
alienation: the alienating power of the speech of the other for the Sartrian
Anglo-Saxons and the structural alienation for Lacan, that is to say the
relationship of man with language’.17 She draws some conclusions from
these Study Days when she says: ‘One cannot hope to understand
something of alienation in the child without grasping the way in which his
madness is replayed in the fantasmatic life of each of his parents’18, that is
to say by a sort of compromise between familial and social alienation and
the logic of the fantasy.
What was at stake was to go beyond a strictly medical point of view
of the alienation of the child by highlighting the social and familial
dimension, the one which the child is immersed in. Here, the analytic
perspective aimed to make heard, as speech, the social and familial
institution that the child is caught up in. Thus, these Study Days replayed
the famous debate that had animated French psychiatry from 1936 to 1946,
to which Lacan actively contributed by taking the position of psychogenesis
against organogenesis. In 1967, what was at stake was to revisit this debate
regarding the status of the mad and to extend it to the domain of the
alienation of the child. The true title of these Study Days could have been:
‘Psychogenesis and Organogenesis in the Alienation of the Child’. No
doubt that, what was hoped for, was to have the same result as in the
previous debate, that is to say psychiatrists rushing towards psychogenesis,
even if this was on the basis of a misunderstanding from the start. Yet, in
1967 the situation wasn’t entirely similar to the one in 1946. Lacan had, in
the meantime, in the 50s, rejected the approach of psychosis through
meaning and proposed his structural presentation of psychosis.
During these Study Days, one finds the same arguments as in Lacan’s
thesis, which were ground-breaking in 1932: the Freudian input regarding
psychosis and an approach of psychosis through meaning, understanding,
that is to say two elements which back then contributed to breaking away
from the psychiatric tradition.
The social and familial dimension as in Lacan’s presentation of the
psychoses in 1938 in ‘The Family Complexes’19 is highlighted during the
Study Days, along with the alienating relationship to the other of the mirror
stage as connections with Sartrian theses. This however, without taking into
account Lacan’s paradoxical position regarding the relationship between
psychosis and freedom in his ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’ of 1946.
The thesis of Lacan indeed links madness and freedom in a way contrary to
psychiatric opinion and this has led to an erroneous interpretation from anti-
psychiatrists, on the basis of a confusion between social alienation and
structural alienation.
A paradoxical freedom
For Lacan, freedom can be approached from the psychoanalytic clinic and
ethics. He underlines this regarding the case of Aimée: the emergence and
development of the delusion to its end are strictly linked to an effect of
liberation produced by the intrusion of her elder sister who, by her actions,
extracts her from her obligations as a mother and as a wife. This effect of
liberation triggers the delusion until the passage to the act, which leads her
to lose her freedom: in prison, the delusion ceases.20 Contrary to the
Kantian imperative, which urges the subject to take the responsibility for his
freedom, the Freudian imperative urges the subject to take responsibility for
the fact that he has a cause.
The Freudian ‘wo es war, soll ich werden’ is not a choice for
freedom, says J.-A. Miller in his teaching ‘Cause et consent’, it is the
choice for the dealt card of the unconscious.21 It is in this forced choice that
a new presentation of freedom is discovered in the deepest part of the being,
more akin to the cause than to the ideal.
It is this refusal that makes the psychotic subject the ultimate free
subject, and brings Lacan to note, as cited by J.-A. Miller: ‘madness
demands the elusive consent to freedom’22 and to evoke ‘an unfathomable
decision of being’.23
Lacan’s reply in his closing speech to these Study Days surprised his
audience. He begins by speaking about this debate and about the conception
of freedom, which makes him diverge from Henri Ey: madness, not an
insult to freedom, but its most faithful companion. This doesn’t nonetheless
transform Lacan into an adherent of antipsychiatry, which he indicates to its
Anglo-Saxon representatives: “....establishing modes and methods whereby
the subject is invited to utter what they think of as manifestations of his
freedom. But isn’t this a somewhat short-sighted perspective? I mean,
doesn’t this freedom which has been elicited and suggested by a certain
practice that targets these subjects carry within it its limit and its
illusion?”.24 He then evokes the question of freedom in institutions: “That
should the question ultimately arise as to an institution that is properly
related to the field of psychosis, it always turns out that at some point, in
situations that vary, there prevails a legitimate relation to freedom”.25 Lacan
dismisses psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists equally.
What is a relationship founded on freedom, if it isn’t a relationship
that finds its foundation in the cause of desire? A foundation less in the
father, less in the Oedipus but in the cause of desire, as the ethics of
psychoanalysis leads us to consider; that is to say, less in relation to the
Other, than to the revelation of the fantasy as a form of subjection, and to
the possibility the psychoanalytic act creates to exteriorise the object a.

Consequence for the institutions: Everywhere the particularity against

the ideal
Yet, what is essential in Lacan’s contribution is as follows: “It is no less
remarkable that nothing has been scarcer in our comments over these last
two days than any use of the terms that go by the name of the sexual
relation (leaving aside the act), the unconscious and jouissance”26 and
when he puts into perspective Heidegger’s ‘Being-unto-death and ‘Being-
unto-sex’, the Freudian castration.27
Lacan will develop this in the 70s, with the substitution of the Father
of the metaphor, with a woman to incarnate the object cause of desire. This
perspective will allow approaching the question of the institutions for
psychotics through another angle than the one of the relationship between
the subject and the Other, or through the angle of the Father, in order to
maintain this distance between the ideal and the object. The institutions for
psychotics from the era of the analytic discourse, referring to Lacan’s
teachings, are institutions where taking jouissance into account, at the
clinical as well as therapeutic level, constitutes the answer to psychiatry.
These are institutions which give themselves the aim of establishing
everywhere the particularity against the ideal.
It is on these bases that the RI3 (International Network of Infant
Institutions) of the Freudian Field has been built: because there are subjects
for whom the recourse to an institution is necessary so that support can be
given which allows the elaboration, from jouissance, of a ‘civilised irony’.
This is what the contributions of the RI3 show in its publications and
in its Study Days: a way of approaching psychosis differently to the father,
with the object a, and now according to Lacan’s last teaching, with the
stand-alone signifier, S1, the One-body.

Translated from the French by Betty Bertrand

1‘L’enfant aliené’: [TN] It should be noted that the French word “aliené” can mean “insane” in
English, however, “alienated” better covered the breadth of uses this word is given in this text.
2Lacan, J. De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, Paris, Seuil, 1975 [not
translated]
3Lacan, J., ‘Règlement et Doctrine de la Commission de l’enseignement déléguée par la Société
psychanalytique de Paris’, Revue Française de Psychanalyse, Paris, tome XIII, n3, septembre 1949,
p. 426-435 [not translated]
4 Lacan, J., Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome 1953), Écrits,
trans. Fink, B.,Norton, London, 2006, pp.197-268
5 Lacan, J. The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Sheridan, A., Penguin Books, London, 1994
6 Lacan, J. The Seminar, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. Forrester, J., Cambridge
University Press, 1988
7Ibid., pp.68-88
8Ibid., pp.89-106
9Ibid., p.102-103
10Lacan, J; Presentation on Psychical Causality, Écrits, trans. Fink, B., Norton, London, 2006,
pp.123-158
11opcit.,The Seminar, Book 1, p.104
12Ibid., p.102
13 Miller, J.-A., Ironic Clinic, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 7, trans. Voruz, V., ed. Wolf, B., London
2001
14 Miller, J.-A., Quelques réflexions sur le phénomène somatique, Analytica, no 48, 1987, p.113-126
[not translated]
15Lacan, J., Address on Child Psychoses, trans., Price, A., HurlyBurly 8, Price, A. (ed), NLS 2012
16Lacan, J., Note on the Child, trans. Wulfing, N., Psychoanalytical Notebooks 20, Wulfing, N. (ed),
London 2010
17 Mannoni M., Enfance aliénée II, revue Recherches, décembre 1968 [not translated]
18Ibid.
19Lacan, J., Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil,
2001, p.23-83 [not translated]
20Lacan, J., Presentation on Psychical Causality, Écrits, opcit.,p.138
21Miller J.-A., « L’orientation lacanienne. Cause et consentement », enseignement prononcé dans le
cadre du département de psychanalyse de l’université Paris VIII, inédit. [not translated]
22Miller J.-A., ibid, leçon du 4 novembre 1987 [not translated]
23Lacan, J., Presentation on Psychical Causality, Écrits,opcit., p.145 ([TN] translated as
‘unsoundable decision of being’)
24Lacan, J., Address on Child Psychoses, trans., Price, A., HurlyBurly 8, Price, A. (ed), NLS 2012,
p.270
25ibid.
26Ibid., p. 272
27Ibid.
Protecting the child from the family
delusion
Éric Laurent1

Hypermodernity trifles with Aristotle’s and St Thomas Aquinas’ definition

of the family by modifying each of its terms. The family defined through
marriage belongs to the past century. The current family includes, by right
or in fact, several forms of union. These families, whether mono-parental or
homo-parental, make marriage appear as an institutional luxury. Today in
France, for instance, only 40% of the population turn towards marriage.

Fiction laid bare

Previously, the family relied on the marriage between a man and a woman.
Nowadays, within the generalised upheaval of gender, who knows exactly
what a man or a woman is? Within unisex couples, the question arises of
how to be sure that the other is of the same sex? The queer position is to
consider that gender distribution is a social construction, thus rendering this
universal obsolete, from where there is no longer certitude.
The same applies to children’s education. Who knows today what
education is? Who knows what it means to raise a child? Experts do not
agree, to the point that we face an educational bubble, inflated by diverse
solutions – as with the financial bubble - and which threatens to explode at
any time, unveiling the uneasiness and even the anguish of the educational
institution. Instead of responding to what it means to educate, instead of
transmitting knowledge, there are nothing but complaints about the
impossibility of educating children.
Children are no longer conceived within marriage, indeed many of
them are conceived with the help of science. This produces a species of
object – such as the embryos obtained in excess during assisted fertilisation
- with which no one knows what to do.
Thus, hypermodernity influences the signifiers of what a family was,
as in every cultural domain, and reveals the fictional character of family and
social bonds. Like capitalism, it has a function of creative destruction: it
destroys tradition and makes a multitude of new forms and bonds
proliferate, which are fragile since they are not consolidated over time.
Norms, like laws, lack the time required to be complied with; they prove to
be badly made and obsolete even before they are consolidated.
The more fictions become sophisticated, the more a nostalgia for
natural rights is insistently expressed. It is a paradox: how, within this
proliferation of fictions, do we not succeed at leaving aside this belief in a
natural dimension of the family institution? This fundamental paradox
emerges at the precise moment when, by multiplying themselves, fictions
and their uncertainties offer a new field to the parents’ more or less
delusional conceptions about what they expect from a child. Thus we see
how parents treat their guilt for not measuring up to the ideals transmitted
by tradition, television and general storytelling. More and more the
conventional character of these fictions reveals the character of the real
object that the child is; an object which is passionately desired and rejected
at the same time.

Two schools
What remains in fact concealed or hidden by the institutional hypothesis is
that the child, in so far as it is an object of passion, is an obstacle and an
objection to the belief in the fictional. We observe this double movement in
the two sociological schools concerning the current evolution of the family,
which have inspired the latest laws of the Master.
For one of them, the family is no longer an institution, and what
matters is the use people make of fictions: which is the most popular
fiction? The least popular? ... the question extends to tax law, for example
in deciding what it is convenient to subsidise or not. Therefore, to consider
that the family is not an institution leads us to consider that it belongs to the
private domain and that it occupies the same position that religion had in
the era of post-revolutionary secularism.
For the other school, close to the Church, the family remains an
institution and, with regard to the existing diversity, including the
inexistence of the family bond, it decrees that even when there is no family,
there exists one. It exists by virtue of a magical operation which sustains the
fiction that the child makes the family. By being born, and by nothing but
being born, the child founds the family. This juridical fiction allows the
adaptation of the religious fiction to the scientific discoveries: the genetic
code endows the child with a number, a calculable number; even in those
cases where the parents are unknown, tests allow paternity to be
established. In sum, this operation reduces filiation to a bureaucratic
category.
However, this hope of finding a limit, a reef, underneath this world of
fictions, entails its own impasses. For at the very moment the dreamed
nuptials between the family institution and science are celebrated, the
question of the cause emerges. Far from being a limit, genetics opens up a
world of new fictions, namely that of the empire of storytelling. It opens up,
furthermore, the gates of the enchanted world of predictive medicine: with
the genetic code, everybody can dream of several possible lives, everybody
can imagine his or her life with a 70% chance of developing lymphoma
cancer between the age of 56 and 62. In order for everybody to continue
dreaming their lives, a whole industry gets ready to explain how to live
such a life. We will have manuals of knowing-how-to-live, to learn how to
live this life, whose fictions will provoke a new disorientation of the
juridical fictions.

Self-engendering / failure
Therefore the problem is that family, in this enchanted world, becomes the
transitory place where the risks to which every person is already exposed
are calculated. History, heritage – including genetic heredity - will all be
nothing but a transitory moment. With the global exploration of the genetic
code everybody will be able to calculate the risks to which they are
exposed. Science will teach them much more about their heritage than the
family will be able to. We thus enter into the world of the passion of the
subjects’ self-engendering. They will be able to explore on-line, the risks
entailed by their own genetic code. They will have been deciphered by
those dedicated to define the risks which each person incurs, together with
the fiction of the life that they can lead according to the risks to which they
are exposed. Probably, in the future, we will find each person’s genetic code
in Facebook. James Watson and Craig Venter have already uploaded online
their own genetic codes and are in the process of setting up a sect for those
who are passionate about this.
Both on the side of the juridical fictions and scientific fictions, it will
never be possible to account for the point in the real that constitutes the
subjective origin of each person: the malformation of the desire, from
which they stem. Not the genetic malformation, but the malformation of the
failed encounter between the desires that propelled them into the world.
The failure - in its particularity - of the encounter between the sexes
(and it does not matter whether they are of the same sex), and the child’s
desire, will remain that of the encounter, upon a dissecting table, of a
sewing machine and an umbrella2...
Who could know out of which bizarreness of jouissance he was born?
The mythical origin sustaining the fictions will never prevent anybody from
interrogating this point, which cannot be resolved by any version about the
origin: the mystery of “who am I?” redoubled by the impossibility of being
one’s own cause...
The desire of the mother, its deciphering, has a limit. The child will
never be able to decipher this strange code from which he stems. The child
will thus reveal himself for what he is: an obstacle for the family and its
ideals. In the same way that the ideal father is the dead father, the ideal
family is a family with no children... When the child appears, the circle of
the family explodes and fragments itself.

The position of the psychoanalyst

In so far as the father and the mother are supported by nothing but a
delusional ideal – on the side of fiction or on that of science - one can
deduce from this what the position of the psychoanalyst ought to be: to
protect children from the family delusions, to protect children from “the
family tie”, from its new forms, from the passions that inhabit it, from the
secret infanticide that is the death wish hidden beneath the family tie.
Family and family ties dream of being the place where the passage
from the function to the fiction could operate. In psychoanalysis, this was
Karl Abraham’s dream (he had a certain idea about child development): the
analysis consisted in holding the child’s hand, making him traverse the
different stages – oral, anal, genital - in order to finally arrive at the good
use of the genital organ through the Oedipal myth. And thus, by integrating
the diversity of the drives, one obtained a mutation able to conduct the child
towards a consolatory fiction, namely, a jouissance in connection with the
phallus. This persists within some analytical streams. For instance, when
one demonstrates that thanks to the treatment, a psychotic child has
elaborated his drive organisation, thus giving a pseudo-neurotic value to it.
This way of conceiving things rather defines psychotherapy. Lacan said it in
a sharp manner: a psychotherapy consists in making the subject believe in
the father, and this is what radically differentiates the Lacanian
psychoanalytic orientation from psychotherapy. This difference is essential.
Different from the neo-Oedipal organisation, the symptom is that
which organises the drive world, beyond the belief in the semblant that the
father is.
This step was articulated by Lacan in the 60s, when he highlighted
how Melanie Klein did not get caught up in the fascination of the paternal
fiction and sustained, certainly in an imaginary register, that the child is in
fact an object. It is from the child as object, and not only as object of the
mother, that the paternal position can be reconfigured, not from the name,
but from the knotting with this object.
To define the father as a function, as Lacan did, is a decisive step
since by means of a function, according to its domain of application, one
can define the set of cases included in such a function (with the exception
of those functions that include the infinite). Function is not defined by any
essence, nor by its a priori characteristics - like a concept would be defined
-but by its realisation within the set of the domain of application. We can
only
Eric Laurent know the paternal function through the models that it
gives us to see. If “being” is “being the value of a variable”, being a father
is then being one of the models of realisation, one of the values a,b,c... of
the paternal function. And parents, one by one, are different versions of
jouissance of this function. They are father-versions [père-versions],
perversions.
However, what is at stake is not the father as semblant, but as object
a.
The analytic field has something in common with that of quantum
physics, where it is considered that each particle can be defined either by its
speed or by its position, or with that of the physics of light, where each
particle is defined either as a wave or as a corpuscle. In a similar way, in our
field, we can define an object by means of its signifying position or by its
position as an object. Lacan has given us a version of the father from the
perspective of the object a through the following formula: “A father only
has the right to respect, or at least to love, if that love is – you won’t believe
your ears - perversely oriented (père-versement orienté), that is to say, if he
makes of a woman the object a, cause of his desire. But what a woman
welcomes of this, has nothing to do with the issue. What she deals with are
other objects a, which are the children.”3
This phrase gives us a very precise indication. Indeed, being a father,
is to have had the particular perversion of having attached oneself to the
mother’s objects a. It is a very particular knotting, socially recognised,
which leaves the fact open that this woman may or may not be the one with
whom the father had the children.
These are very contemporary formulations, which are appropriate for
re-configured families.
However, this “perversely” (père-versement), has to be qualified in
different ways. According to the structure of masculine desire, man attaches
himself to the objects that cause his desire. The perversion of the fetishist
makes him attach himself to the phallus that the mother lacks, putting into
play a particular fetish object. Lacan also defined the father by means of a
particular fetish object. He does not attach himself to an object that he
possesses, but to an object that a woman produces. The child is the mother’s
object a.
In a certain sense, one can speak of the inter-crossing of the père-
version/perversion and the maternal perversion which attaches the mother
to the child and which has always the appearance of a folie a deux, as we
can see in those cases which attract more attention and provoke anxiety,
cases of infanticide that put into question any possible ideal. Or even those
cases of denial of the pregnancy, which have recently shown in France how
“the child” may generate these passions that belong to the particular
madness of the maternal bond.
If a man occupies himself with the objects a of a woman, Lacan adds:
whether he wants it or not, he will occupy the position of the father.

Our compass
If psychoanalysis can protect children from the family delusions, it is by
trying to relieve - especially men - from their delusions of paternity. On the
side of neurosis, to alleviate himself from the weight of his desire, the
neurotic subject loves to complete himself with the family symptom, that of
being a good father, imagining that this could give him the un-findable key
of his desire. Delusional variants of this version also exist.
 Faced with hypermodernity and its effects, what interests us is to be
able to orient ourselves with regards to generalised madness.
We are not going to panic, up to the point of vertigo, nor are we going
to reassure ourselves, taking a conservative position of the type: “Oh how
great was the Oedipus before 1910”. Certainly, before the First World War
we could still believe in the father. Under this form it is nowadays a total
impasse, just as much as the so-called progressive utopias.
Before these two reefs, which are our Charybdis and Scylla, one must
navigate with the compass of the object a, which takes into account the
reconfiguration of families. It discards any attempt at re-establishing the
beliefs in the father, which we find in the desire to restore the paternal
authority, of teaching parents how to have authority, of creating parenting
schools where one teaches them the right behaviours, etc. All of this will
not relieve them of the fundamental fault of existing.
The object a knots the jouissance and the pain of existing. By
analysing this knot, with this essential compass, we will be able to bring
relief to our fellow humans.
We are all entangled in our jouissance, all in the same boat, the
analysts and the others, but we can try to transmit this compass, which may
certainly be useful to many.

Translated from the Spanish by Florencia F.C. Shanahan

Conference given by Éric Laurent, then General Delegate of the WAP

(World Association of Psychoanalysis), on the 8th November 2008 at the
7th Congress of the ELP (Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis), in
Barcelona, Spain.

1 Eric Laurent is a psychoanalyst and a member of the ECF. This text is the rewriting of a lecture
given on the 1st of December 2010 at the Instituto clinico de Buenos Aires [ICBA]. Editing by
Pascale Fari and Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs.
2Reference to “Les Chants de Maldoror” by Comte de Lautréamont.
3Lacan J., R.S.I, Ornicar n°3, Seminar of 21st January 1975 (not translated).
UPO: Unidentified phobic objects
Serge Cottet

The observation of the phobic child highlights the structural genius of the
child, and the structuring function of anxiety: it localises, it forbids, it
names an object. In the Lacanian doctrine this set of functions is summed
up in a canonical definition: “The phobic object as an all-purpose signifier
to make up for (suppléer) the Other’s lack”.1
This instrumental function of the object to circumscribe the anxiety,
overrides its signified. It is a somewhat arbitrary signifier, which only has
the function of cause, which Lacan calls “metaphoric function”.2 “Because
of the horse”, says Hans, “wegen dem Pferd”.3 The object only needs to be
named in order to have an answer for everything. Lacan even adds that “no
analyst is mistaken about its true function”4, which is to put a symbolic
semblant in the parental relation that is deficient in that respect. Phobia has
a defensive function regarding the insufficiently metaphorised enigmatic
desire of the mother. The dog that bites or the wolf that devours transforms
an anxiety impossible to bear into a localised fear: a provisional solution to
the enigma of maternal castration. Indeed, with little Hans the Lacanian
Oedipus makes the symptom rotate around the maternal castration, a lack
which threatens the child: to fulfill or not to fulfill it?
This structural operator, of the phobic object, should not conceal from
us the insufficiency of this substitute, the remainder which persists in the
subject’s life, the limits of a metaphoric operation.

Plurality of the functions of the phobic object

The structuralist strategy of phobia, orientated by the supposed jouissance
of the maternal Other, does not prevent the subject’s libido from saying
something too. It is understood that it is the enigma and the obscurity of the
maternal jouissance that is the object of an interpretation, of a symbolising
attempt. The child produces fictions which interpret the enigma of the
cannibalistic tenderness of the adult. But this cannibalism is that of the
subject himself: imaginary sadism, Melanie Klein would have said,
identifying the wolf with the subject himself and his oral sadism. Lacan
rectifies this: against the backdrop of a symbolic dissatisfaction, the
subject’s oral satisfaction is squashed.
Phobia is a function satisfied by several variables. This means that
the object does not only have one univocal signified: the father, indeed, for
Freud, but also the devouring mother. In the end, Lacan denotes the phallus,
detached from the body, in the horse that kicks, to be playing its part all
alone.5 It is also the subject himself.
In the central dream of the Wolfman, the place of the subject is
especially underlined by the gaze and the immobility. In The Seminar, book
XI, Lacan specifies that “their fascinated gaze is the subject himself”.6 At
the time of his psychosis, by contrast, the subject is threatened by a pack of
wolves. The image of the wolf is different again in children’s tales: the
trapped wolf, with a severed tail, is different from the wolf in the nightmare.
Freud translates that wolf equals father, unilaterally. However, as it is also
the case with Hans’ horse, it can support many other functions.
This plurality of functions is manifest in the case of Patricia Bosquin-
Caroz, where the wolf is sometimes gentle and helpful, sometimes bad,
sometimes eats boys or, on the contrary, is hunted by the father; on
occasion, it represents the subject himself who bites, or even the analyst
who writes. In the end it is reduced to a thousand paper pieces – just like the
giraffe or the paper tiger, when it is no longer of use before transforming
itself into a flower – as in the song Une jolie vache déguisée en fleur7 ,
testimony of the structural virtuosity in handling the semblant, in a witty
little girl. However, if the enjoyment of the mother is indeed metaphorised,
the oral drive still remains demanding on occasion, shown in the
intensification of the anxiety of devouring with the birth of a little sister; a
quasi experimental demonstration of a threat that she is exposed to when
the paternal Other lets her down. It is not about the anxiety of the loss of an
object, but the threat of being swallowed by the mother – similar to the
function of the bear in the case presented by Marie-Agnès Macaire:
according to the circumstances, the animal loses its metaphoric function;
sometimes the bear eats her, sometimes the bear cleans the house, chasing
the ants away.

Rather strange creatures

If the objects most appropriate to metaphor are found deficient or, even
more so, see their power of fiction thwarted by the real of the drive, we
cannot immediately see the supplementing function of certain phobic
objects – whether they are names of jouissance, or difficult to identify, in
contrast to the familiar animals required for such an operation: dog, wolf,
bear, etc. This is the case for vermin, spiders, ghostly entities, and other
cocktails of witchcraft.
About the first ones I would evoke a case published in Scilicet 1.8
The observation turns on the “most insignificant of objects”, which is first
phobic, then fetishistic: the button of the mother’s dress in a six year old
child. The anonymous author titled his text “Fetishisation of a Phobic
Object” following Lacan’s elaborations in The Seminar, book IV, on little
Hans’ fetishism, taken up in the article Science and Truth, “on the lack of
the mother’s penis, where the nature of the phallus is revealed. He [Freud]
tells us that the subject divides here regarding reality, seeing an abyss
opening up here against which he protects himself with a phobia, and which
he at the same time covers over with a surface upon which he erects a
fetish”.9 The phobia stems from childhood and it is in adulthood that the
button will be erected to the condition of jouissance, which will precipitate
the subject towards analysis. This avatar only designates the button as a
metaphor, and of nothing other than the maternal jouissance. It is quite
realistic and rather more metonymic than metaphoric through the
specification of its anatomic localisation on the feminine body: the same
object names the jouissance and at the same time designates the garment’s
accessories that are destined to veil it.
This transposition gives me the occasion to develop the other version
of the drive concerned in anxiety, notably the nightmare, peopled by rather
strange creatures that we also find in phobia. It is a procession of bad
mothers who come forward with crawling animals, insects, crabs and other
spiders. We are far away from La Fontaine’s menagerie The cat, the weasel
and the little rabbit.
Today all the hideous monsters that are found in the arsenal of
videogames, find their way into the child’s sexual theories: prehistoric
animals, carnivorous vampires, unnamable gores, witnesses of an oral greed
quite far away from the limit of the phallic function. The Kleinian tradition
identified such objects as pre-oedipal. Karl Abraham’s equation of spider
equals mother, which found universal popular success thanks to Louise
Bourgeois’ work, finds here its confirmation.
It is significant that catastrophe movies such as Giant Spider Invasion
or Jaws have the same content as children’s nightmares, like the
enlargement of a zoom effect. So it is not only the phobias that are made
from cartoons or children’s tales, it is the child’s anxiety which is used to
feed these movies for adults, which combine fright with quite an obscure
satisfaction. And it is just as significant that, for reasons of tact, catastrophe
movies have been removed from “TV” programmes all over the world since
the Fukushima catastrophe.

The ghost of the parents’ jouissance

After having been separated from her brother with whom she shared a
bedroom, at the age of six, a little girl finds herself alone in the apartment
sometimes; when her parents are away she barricades herself in her
bedroom at night. It is the anxiety of the pitch-black night, a cliché of
infantile phobias. But, above all, she imagines that a more spiritual than
material thing, a kind of ghost will come out of her parents’ bed, from their
bedroom at the bottom of the corridor – just like in horror movies, to
threaten her and kill her. This Alien, this Horla à la Maupassant, will
disappear spontaneously at puberty, without analysis. Later, a similar
anxiety will get hold of her, an anxiety of loneliness without fixation to an
object. Today, this person cannot live on her own, and calls a man who has
the counter-phobic function that her brother had before. She is a medical
doctor and has many bodily preoccupations of a hypochondriac nature. She
does not decipher her previous phobia, despite finding analogies with her
current anxiety. We cannot really consider the ghost, unnamable thing, as a
paternal metaphor. It rather functions as an irruption of an undue and
dangerous jouissance.
When her parents were absent, she believed that she was abandoned,
and the prey of evil genies: the parental couple is very close but the father is
fearful and double-locks the doors - “we are safe then”, say the parents. But
the daughter does not feel secure, she experiences the Unheimlich, the
familiar object, both resident and intruder, that is extimate to the subject. A
Freudian interpretation would indicate the masturbatory signification, as
Freud himself suggested to Lou Andreas-Salomé in epistolary supervision
in December 1917.10 Lou Andreas-Salomé is engaged in a transferential
relationship with a six year old girl with nocturnal terrors. The child was
calm until a very bad scarlet fever, caught two years before the analysis, had
necessitated several surgical interventions. The parents impute the
nightmares to this shock. However, the content of the dreams shows no link
with the real trauma: “arson, murders, blood, frogs and crawling worms,
etc.”. Freud draws attention to the sexual etiology of the nightmares. It is a
self-punishment. Indeed, the little girl interprets her scarlet fever as a
consequence of her jouissance: “Before the scarlet fever I smudged
myself”11 and believes that the illness is a punishment for it. Now that she
is cured the punitive monsters take over.
In our case, it is different: the person has no memory of masturbation,
we cannot apply this cliché to her. Her fear of illness is not linked to
masturbatory guilt. It is rather the loneliness of love. The proximity of the
object when the parents are absent is related to an unleashing of the drive
projected on to the undifferentiated Other. The feminine identification has
always been problematic for this subject. At puberty the phobia disappeared
but a phobia of washing and of the bathroom took over.
The question of the phallus is posed as follows: when mummy and
daddy leave empty the bed chamber (le deduit) where they frolic, what does
remain? Answer: the ghost of their jouissance, which escapes from it.
More precisely, a remainder of this jouissance: a residual surplus-
jouissance to which she is entitled when the bedroom is deserted. It is her
current symptom that accounts for her phobia. The subject is not very
demanding when it comes to choosing a man: the man as instrument,
counter-phobic and all-purpose, to avoid loneliness - at least that is what
she believes; in reality, she chooses men who are not available and who
deprive her of a continuous presence.

A phobia of insects
Another example reveals the proximity of the unidentified object with a
signifier of jouissance that is not very propitious to restoring the symbolic
order. At the same time it illustrates the affinity between jouissance and
anxiety, which is therefore not simply a signal of danger, as Lacan
developed it in his Seminar, books X and XVI.
At a very young age this girl was afraid of insects, of ants, and of
being stung. Later at school she is afraid of being rejected by her friends,
she is not appreciated, and stays alone. The family context shows a serious
phallic deficiency of the father. The parents are divorced, and the mother is
on her own. The metaphors inspired by the image of the stinging insect are
numerous. They equivocate with incest, and in general with love or
seduction - see the famous metaphor of love that Ronsard made popular
with his ode L’Amour piqué par une abeille (Love stung by a bee).12 Here
again, we will have difficulty to grasp the metaphoric function of the insect
apart from the phallic image involved in it. It is different from Karl
Abraham’s example that saves the father, where the phobia of the wasp in a
little girl, finds favour in the resemblance with the stripes of a tiger. The
child associates the insect’s buzzing with the growling of the tiger and the
latter with the displeased voice of the father who scolds her.13 The
eroticisation of the object is here manifest, just as in a painting by Salvador
Dali about which we wonder whether it has not been inspired by this very
case.14 The hypothesis of the subject is however rather more eloquent than
any preconceived symbol.
The wasp of the Wolf Man’s dream, which the German word Wespe
puts in consonance with S.P., the initials of Sergueï Pankejeff, orientates us
better. For this little girl, as in The Flee and the Coach (La Mouche du
Coche)15, she annoys her mother with her demands and gets brushed off as
a consequence. If the phobia of insects has receded, another one has come
about, with the feeling of being kept at a distance by her friends at school.
This does not indicate a persecution but her own anxiety of the other
(semblable), her dislike of friendship and finally her identification with a
redundant, parasitic object. Here again the signifier lends itself to
everything: phallic metaphor, difficult symbolisation of a separation,
identification with the brushed off insect.
To sum up, I want to underline that a phobia sometimes disappears
spontaneously without analysis – it suffices that the child be separated from
the mother. But we observe a remainder in the analysis of adults. Freud
evoked this persistence, either in symptoms or in traits of character. Lacan,
despite the hypothesis of the turntable, was, according to some testimonies,
not reluctant in diagnosing an adult patient in hospital as “a phobic”. Even
if we do not use this terminology any more, and if we have good reason to
consider phobia as a symptom rather than a structure, the residue that
anxiety is, confirms that any symptom inherits something from some
failure, by the child, to extract himself from the maternal jouissance.
Translated from the French by Vincent Dachy

1 Lacan J., The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power, Écrits, Norton, London,
2006, p. 510.
2 Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre IV, La relation d’objet, Paris, Seuil, 1994, p. 399 (not translated).
3 Ibid., p.317.
4 Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XVI, D’un Autre à L’Autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 324 (not translated).
5 Lacan J., Geneva Lecture on the Symptom, Given on 4th October 1975, trans. Grigg, R., Analysis
no. I, 1989: pp. 7-26
6 Lacan J., The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Penguin
Books, London, 1994, p. 251.
7 Brassens, Georges, Une jolie fleur (dans une peau de vache), song title.
8 Lacan J., Fétichisation d’un objet phobique, Scilicet 1, Paris, Seuil, 1968, p.153 (not translated)
9 Lacan J., Science and Truth, Écrits, trans. Fink, B., Norton, London, 2006, p. 745.
10 Andreas-Salomé, Lou, in Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Letters, Pfeiffer, E. (ed),
Norton, London, 1985; letter by Andreas-Salomé of 15.Dec. 1917.
11 Ibid., Andreas-Salomé, Lou: [TN] The German word used in this letter is “beschmiert”, which is
“to smudge”, often in the sense of “to sully”.
12Ronsard P. de, “L’Amour piqué par une abeille”, Ode n0XVI, livre IV, 1550.
« Le petit enfant Amour/Cueillait des fleurs a l'entour/D'une ruche, où !es avettes/Font leurs petites
logettes./Comme il!es allait cueillant,/Une averte sommeillant/Dans le fond d'une fleurette/Lui piqua
la main douillette./ Sitôt que piqué se vit,/« Ah, je suis perdu ! » se dit,/Et, s'en courant vers sa mère,/
Lui montra sa plaie amère ;/ [...]/Si doncques un animal/Si petit fait tant de mal,/Quand son alène
époinçonne /La main de quelque personne,/Combien fais-tu de douleur,/Au prix de lui, dans le
coeur/De celui en qui tu jettes /Tes amoureuses sagettes ? »
13 Abraham K., Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis, Karnac, London, 1979
14 Dali S., Dream caused by the flight of a bee, New York, 1944, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,
Madrid.
15 [TN] Lafontaine’s fable
Reading the classical literature
The case of Sandy according to Jacques
Lacan
Jacques-Alain Miller1

Lacan and Women who think

Maternal deficiency
Hans and Sandy From the Mirror Stage to the Oedipus Complex
A dog in the bed, a dog in the street
The illness of all women
The phobia and the principle/inception of reason

Here’s our first question with respect to Anneliese Schnurmann; putting it

unambiguously – Was she an idiot? Reading Seminar IV, one could be
forgiven for thinking she was. She understands nothing. For Lacan, this is
her merit as an observer. So then, she understands nothing? For my part, I
don’t find this to be the case at all.

Let’s go straight to the crux of the matter. For the reader of Seminar IV, the
case of Sandy stands as the enduring example, the paradigm, of the
pathogenic effects of maternal deficiency. This is the pivotal point
underlined by Lacan on several occasions. Yet, Anneliese Schnurmann
herself assigned a pathogenic causality to the mother’s deficiency and
without there being anything ambiguous about it. In fact, in her text we find
the following sentence: The most decisive event, in the formation of little
Sandy’s nightmare and of the phobia that followed, was probably the effect
on the child of an injury suffered by the mother and her prolonged absence.
Let’s do a close rereading of the sentence that Lacan uses to introduce
his rereading of the case. He says “the notion that the mother is lacking the
phallus, that she is even desiring, in other words reduced [atteinte] in her
power, will be the most decisive thing for the subject.” He even uses the
same word used by Schnurmann: “decisive”. But to be fair we should also
point out that the terms he uses to qualify this maternal deficiency (he says
“the mother lacking the phallus, desiring, reduced in her power”) are not
borrowed from observation.
Let us credit Anneliese Schnurmann for the place she gives to the
castration complex, while, for Lacan, phallicism marks the essential
contribution brought by this Seminar. Anneliese Schnurmann does not
disregard the castration complex in any way. This is what she says: The
sight of the mother, diminished, damaged, handicapped, the damaged
mother in English, could have confirmed a fear that Sandy could have felt,
when she compared the genital organs of the little boy with her own.
Here, from the first, all the cards are on the table. Anneliese
Schnurmann has not understood so badly what it is all about. She has
perfectly isolated, the triggering function of the diminished mother and the
experience of the castration complex through the perception of the male
genital organs in the formation of the phobia.
Why doesn’t Lacan treat her better? Does he perhaps confuse her
with Anna Freud, who is certainly her patron? Anneliese Schnurmann’s
exposition of the case was presented in 1946 at Anna Freud’s seminar and,
at one point, Anneliese mentions an objection that Anna made in relation to
a word that was said by the child, “pussy-cat”. As we see in its following
publication, Anneliese is clearly supported by Anna.
Here, we could perhaps broach the subject of Lacan’s relation to
women who think: for example, Melanie Klein and Marguerite Duras. What
they say is wonderful, even if they don’t know what they are saying – so, it
is necessary for him to come along and explain what they say – we know
that Marguerite Duras didn’t take it very well, perhaps nor would Melanie
Klein. No doubt we could also add the name of Françoise Dolto to this
series. These are the pythonesses, who need deciphering.
Then, there are the fools. Here we have Marie Bonaparte, even
though Lacan borrowed a certain number of details from her in his
commentary on “The Purloined Letter”, and also Anna Freud, even though
he learnt something from her work on the mechanisms of defence – that the
ego is structured like a symptom, that the ego has the structure of the
symptom.
To read the Seminar, one would be tempted to class Anneliese
Schnurmann in this second list. This would be unfair. This is what we will
find if we take a closer look at the contribution of this author who little
Sandy calls, Annie. Anna Freud’s name does not predispose us to think
kindly of Anneliese Schnurmann. But after having reread her paper, I do not
think she considers the case from the perspective of frustration.
I would like to know more about Anneliese Schnurmann and also
about the Hampstead Nursery, which was closed a short time after this
“Observation”, after the war.2 The fact that Anneliese later wrote about the
inconsistency of the mother tells us that it is not by chance that, in this
observation, she noted something that Lacan remembered and later made
famous.

This phobia is fifty years old. It was produced in 1945 and now, in 1995, we
are still interested in it, even though it lasted barely a month at most, from
mid-April to mid-May. This might seem very far away. But Sandy is only a
little more than a year older than I am. I say this to bring us closer to the
case. Sandy is someone who might still be alive today – and who has no
doubt forgotten everything, as, after a few years, she had already forgotten
her therapist. The latter went to pay another visit to her patient, because,
under Anna Freud’s iron rule, you went to see what had become of the
institution’s little protégés. So, she saw her again and the little girl called
her “aunty”. She no longer knew that Anneliese had been her therapist.
There is no reason to suppose she would remember any better now, except
for the fact that she must have read the case.
The phobia occurred between the ages of precisely two years, five
months, and two and a half.
It would be fascinating to compare Sandy’s phobia and that of little
Hans, line by line. In the seminar, these are the first notes on the theme of
phobia, which will take up the second half of both the year and the book.
The Sandy case is the musical cell of what will later become the
enormous symphony developed in relation to the case of Hans. Let us say a
few words about what such a comparison might entail.
In the Hans case, it really is a phobia. It burns brightly for several
months and has some pronounced effects of incapacitation on the subject.
For Sandy, it is hardly a phobia. As Lacan says on page 100, and it seems
apt to me, it is only a rough outline of a phobia. It is a draft. It could have
been a phobia, and then, before it really flared up, it died down and went
out. To employ another metaphor, it is a phobia that did not crystallize. One
could ask, why? Can’t the reason be found in the fact that Sandy has
Anneliese, this substitute mother, following her at every step? As soon as a
nightmare wakes her up and she feels like crying before falling back to
sleep, Anneliese is there, who starts to note down all the facts, day by day.
We thus have the diary of the, in some way, aborted birth of this phobia,
noted in minute detail. There is something to learn from this Anna Freudian
discipline. Here I cannot help myself feeling a sense of admiration for what
Lacan also indicates as the sense of exemplary fidelity and precision that
she gives.
Secondly, Hans speaks, he speaks a lot. Encouraged by his father,
egged on by his listening, he lays it on thick (Lacan says so himself) and we
have a torrent of fantasies, phantasmatic waves coming one after another.
This is not what we find in Sandy’s draft phobia. We have a few words, a
few neologisms if you want. On one occasion, she constructs a complete
and quasi-grammatical sentence and it is an important moment in the
observation. On the whole, the case is ultimately an observation of
behaviour. In the Hans case, speech takes centre stage, and in the case of
Sandy, behaviour – but there are also signifiers, certainly.
Knickers can be found in both cases. You know the importance of the
mother’s knickers for Hans. The first thing Sandy does when she finds her
mother in good health again is to go and lift up her skirts to look at what she
has on underneath and to ask her, in her not quite grammatical language, if
she is really wearing knickers.
Point three: there is a parallel between the horse and the dog. For
Hans the object of the phobia is the horse animal. In the Sandy case it is the
dog animal. Finding two animals in the same function like this leads one to
think that the animal, in its status as taboo, is closely linked to the structure
of phobia. One could compare these two objects. What they have in
common is that they bite. This has an essential place in the Hans case – and
to bite [English in the original], biting, has an eminent place in Sandy’s
phobia too. On the other hand, one could oppose them in that, the origin of
the horse object is to be found on the feminine side, while, Anneliese
Schnurmann indicates that the dog is rather on the masculine side. In the
chronology that she establishes, it is through an identification between the
little boy and the dog that the latter affirms its place in the phobia.
 In both cases we find substitutes for the Name-of-the-Father, made
from what’s available - although, in the Seminar, page 396, Lacan
emphasised the imaginary function of the father, which would involve the
aggressive, repressive role that the castration complex entails. With Hans’s
horse and Sandy’s dog, we are in the register that, for Lacan, will later
become that of the Names-of-the-Father, when he will make of the
substitutes of the Name-of-the-Father the many Names-of-the-Father as
such, thus pluralising the Name.
Two paths are open to me – I could either go directly to the
observation, or indicate why Lacan refers to this case in his Seminar. I
prefer the second way, because I don’t want to give the impression that, in
the end, Lacan simply outclasses the observation. As the observation is our
goal for this evening, I will start with Lacan, and we will then come to the
observation itself.

One must not overlook, the way that the Sandy case is included in Seminar
IV. It is announced in the third lesson, pages 54-55, developed in the fourth,
pages 71-75 and then mentioned on page 100.
Could the Sandy case be removed? I mean, why did Lacan appeal to
this particular observation, of a phobia, by a student of Anna Freud, in the
fourth lesson that I have entitled The Dialectic of Frustration? Although he
says he chose it completely by chance, from many others that were
possible, am I saying that I don’t believe him? No, I mean that one can play
at removing this observation.
Seminar IV seems to be designed to correct the doctrine of object
relations as it is promoted by the post-Freudians, and especially by the
French post-Freudians contemporary with the Seminar and in particular
Bouvet. It is in this sense that Lacan underlines, at the beginning of the
seminar, on page 28, that this notion is impossible to comprehend and even
to put to work, without introducing the phallus as a third element. This is
what motivated him to introduce the phallic object into the Seminar – the
need to correct a lack in the post-Freudian theory of object relations. The
latter is only concerned with the relation between the mother and the child,
ego and objects; it omits the phallus. Lacan corrects this omission.
 Now, I do not believe that what he was interested in was correcting
the post-Freudian doctrine of object relations. He was rather correcting his
own doctrine of the mirror stage.
In fact, the mirror stage is an object relation. It is the relation of an
individual to an imaginary object that is his own body. Lacan used it as a
matrix for representing the relations of the ego and its objects for us. It is
precisely that object relation, which he had himself privileged, that he
corrects, by introducing an element that had not, until then, been brought to
the fore in his teaching and that was not in any way in the foreground of his
presentation of the mirror stage. In Seminar IV on the other hand, he
introduces the phallus, a new object, distinguished, privileged, as the
principal narcissistic object. This is why I could say in my course that the
Lacanian phallus was the heir to Freudian narcissism, the essential support
of ego libido, transfused into object libido. This definition will remain
present in Lacan for a long time. We find it again, for example, in his
“Subversion of the Subject”, where the phallus is defined as “concentrating
in itself the most intimate aspect of autoeroticism”.3
In correcting his mirror stage, Lacan introduces a problematic that is
at once that of the imaginary object, and that of the lack of the imaginary
object. He thus pluralises the object. For Lacan, until this seminar, the
essential status of the object was an imaginary one. What does the mirror
stage mean, if not that the object par excellence is an image seen in the
mirror? For Lacan, this was the model, the matrix, the origin of all objects
that mobilise the subject’s libido. Now, from this seminar onwards, the
object comes to be inserted into Lacan’s pre-established categories and
where it gets refracted. Hence the distinctions that arise between the
imaginary object, symbolic object and real object; and this gets even more
complicated if one considers the dimension where this object is produced,
that of the lack upon which it arises, that of the agent of lack.
In fact, the path taken by the Seminar goes from the Mirror stage to
the Oedipus complex and even though Lacan presents it to us in a very
natural way, in an affirmative tone, the path is quite a tortuous one.
Of course, Lacan had already, previously complicated the relation
between a and a’, which suffices to organise the specular relation, by
doubling it with an other, a symbolic relation, between S and A. It is the
schema that he recalls at the beginning of Seminar IV as the result of his
preceding elaboration.
 Let us remark that these two relations, on these two registers,
imaginary and symbolic, are very separated on the schema, even though
they are completed by a few other vectors. The imaginary vector interposes
itself and interferes with the symbolic dimension, it troubles it, disorganises
it, annoys it, it is a question of properly disengaging the symbolic, which,
for its part, conditions the imaginary. It is precisely this schema that Lacan
modifies step by step in Seminar IV, without always explaining it. He
modifies it because he modifies the very structure of the imaginary relation.
He introduces a supplementary term, the phallic term - which we will write
cp [lower case phi], an imaginary term and he sets himself that task of
showing that it acts as a switch [commutateur] with the symbolic order.

So Lacan progresses through quite a profound modification of his

conceptualisation. He is not content to add another dimension to the
imaginary dimension – he modifies the very structure of the imaginary
dimension. In what way does he do so? If you would like to follow me in
this deduction of the Sandy case, he had to think the relation between a and
the phallus, and also the relation of its correlate, let’s say a’, with the
phallus.

What are the two terms that can best exemplify the relation to the
imaginary phallic object, which would allow us to show that they have a
symbolic status at the same time? Well, in both cases, they must be
elements that are really lacking this phallus, if I can put it like that.
This can be translated very easily in the following way – the
privileged reference points for inscribing the phallus in the imaginary
relation are the little girl and the mother because in both cases, the relation
to lack of the phallus is obvious, or at least easy to bring out.
As the phallus, an imaginary object, is also inscribed in the symbolic
order, we have to place it on the second axis, between S and A. This
relation to lack that the subject maintains with the phallus is placed on its
symbol in the form of a bar and the same goes for its correlate:

Thus, if you follow me, and as I have said it is a game, what we need
is a little girl, a mother, a phallic object and, so that it comes out best, it is
preferable that the function of the father should not be too pronounced, that
it does not come to veil the lack in having. And low and behold, this is what
the Sandy case gives us – and not by chance, but in a privileged way.
In fact, the Sandy case is the case of a little girl, where the presence
and absence of the mother are determinant, where the castration complex is
perfectly brought out, and in which there is at least some distance from the
paternal support, since Sandy’s father, a fighter for liberty, died even before
the birth of his little girl. This clinical case thus contains all the details that
have to be brought out.
I add, since we are speaking of this dead father, that another death
marks Sandy’s history, the death of the sister, a sister seven years older, who
died when she was two. We do not learn the consequences of this death, and
it is not sure that Sandy was told about it, as the children were kept in
different places. She also had a brother, two years older than her, with
whom she is reunited later when the mother remarries. The Seminar says
that this young boy is the son of the stepfather the mother married, but in
fact, it is really Sandy’s brother – they have been separated on account of
the misfortunes that have befallen the family during the war.
This shows how profoundly appropriate the Sandy case is at this
moment in the Seminar. Let us now proceed to the observation itself.

I would like to bring out the way Anneliese Schnurmann’s observation is

organised. She is truly a girl with a method, a lot of precision, and has been
to a good school. This school is not our own, for sure, but this discipline has
its value. It smacks of logical positivism, where one tries to transcribe the
facts as they occur, one after the other, adding the least subjectivity. They
used to be called protocolary propositions: Otto saw... Otto heard...
The author’s idea, it is very precise, was to isolate the triggering
factors, and to give, she says, “a coherent picture” of them. She cares about
coherence. In fact, what we are presented with is a summary of facts,
followed by a commentary that demonstrates the coherence of the case, and
even its logic.
She specifies this draft phobia perfectly, in a single paragraph. When
she was two years and five months old, Sandy woke up screaming a short
while after having gone to sleep. She insisted that there had been “a dog in
the bed”. Afterwards, she started to show a great fear of her bed, says
Anneliese Schnurmann (it is rather that she was afraid of going to sleep and
getting into the bed in which she had had that dream), and then, a few days
later, she started being afraid of dogs in the street. This lasted for a month
and disappeared. There, straightaway, in a single paragraph, you have it in a
nutshell.
The exposition is then divided into three large parts – it is done with
great simplicity, much greater than the way we do it ourselves.

I – Main Facts
1) Family History
2) Physical and intellectual development
3) Instinctual development
II – Events
III – After

Part one, the main facts: the key preceding facts. Secondly, the
events: which refocuses the observation on the short period in question, on
what immediately preceded it, and then on the progress of the phobic crisis.
Thirdly, after: where one sees the family recomposed, as the mother
remarries, etc. Then comes the commentary of these facts.
She distinguishes the facts into three registers: family history;
physical and intellectual development; and then instinctual development,
which is the main focus.
The main features are roughed out in part one. In the second part, on
the other hand, two key events are highlighted, the first in December 1944,
and the second in March 1945. And then, we enter the notes taken day by
day.
Perhaps it is worth following the presentation that Anneliese
Schnurmann gives of the little girl’s instinctual development, up to when
she was two years and five months old. She does it in a very
methodological way. First she studies the facts from the oral register, then
those of the anal register, thirdly those of the genital register, without
omitting, fourthly, those belonging to the register that one could call
relational. She does not perhaps make a great deal of use of this in her
demonstration, which centres on the events. Once all that has been said, the
view is that when she was two, in other words in November 1944, she is
stable. Without problems, she has overcome everything, she appears as a
normal and stable child. But, all the same, the facts anterior to her
instinctual development could be of interest.
The author studies the development according to the Freudian stages.
In the oral register, what stands out is that when she was four months
old, her mother had an abscess in her breast and, all of a sudden, the baby
was transferred to the bottle. The author attributes the fact that the child eats
little and has difficulty feeding until she is one and a half to this severing,
which is considered abrupt. Subsequently, this difficulty in feeding resolved
itself, but the fact that she persistently sucks her hands and blanket is linked
to it, and when Anneliese Schnurmann sees little Sandy again when she is
four years and eight months, she notes that Sandy still sucks her blanket.
From the anal perspective, there is nothing to point out; the discipline
was easy.
From the genital point of view, the child’s masturbation was noted.
There is also the relational perspective. Anneliese Schnurmann in fact
extends the object relation to include the relation to the other. In this way
she describes Sandy as a child capable of showing positive affection. The
therapist’s interest centres on the game of aggression with the mother. The
mother used to tickle Sandy with her hair when caring for her; the child
wilfully pulled her mother’s hair and she became a little hair-puller for her
little friends. So Anneliese attributes the origin of this social behaviour to
her relation to her mother. She indicates, and Lacan gives this some
importance, that the mother used to play a teasing game with the child,
which consisted in pretending not to see that the child was there and then
seeing that she was, a sort of Fort-Da with the child as a cotton reel, a game
of presence and absence, playing on the anxiety and worry of little Sandy,
who had acquired the habit of doing the same thing with her little friends.
The description is amusing and precise. At the same time, Sandy developed
a tendency to turn aggression upon herself. When she was scolded for
pulling the hair of another child, she would often start pulling her own –
here we have, if you like, a transitivism, the dominance of which Lacan
indicated in the a-a’ relation. Once, she was observed pulling her hair with
one hand and stroking it with the other. One thus observes a sort of
subjective division in a nascent state. She also used to play the “teasing
game” with herself, to the point that, for a few weeks, she did not want to
take a biscuit or a piece of bread served to her on a plate, without first
advancing and withdrawing her hand for several minutes. In other words,
the Fort-Da had a powerful impact for this little girl. Nonetheless, when she
was two, she no longer pulled other people’s hair, she no longer played this
slightly worrying game with her hand – everything was fine.

We now get to the heart of the observation.

A more precise chronology is available to us, which I will first
outline, before focussing in on specific details.
Two facts stand out. In December 1944, the observation indicates that
Sandy’s relation to the sexual difference is established. She has “a
conscious awareness” of the difference between the sexes, on the basis of a
visual experience whose description we could recall. Then, in March, no
doubt the last week of the month, the mother, who comes to see her
regularly (this mother who had previously been described as having vitality
and even certain masculine traits in her way of affirming herself) appeared
diminished to the child, walking with the aid of walking sticks. She had
been ill. She had been operated on, etc. What’s more, she went away after
two days. The mother was injured.
There are two facts. I am not the one to have isolated them. They
were isolated by Anneliese Schnurmann as the two triggering factors
behind the phobia: the activation of the castration complex in the girl, and
the sight of the weakened mother, this strong mother, a widow, who had
certain masculine traits. This is the description that Lacan takes up in the
seminar.
 After a fortnight’s incubation, the crucial period starts.
Very precisely, on the night of the 14th to the 15th of April, Sandy’s
nightmare occurred and the phobia was subsequently established. We will
go back over this in minute detail, as we have the day-by-day account.
Then, on the 1st of May, we have the return of the cured mother, in
fine form, which significantly calms things down, even if the dog phobia
continues – but it no longer has the same vitality, it declines and we no
longer get the daily record. Then, two weeks later we see a phobia in statu
nascendi, which did not precipitate, crystallise.
The initial period is that of the first four days, the 14th, 15th, 16th and
17th of April. This is the “dog in the bed” period.
Although Sandy’s declarations do not allow us to know exactly what
the nightmare was, it can be recomposed through the elements that
appeared afterwards. Here is how it is presented. She was put to bed, she
appeared agitated, a little worried, and then she was moved, she was afraid
of an object, the object had been shown to her so that she would not be
afraid of it, she went to sleep, and a very short time afterwards she woke up
and screamed, terrified. The child said to the nurse (we don’t have her exact
words) that there was a dog in the bed. She did not get back to sleep for an
hour, during which she cried. That is Sandy’s nightmare.
The four following days, she at first refused to go to bed; then she
made a certain number of declarations, which are not as prolix as those of
Hans, but are convincing all the same. She said “Doggie coming”.
“Doggie” is a diminutive for “dog”. Toutou arrive, ya toutou. Then: “No
bed”. And combinations of the two: “No bed, doggie coming”, etc. At the
same time, it was not fixed, because on the third day, she plays at being the
dog when Anneliese Schnurmann arrives, as if making a sort of
demonstration – I am a doggie. At another moment, it is a little boy who is
the dog (little English boys seem to like playing at being a doggie, although,
not so long ago, it was the French that a particular politician referred to as a
poodle) and she was very afraid, as if she believed – “he is a dog”. Anyway,
things are very active around the signifier “doggie”. On the fourth day, she
is observed carefully inspecting her vagina. She is then told the following
(it is not the therapist that says this, it is the one referred to in the text as the
“worker” (it must have been the nurse, the person who bathes the child):
“All girls are like that”. She says precisely, I quote: “The worker told her
that everything was alright” and that “all girls are like that”. That does not
take us very far. It is the first part.
Then, from the 18th to the 30th of April, the phobia shifts outside. It is
no longer a question of the dreamt of dog, the dog of play, the interior dog –
it is the dog in the street. For this to happen, the contribution of Anneliese
Schnurmann was required, who perhaps lacked a little skill. The children
met what she calls a “strange dog” (the English make a difference between
“strange dogs” and normal “dogs”). She warns the children not to approach
them because they can bite. This has a big impact on the little girl who, at
first, noted nothing, and then had something like a moment of illumination:
eureka! Thanks to this little sentence, this explanation, this induction by
Anneliese Schnurmann, she discovered that she could do a lot more with
the dog, that she could create a real phobia out of the dog. It is here that, as
Lacan points out, she utters a complete sentence. Anneliese Schnurmann
notes in her commentaries that a profound emotion, a fright, can result in
intellectual progress. This does not mean that one should frighten children
on purpose (although one never knows with English education) but she
notes finely, that, on the spur of the moment, Sandy makes a leap forward
with language. A complete sentence emerges “Doggie bite naughty boy
leg”. It is not entirely grammatical; there are some little things that have
been eaten (not only the leg of the little boy, but also some words), but it is
a sentence. At dawn on the sixth day (it took six days to make the world and
six to make a phobia), with the collaboration of Anneliese, the real phobia
is installed. As she writes, “For the first time, Sandy was afraid of a dog in
the street.”
Sandy begins to show some aggression with the other children. She
also shows a masculine identification with two little boys, who like to bang
things, above all with hammers – she starts doing the same thing. There is
no entry for the seventh day, the 20th of April. I suppose that it was a day
off, a Sunday. I have not had time to verify this. On the eighth day,
Anneliese Schnurmann notes that the child worries about her body and
makes some very precise verifications. Sandy successively takes an interest
in different parts of her body, her foot, her big toe, her genital organs, also,
her clothes, and also the bed, etc. At the same time, the therapist gives an
interpretation that returns three times in the text, namely “They are all like
that”. It is the sole interpretation made to Sandy. When she is given this
interpretation, Anneliese Schnurmann notes that on the eighth day, she
began to recount something more complex about the girls she knew – that is
to say, she admits that a class of girls exists. First two little girls come to her
attention, as they have fallen ill. They have been confined to the infirmary
and she, Sandy, is not allowed to go and see them, which had worried her a
lot. So, there are two ill girls. Then there is “Mummy ill”. And she is also
concerned to know if “Anneliese ill”, if “Sandy ill”, etc. One can read these
utterances as concerning the constitution and exploration of girls as a class.
Her questions concern the class of girls.
“Lydia ill”, “Margie ill”, she is the second little girl, “My mummy
ill”, and, curiously, there is a sort of optimism “My mummy come back, my
mummy walkie again”. And then the questions, “Sandy ill. Annie ill?” And
she tells a whole story on the question that she poses on the subject of
women, and what the illness of all of them would be. In short, she
elaborates her doctrine on castration, and that one recovers from it.
Some verifications follow. Encounters with dogs continue to be
difficult, then, there is the return of the mother on the 1st of May. There,
Sandy laughs, the whole atmosphere changes, she goes to look under her
mother’s skirts. In the two weeks that follow, there is nothing more in the
observation, except for a simple note – “It continues, it does not seem to be
getting worse” and exactly one month after the nightmare, it is finished.
Then come the commentaries and reflections of Anneliese
Schnurmann.

I have already said that she perfectly identified the two triggering factors,
namely her new perception of the difference between the sexes and the role
of the mother, whose departure weakened and her return to form frame the
dawning and disappearance of the phobia. She isolated two events.
Everything now lies in the conceptualisation of these events and above all
of their relation. What strikes me when I read Anneliese Schnurmann’s is,
in fact, first of all, that she does attempt to conceptualise things.
How does she do so? It is a question of finding what these two
phenomena have in common. She says “The perception of sexual difference
is the perception of an injury made to the body” and what confirms it is that
Sandy explores this body and its different parts. On the other hand, the
mother is found to be injured in her body. It is thus the same phenomenon.
She even adds, “One can consider that at this age, the mother is almost still
a part of the child’s body”. So, the disappearance of the mother is
equivalent to losing part of her own body.
I don’t know if she conceptualises these two very simple facts as
Anna Freud would have conceptualised them, but she certainly
conceptualises them as a certain Jacques Lacan would have. She
conceptualises them on the basis of a-a’, as a scopic relation. Equally, the
castration complex, in so far as it rests on the comparison of a boy’s body
and a girl’s body, is thinkable on the basis of the scopic field and in the
form of the totality of the body, of the body image. On the other hand, what
concerns the mother also has the body’s totality as its reference, in both
respects: the integrity of her body has been injured, it has the value of a part
of the child’s body – Lacan takes this up in the Seminar.
Anneliese Schnurmann’s conceptualisation is made in terms of a-a’,
and it is the reference to the body which forms the overlap between the two
triggering factors. According to Anneliese Schnurmann, the girl’s privation
is grasped by the child as a supposed injury and it undergoes a displacement
onto different parts of the body, which she asks to be carefully re-identified.
She does the same with Anneliese Schnurmann’s body and she assures her
that her body is like the little girl’s. Sandy’s concern then bears upon the
therapist’s glasses. No doubt she has to explain that it is an inessential
attribute. It seems to me that Anneliese does not conceptualise in terms of
frustration, but in imaginary terms.
There is another thing I like in Anneliese Schnurmann’s commentary.
When she gives her last interpretation, when she gives her universalising
interpretation to the little girl for the third time – “we are all like that”, more
precisely “we are both like that because we are both girls”, she says, “Sandy
is confronting the core of the problem”, the coeur, the noyau. The word
problem appears only once in her commentary, but it is proof that in this
case she targets a subject with a problem to solve, a knowledge to elaborate.
The problem, as she mentions towards the end, is “to reconcile herself with
the fact of being a girl”.
What is Lacan’s contribution to the problem? There, where the body’s
form is at stake (Anneliese Schnurmann speaks of an injury to one’s own
body, but I will retranslate it like this), Lacan situates the phallic function.
Despite the fact that the observation clearly points to the new perception of
the difference between the sexes, she avoids the issue. By conceiving things
in terms of an injury to one’s own body, she obscures the point, namely that
the injury to the body centres on a very precise element.
It is worth the trouble to savour the precision with which Anneliese
describes the child’s scopic discovery of the difference between the sexes
from the start. “One day”, in December 1944, “a little boy of about two and
a half was brought into the group that Sandy belonged to for his afternoon
nap. Before going to bed, he used the pot, urinating into it standing up.
Sandy stood next to him, watching intently. She had never seen that before,
as the boys in her group still wore nappies. A short time after observing
this, Sandy asked for her pot, and tried to use it by holding it in front of her.
As she was unable to do so, she showed a lot of disappointment, lifted up
her skirt, showed her genital organs, and said something like bicki in a
clearly demanding voice. Bicki was a word that she used for things she
considered desirable in a general way. She repeated this word several times,
with increasing urgency and insistence in her demand”.
Here, we find the word “demand” [English in the original], which
means exigence, and there is no doubt that Lacan’s invention of demande
comes from the English word, the Seminar shows this clearly – and why not
from this text by Anneliese Schnurmann?
The text clearly describes this visual interest centred on the organ, but
the fact of its being noted gets lost in the concept of the body proper, that
the author needs to bring together sexual difference and the wound to the
mother’s body. What Lacan does is the opposite. He conserves the value
centred on the male genital organ, but modifies the concept of the penis in a
way that allows it to account for the wound to the mother’s body. This is the
invention of the phallus. The phallus is a term which, on the one side, finds
its basis in the visual field, as an imaginary object, but which, on the other,
accounts for something as abstract as the power of the Other. Thus, while
Anneliese Schnurmann makes the connection between the two triggering
factors in terms of a wound to the integrity of the body, Lacan makes the
connection in phallic terms.
There is a precise point where one can see that, by her own
admission, Anneliese Schnurmann’s perspective hits a snag. It is the very
fine remark on page 266 of Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, about the
paradox that the fear of being bitten presents – a paradox, because, when
you look at it, what has she got to lose? Anneliese Schnurmann is unable to
conceptualise the nature of the threat hanging over Sandy. Is she crying
because of an accident that has happened? Or what is the accident she fears
she will suffer? It is the admission that there is something which is
temporarily unsuitable, and which is unthinkable for Anneliese
Schnurmann.
In a way, Lacan says: Can’t all this be accounted for better with my
concepts than with chronology? One could find this unjust, as Anneliese
Schnurmann’s chronology is finely wrought, and one could even take it as a
model. But I think that Lacan’s remark refers very precisely to what
Anneliese Schnurmann, who organises everything in terms of events and
who notes all the days, herself points out – namely, that in the end, the
event at stake in castration cannot be situated within the coordinates of
chronology. She says “the child obviously had no clear idea whether the
damage supposed had already taken place or was on the point of
happening”. She notes this as if it is a deficiency of the child. And she says
“But this fact is not so surprising if we consider that the thought processes
of little children do not conform to time and logic”. It is here that Lacan
objects to the way a child’s thoughts are treated as so-called primitive
thought; hence, his interest for Levis-Strauss’s refutation of Lévy-Bruhl. As
for Lacan, he will develop a rubber logic, which makes it possible not to be
confined to chronological linearity. She says “As in the unconscious
thoughts of the adult, opposites do not exclude each other”. It seems to me
that this is where Lacan brings a solution with the notion of a, not abstract,
but symbolic phallus, in other words abstract all the same in relation to the
real or imaginary organ.
It also provides another level for grasping the efficacy of the
interpretation: all are like that. This undoubtedly had a positive effect,
though one cannot be sure. Anneliese Schnurmann herself asks what would
have happened if this interpretation had not been given. Should the very
rapid disappearance of the phobia be attributed to it or not? Such
phenomena are also seen in children without therapeutic intervention.
What does Anneliese Schnurmann think about the effect of the
sentence? It is difficult to understand the efficacy of the symbol upon
elements that, for her, are completely unlinked to the symbolic. For Lacan,
the subject – the child subject, little Sandy, too – has, if I can put it like this,
a credible desire, a rational desire. What counts are not only objects present
in the world, what counts most is structure. It is at this level that the child is
oriented. Phobias, like Sandy’s and like Hans’s, are there to show that for
children, nothing is without reason, there must be nothing without reason.
Lacan indicates that Hans’s horse emerges in the sentence where it is
because of the horse – Wegen – on account of the horse, that I caught this
nonsense. The horse comes in the place of the cause. The invention of the
dog is also the invention of the cause of castration. The lack must have an
agent. What is present is, let us say, an epistemological desire properly
speaking, a lucubration of knowledge. Castration anxiety is also an anxiety
about why.
Lacan also signals another important point. The perception of sexual
difference alone was not enough to trigger the phobia. A second fact was
necessary, the decline and absence of the mother. This can be conceived in
terms of deferred action: it is only when the second event occurs that the
first takes on its traumatic value. Lacan says something more by saying that
what is traumatising in the second event, in other words the perception of
the mother as reduced in her power, is that she cannot give the phallus. She
cannot transmit it. What seems essential to this equilibrium in the order of
the world is the presence of a complete Other who has and who can give.
This function of the Other who would be able to give is noted by
Anneliese Schnurmann precisely when she observes the fascination that
Sandy has for the little boy who urinates standing up. She says “In the
following days, she again tried to urinate like a boy, insisting that I hold the
pot for her and she got angry with me because it did not work”. From this
event, she draws the following consequence in her commentary, “her idea
was that it was within my power [in English in the original] to give or to
withdraw, to refuse to give the penis”. At this point, highlighted by Lacan,
we can pay homage to Anneliese Schnurmann – the notion of the mother’s
power is already in the text, in this little phrase: “within my power”.
I will thus allow myself to conclude that Anneliese, immortalised by
Lacan, was also slightly defamed by him. She was not aware of the
signifier, and particularly the phallic signifier, nor was she aware of the
paternal metaphor, but she was not an idiot.
In the heat of movement and invention and going at it at full tilt,
Lacan was a little rough. We offer her our apologies.

Questions
Some of the answers given by Jacques-Alain Miller’s to questions posed to
him by members of the audience can be found below.

Because of the time, I left out the second part concerning what happened
afterwards, which was commented on by Lacan. She returns to her family,
which is reformed as the mother remarries the brother of her first husband.
The little girl thus finds an embodied father once more, a stepfather. She re-
joins her brother and there is also her cousin, her uncle/step-father’s
daughter, but she is her mother’s favourite. One could think that her sister’s
death plays a role in this. She became the favourite and Lacan says – she is
the little boy’s girl phallus. One could consider that the universalising
interpretation that was given to her was not without consequence, and that
she found the value of exception again as the favourite.

As she was told that all were the same, she will finally be the phallus.
The problematic of having or of not having, does not please her very much,
and she will be delighted to be the favourite. All this could be rewritten on
the basis of a much later period in Lacan’s teaching [...]
There is a fantastic episode with the foot. “Three days later”, it is the
st
21 of April, “she comes crying from the bathroom to tell me that she has
hurt her foot” (it is like little Hans, where, at one time, the foot also had
great significance), “she took off her slipper and looked at a few fibres from
the sole and she said, disgusted, dirty.” Everything that touches the body,
clothes, glasses, etc..... is essential for her. These are things that one can
observe in feminine subjects who have been marked in their childhood by a
little metonymical event, linked to the perception of sexual difference, an
element becomes fixed and triumphantly resists years of analysis. She does
not believe her word; she verifies her foot, her toe. She is a good little
English girl who looks for evidence [...]
 After this little incident, when Anneliese says that she must not play
with the “strange dog”, that it would bite – “all the children greeted each
dog that we came across by saying doggie. Sandy never showed any fear
and even any particular interest regarding the dogs that we could have met
on the road. When we had nearly got to the Nursery, Sandy started to speak
excitedly, at first in a jumble of words, Doggie, bite, boy, Bobby, Mummy”
(an ejaculation, a jouissance of signifiers), “and then she said clearly, almost
in a whisper, the longest sentence that she had ever produced – Doggie bite
naughty boy leg. Immediately after, she showed, repeatedly, her finger
which was unmarked, saying; All better.” It is something that might have
been said in relation to the mother, she was going to get better. It was a sort
of triumph, nothing had happened to her, except the phobia. At the same
time, the solution came into view.
What is the precise meaning of this sentence? It is perhaps a thesis
about castration – everybody is a boy, and then there are those that are
naughty, and at that moment the dog bites, and takes a bit away. She has
constructed a thesis, a theory of castration, on the basis of the “dog in the
bed”, and to “bite”.

Translated from the French by Philip Dravers

1 This presentation was given on 17th March 1995, at the E.C.F. in response to an invitation by the
Group Petite Enfance (a new branch of the CEREDA network). Text established by Catherine
Bonningue. Published with the kind consent of J-A Miller.
2 One could refer to Catherine Bonningue’s article, “Note sur Anneliese Schnurmann et la
Hampstead Nursery”, in the context of “Research and References”, p. 83
3 Lacan, J., “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire”, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink,
London: Norton, 2006, p.696.
The child and his objects
The body in all its magnificence

Daniel Roy

The anthropo-scene: the place from which objects are produced

Paul Crutzen, a winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, has dubbed the past
two centuries “the Anthropocene Era”, in other words the age in which
humankind has become “a geophysical force”. We now are in Stage 2 of
that age, the “Great Acceleration”, and fast approaching Stage 3, when all
global ecosystems will come under threat. Three solutions will be possible:
1: business as usual: we carry on as before and hope for the best; 2:
mitigation: we try to reduce the impact of human activities on the
environment, which involves “important changes in societal values and
individual behaviour”, but scientists wonder whether this is achievable; 3:
geo-engineering options, which scientists find tempting.
A precious indication can be found in the effort of scientists to
translate the real they deal with into a transmissible discourse. Not only has
discourse shaped our world, but now man-made objects, and the forces they
unleash, are taking the place of the objects and forces of “natural” physics,
and are shaping the biosphere. Humankind is not only leaving traces of its
presence, opening up to the field of interpretation, reading and deception,
but also creating objects with lives of their own, that do not deceive,
especially since they have lost their signifying ties with the living bodies
that have set them in motion. On the contrary, now they have control over
those bodies. The analytical experience teaches us about where the forces
benefitting the objects science produces, come from. In the same
movement, it allows a subject the liberation from the objects that orientated
his desire and fixed his jouissance.
In his Ethics of Psychoanalysis seminar, Lacan refers to the Freudian
invention: “The discourse [of these admirable female theorists called
hysterics] leads [Freud] to polymorphous perversity as it reigns over the
world that unites the child to the woman, and the shape from which desire
draws its strength is demonstrated in the facets of this crystal.”1
When Lacan talks about the “world that unites the child to the
woman” and the “crystal” that constitutes “polymorphous perversity” to
shape the forms that desire will take, he refers to an engine that is quite
different from this ideal of non-dependency, or prophylaxis of dependence2,
still associated with the mother-child relationship. This is a radically
different point of departure because it is about starting from the fact that it
is a woman, as mother, who introduces the subject into the field of
jouissance. Polymorphous perversity is not based, Lacan stresses, on
autoeroticism, although he does not rule that out, but on “hetero-eroticism”,
on the encounter with eroticism, with the sexual, as heteros. This alterity is
established in the dependence on an Other, the mother. All the richness, all
the resources, can be seen in that, but one can also see how “social
collusion in attaching the child to the mother, makes her the chosen seat of
prohibitions”. Being dependent on an Other body to learn the radical
otherness of the real is a good “school of conduct” that is not based on a
system of prohibitions, which can only be added on socially.
Jacques Lacan develops this new perspective in a passage in Seminar
17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis:
“It is not just a matter of talking about prohibitions, but simply about
a dominance of the woman as mother, as a mother who says, a mother of
whom one makes demands, a mother who gives orders, and who thereby
establishes the child’s dependence. Woman lends herself to jouissance by
daring the mask of repetition. She presents herself here as what she is, as
the institution of masquerade. She teaches her little one to parade. She tends
towards surplus jouissance, because she, the woman, plunges her roots, like
a flower, down into jouissance itself.3
That is our starting point: this humus — dependence on a woman to
alter one’s jouissance — is where human beings shape the objects that will
matter to them and become “means of jouissance”.

The problem of the object

This opens up what Lacan calls in his Anxiety seminar “the variety of
solutions to the problem of the object”.4
“The problem of the object”, according to the line of reasoning he
sketches out here, is now presented in the following manner: the wealth of
solutions stem from the little man’s dependency on a woman, who acts as
mother and who, as a woman, introduces him to the otherness of the
encounter with jouissance (this otherness is what is called “the sexual”).
But that otherness can always be interpreted as “it’s the Other’s fault” or
“this happened to me because of the Other”. That is how the object
appeared in the analytical experience, as an object taken in the Other,
prisoner of the Other. And it was necessary to wait for Lacan’s seminar on
anxiety for it to detach itself from this detritus and appear for what it is and
what it is worth: “[ ] what is most me lies on the outside, not because I
projected it there but because it was cut from me [ ].”5
The problem of the object begins when it appears for what it is, in
other words lost, detached from the Other, and the subject is on the brink of,
and in a position to, recover it, to become responsible for it: that is anxiety.
What will the subject do with this surplus jouissance that is offered to him?
Will he prefer “any surplus jouissance that is the product of our industry, in
a word, a fake surplus jouissance”? Lacan adds, “Moreover, that can catch
on. One can do a semblance of surplus jouissance - it draws quite a
crowd.”6 That is a precious indication from Lacan: these “fake” objects,
whose possible harm is regularly denounced, are not “naturally” exempt
from the pleasure principle. They do not go “beyond” it. They do not
approach the real of jouissance, but rather keep the subject at a distance.
They are even one possible solution to the problem of the object, a
solution Lacan does not reject. For these objects are available in the world
and very clearly possess the trait of being “outside-body”: they therefore
have a soothing side, which is why they work so well as babysitters! They
also have a disturbing side, which we shall look at later.
The trouble with these objects is that they are worthless to the
subject, and, consequently, do not help him answer the questions he really
faces when something unexpected happens.

Fort-Da
Such an unexpected event is precisely what triggered the problem Freud’s
grandson faced when his mother went away. That the issue arose the
moment the mother went away must not mislead us by suggesting that this
only involves the problem of the mother, the problem of the relationship to
the mother. This recurring clinical question is usually called “separation
anxiety”.
 “What do you do when your mother goes away?” You scream and
stamp your feet, burst into tears, move on, heave a big sigh of relief, etc.
Lacan’s commentary in Seminar 11 on the fort-da game introduces us
to the underlying logic of these phenomena, which is based on the step he
takes in this seminar. It is no longer a matter of the mother’s absence, of the
child’s game of absence and presence, indexed by the phallus, a game of
hide-and-seek. The issue is not just “your mother is gone; you miss her or
she misses you”. It is “you missed it”! And then, what you have just missed
appears behind the screen your mother formed: what you have just missed
is the encounter. That is the production of the “Lacanian” object — objet
(a), surplus jouissance — which comes to the place where the real of the
impossible encounter was. It indexes and masks this real. This is the place
where, between the question of the mother’s Desire, “the mother’s sketchy
and always open-ended absence”, and the loss of the always-missed
encounter, the little child discovers the wooden reel.
Then, so-called “separation anxiety” is diffracted between cases of
the impossibility of symbolising absence, cases of refusing to accept loss
(the object is not separable from the Other: he takes it with him, or the
object emerges in the present) and cases “waiting” to be discovered.
With little Hans, who will be our teacher, we will explore the radical
change that a change in the regime of the encounter introduces for the
subject.
So-called “drive” objects regularly fill this space, serving as fuel for
the new engine. That is why we always find a trace of them in accounts of
cures with children. Psychoanalysts since Melanie Klein have focused
particular attention on these objects, a sign of the importance
psychoanalysts have always given them. Today that importance has a new
lease of life because it is with the know-how with objects that the child can
teach itself how to approach the gadget-objects modern society offers.
Drive objects are precisely those objects produced by the analytical
cure, produced by a child when he meets an analyst. What makes them so
special is that they come out of the encounter with what matters for any
given child with an enigmatic desire and an opaque presence. That is why
analysis is and has always been a good laboratory for making a list of
objects that matter to a child after encountering the desire and presence of
those who care for him, in most cases his parents. This may have given rise
to the illusion that the objects entered the logic of the child’s stages of
development, whereas they actually attest to a change in the regime of the
encounter. In the best of cases, they are remainders or residues. Conversely,
when they emerge in all their magnificence it cannot be inferred that they
have found their steady regime, for that only happens when they are
detached.

Little Hans and his objects

For Hans, the question, “what do you do when your mother goes away?”
came to him very precisely in a dream accompanied by a specific affect:
anxiety. Here is the account of that dream, which preceded the onset of his
phobia: “Hans (aged four and three-quarters) woke up one morning in tears.
Asked why he was crying, he said to his mother: ‘When I was asleep I
thought you were gone and I had no Mummy to coax with’.”7
The dream says that his mother is no longer available, that she has
changed the regime of the encounter. Hans lived under the illusion of the
possible encounter. Now, he enters the regime of the encounter as missed.
What brought this change about? Why is it now no longer possible for Hans
to “coax with Mummy”? Why does “coaxing” now seem like a jouissance
that has been lost forever?
Is it because his father had forbidden it? That is what Freud and his
father would like to believe and make Hans believe. Hans does not
contradict them and sometimes provokes his father’s anger. This is what
Lacan calls Freud’s “dream”.
He provides a more diffracted answer in Seminar 4, The Object
Relation:
-Hans is no longer his mother’s only object “at hand”, because a
little sister was born: “Hans feels excluded, has fallen out of the
situation, is ejected by the little sister.”8
-The object that until then he had “at hand”, his Wiwimacher,
which serves as both a conceptual tool to survey his world and as
an imaginary lure to catch the attention of ladies, is thrust back
on its “real presence”. He now does anything that comes into his
head and no longer makes the symbolic connection with the
world nor the imaginary one with the mother.
His mother and her small organ thus appear with their own demands
and he no longer has the tempered, bourgeois jouissance of it. Quite the
contrary, he becomes its prey. He is in the grip of jouissances that are
foreign to him, heteros. This is the real that opens up the pit that now
separates him from his mother and turns her into a “gone mummy”; that is
the anxiety.

This specific point is where Hans finds “his rescue” in a particular wooden
reel, a special “object”, namely the horse, accompanied by the “instinctual
furniture” of various objects.9
The horse, a symptomatic construction, has the traits of the old status,
and the new status of the object Hans must deal with:
-It takes the place of the mother’s body and, as such, is a horse
that bites; it keeps the traits of the earlier mode of encounter:
becomes an object for the Other’s jouissance.
-It takes the place of the mother’s body and, as such, pulls
heavily laden carts, just as his pregnant mother carried his little
sister; in this case it attests to the new regime of the object.
-It takes the place of his Wiwimacher, but as something from
which he is separate, which has become an “outside-body”
object.
-It takes the place of his own body, as a young horse, but also as
a body that separates from an object, the Lumpf, the imaginary
children (Lodi).
-It takes the place of the father who separates the child from the
mother, but who is powerless because the presence of the horse,
a substitute father, has the symptomatic outcome of confining
Hans to the house with his mother.
The horse is a special object (what we call “phobic”) that, like the
reel, serves to process the logical moment where the new regime of objects,
where they find a valid subsistence, is developed for Hans. But, unlike the
reel, it is a symptomatic object that tries to reconcile the before and after.
The mode of subsistence of the objects, the place where they are the
best and threaten the least, where the subject can enjoy them as something
good and desire them without that desire necessarily being unfulfilled,
impossible or in need to be defended against, is when they are separate,
detached, fallen from the body. Their best status, when they are useful and
worth something, is “outside-body”.
That is the big lesson little Hans teaches us: it is when objects are
hanging from or rooted in the body that they encumber, embarrass and
impoverish us.
To enrich yourself, place your objects outside-body!

Little Hans works hard to accomplish this task, putting together his new
furniture, finding various “reel-objects” to carry out the operation of
putting-outside-the-body, of condensing jouissance to take it away from the
body:
-there is the horse pulling the cart (Wägen dem Pferd - wegen
dem Pferd ), not as something that bites but as something that
falls;
-there are the railway car and lines, which Lacan, holding up a
map, uses to demonstrate the dimension of impossibility in the
encounter;
- there is the famous giraffe, drawn and crumpled, that Hans sits
on;
- there is the stork who brings Hanna, with the hat and keys;
- there is the stone on which the father hurts himself;
- there are the mother’s underpants, on the border;
- there is Grete, the doll, who incorporates a pocket knife and
expels it through a hole between her legs;
-there is the drill that makes a hole in Hans’s belly in the bathtub,
and the pliers used to remove and replace his bottom and
Wiwimacher;
-there is the mother herself, whom Hans, Lacan says, turned into
a “moving part”.10
The abyss that opened up when “the mother went away” reaches its
limits with this operation: the object as something separable includes in
itself the void of the separation, the real of the now impossible encounter,
and that is how it condenses a little bit of jouissance in him as something
that is always lost. If you want to retrieve it, to extract it from the object, it
slips away from you. It is like nouvelle cuisine: just a touch of flavour that
amazes when you bite into it.

Objects with and without limits

Of course these objects exist as common everyday items, but they seem to
bear the stamp of the encounter as discoveries in language, as things seen
and heard, given or received, stolen or offered.
 Reading the account of Hans’s cure immerses us into the little boy’s
language universe, visual and acoustic. Each object makes this substantial
universe emerge: the sound of horses’ hooves on paving stones, the
coachmen’s whips; the mother’s underpants (modernity; the mother on the
toilet, the difference in sound of the urinations, Hans’s spit, the veil over
nudity); the Lumpfcomplex: Lodi, Schrumpf, the black stocking, the sound
of something falling.
Each object condenses these disparate elements, which disperse like
shards if you try to grasp them. They are fragments of pure poetry, suns
diffracting into elementary particles.
The psychoanalyst is not a poet, for he examines this diffraction at
the moment it occurs and, consequently, he loses its poetic effect. That is
why, in the analytical experience, objects are always lost, about to be lost,
being lost, or do not succeed in getting lost.
But these are the same objects that will be enriching to those who
want to be responsible for their objects just as they lose possession of them,
have separated from them, without making themselves bear them through
another body. But that is another story: how these objects go into operation
in the encounter with the Other sex.
What we have learned, reading Hans with Lacan, is the essential
advantage in considering and welcoming these elements of discourse — the
horse, stork and drill — as objects arising from the new regime of the
encounter with jouissance and with the Other, which treat the trauma of that
encounter. In this movement, we free ourselves, and we free the subject
from the obligation of filling what seemed marked by an “it doesn’t work
anymore” with meaning.
Lacan indicates this on several occasions: these signifying objects are
insignificant. They are not there to signify. Their function “of refounding
the real in a new way” is what matters.11 Take the example of the fantasy of
the two giraffes. What is important? Knowing whether one of them
represents the father, the other the mother, or rather the singular use Hans
can make of them by drawing them and crumpling them up? Lacan points it
out: “It is a testimony, a kind of treatment”12 that the little boy, in love with
his mother, holds in his hand. He can keep something of his love for his
mother without always needing to have it in his hand or within his reach.
That is a benefit. That is how the objects that matter are of use: they contain
something of the encounter. Produced as objects fallen from the impossible
encounter, they bear the stamp of the moment of detachment from the living
signifier of demand and desire. They are marked by that internal limit,
which is that of the real of the impossible encounter.

Today science and the modern world raise new questions on speaking
beings that have never come up before, and which have joined the old ones,
overlapping or even competing with them.
For example, instead of the question “what do you do when your
mother goes away?” we now have “what do you do when your pay-as-you-
go runs out?”
Several answers are possible:
1- you steal a mobile phone
2- you borrow one from your best friend
3- you take advantage of the situation by starting a conversation with
your neighbour or the person at the next table
4- you get angry with your parents
5- you get depressed.
This question arose for 12-year-old Elodie, who told me how she
used up her monthly credit of € 25, in two days. Elodie ticked answer 4: she
got angry with her parents because they had refused to sign her up for an
unlimited plan. Elodie helped me understand that these objects, although
likely to become part of the “instinctual furniture”, like other objects in the
world, nevertheless possess a particular trait: they have no internal limit.
They are susceptible to never lacking.
What can be done with objects offering unlimited use? What will
they do to us? These are the new questions facing children today.

Translated from the French by Glenn Naumovitz

1Lacan J., “Compte rendu du Séminaire de L’Éthique”, Ornicar n° 28, Navarin Éditeur, 1984, p.8,
untranslated
2These terms are those that Lacan used in The Seminar, Book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans.
Porter, D., Routledge, London, 1992, p. 10
3Lacan J., The Seminar, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Grigg, R., Norton,
London, 2007, p.78
4Lacan J., The Seminar, Book X, Anxiety, trans. Price, A., Polity, Cambridge, 2014, p.228
5ibid, p.223
6Lacan J., The Other Side of Psychoanlaysis, op cit, p.93.
7Freud S., Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy [1909], Standard Edition, vol. VI, Hogarth
Vintage, 2001, p.23
8Lacan J., Le Séminaire, Livre IV, La relation d’objet, Paris, Seuil, 1994, p.259. (Seminar Book IV,
untranslated)
9ibid., p.397.
10 Lacan,. Le séminaire, livre IV, ibid., p.405.
11 Le séminaire, livre IV, ibid., p.307
12 ibid., p.265
Reading Gabrielle and Richard with Little
Hans
Éric Laurent

This proposal that I am putting forward, to read Melanie Klein’s Richard

and Winnicott’s Gabrielle with Little Hans, can be understood in several
ways.
It is, of course, a suggestion to read all three, but, in a sense, against
their chronology. It is a suggestion to return to Freud in order to undo the
illusion of progress and to note how these papers published in the 60’s and
70’s can be understood from the perspective of a Freudian orientation.
This is particularly risky as regards the psychoanalysis of children, on
which Freud wrote only one extensive text and which he never practiced,
per se.
This was, nevertheless, Jacques Lacan’s wager in the 1950s when he
set out to show the psychoanalysts who were drowning in the imaginary
wealth of child fantasy that, there also, the formations of the unconscious
were structured like a language. By choosing to devote the fourth year of
his seminar to reading Little Hans, Lacan was trying to respond to the
problem he had posed for himself in the “Rome Discourse” in 1953. At that
time, he considered that one of the three major issues of psychoanalysis was
“The function of the imaginary, as I shall call it, or, to put it more directly,
of fantasies in the technique of psychoanalytic experience and in the
constitution of the object at the different stages of psychical development.
The impetus in this area has come from the analysis of children and from
the favourable field offered to researchers’ efforts and temptations by the
preverbal structurations approach. This is also where its culmination is now
inducing a return, by raising the question of the symbolic sanction to be
given to fantasies in their interpretation.”1
By rereading Hans in 1956, Lacan led his listeners to give their
symbolic sanction to fantasies, particularly in the psychoanalysis of
children. This question clearly bothered him from the beginning of his
seminar because he devoted the entire first trimester of the 1953-54
academic year to the analysis of Dick and the wolf child. And although Dr.
Lacan was not considered a specialist of child analysis, he was nevertheless
authorized to comment on the subject thanks to his famous mirror stage,
which some reduced to its genetic dimension.
One of the surprises of the seminar on the Object Relation was the
demonstration of the separating power of the mirror stage and its ability to
emphasise symbolic phenomena. And this result was obtained with more
than one phobic child. We know to what extent phobias can be grasped
from their imaginary, or even ethological side.
Reading Hans with Lacan supports the idea that Freud relied on
myths rather than the imaginary of the body and on fantasy rather than
drawings, and that the phobic object proves to be a “signifier of all trades”,
even to the point of crumpling up the drawing.
I would like therefore for my invitation to read Gabrielle and Richard
through Hans to have this meaning: to note what comes back to the
symbolic order in what might appear as a shimmering, a mask of the
imaginary. It is in this way that we may approach the real of the symptom.
I would like to make three comments on what Melanie Klein knew
about the Freudian thing and in order to make them, I will need a certain
writing: that of the fantasy, S⋄a. My three comments are the following.
First, what she knows and what she doesn’t like to say, is on the side of the
subject and not that of the object. Next, that contrary to what we may think,
she does not effectuate her analyses with the imaginary, but rather from the
symbolic, like everyone, imaginarising it. Finally, that by imaginarising the
symbolic, she preserves the sexual relationship as possible. You simply
have to identify with the Other at the cost of the idealisation of gratitude.
For Melanie, woman exists, all you have to do is thank her.
In 1946, with his article “British Psychiatry and the War”2 then in
1948 with his report on “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan was
among the first psychoanalysts to introduce Klein to France, and the first to
present her results within the framework of a Freudian orientation in a
systematic manner, regardless of the still very lively institutional quarrels.
In 1948, Lacan situated Melanie’s contribution on the side of the
subject, presenting her as a pioneer who projects the subject experience on
the period before the appearance of language: where it doesn’t speak. The
results that she gets from this limit are to be situated in relation to the
disturbances of the imaginary. On the one hand the schizo-paranoid
fragmentation of the ideal ego, and on the other, the structuring, productive
effects of unity of the depressive position. It is in this last way that Lacan
reconciles “the mirror stage as formative of the function of the ‘I’ with the
Kleinian superego”.
This does not prevent him from noting that her practice of treatment
centred on the imaginary, is a directed paranoia, resulting in the projection
of the internal bad objects onto the analyst. This is why the only way out is
the depressive position that allows the subject to disentangle itself from the
ever-threatening imaginary confrontations. Indeed, the analyst can always
assume a double consistency, thereby triggering not only effects of rivalry,
but also of anxiety.
As soon as Lacan announced that “the unconscious is structured like
a language” he took up his presentation on the Kleinian contribution again.
The first trimester of his first seminar is, in fact, partly devoted to the study
of the Dick case, published in 1930 and the first example of psychoanalytic
literature on the treatment of a psychotic child. Lacan presents Dick as a
kind of experimental device of the disjunction between the real and
symbolic, the action on the symbolic entailing a veritable generation of the
Ego and the imaginary.
Indeed, Dick maintains a relationship of generalised indifference
towards those around him. This is what Lacan describes as a subject bathed
in the real. He then calls Melanie Klein’s work the veritable injection of the
symbolic into the child (the daddy train, the little Dick train, and the
mummy station). She presents the Oedipal structure and thereby puts
phallic signification into play. Thus, the child who was indifferent towards
everything begins to speak and hear his imaginary world, which had been
limited to doorknobs and trains.
What Lacan insists on here is precisely this imaginary production
from the symbolic, whereas at the time it was more common to insist on the
necessity of establishing the imaginary in order to introduce the subject into
the symbolic. It is at the very heart of the Kleinian invention that Lacan
emphasises a psychoanalysis operating from the symbolic.
From this, he gets three results. The first is that the
container/contained dialectic that dominates the imaginary has a secret: it is
merely illusion. The container and the contents are in two different worlds
and it is only on the edge that the body and the object of the drive are
reattached in a topology where they only seem to belong to each other.
The second is that the symbol, in the Freudian sense, is always
entwined with its mode of negation. What is the symbol that is formed in
Dick’s case as a response to the Kleinian injection? It is the call that Lacan
considers as the emergence of the possibility of refusal. Therefore, it isn’t
only the “no” that the child utters in his second year that attests to this
presence of negation in the constitution of the subject.
Finally, we have a new way of reading, of leafing through Klein —
that is, to distinguish the leaves of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary
in her work. We can distinguish the imaginary from the depressive position
of the subject’s mortifying relationship with the symbolic, and the real from
the maniacal excitation in what returns in this mortification.
The imaginary of the schizo-paranoid position, insofar as it is in a
normal relationship with the fragmented body (the “hysteric” kernel of the
neuroses attests to this) must be distinguished from the symbolic effects
induced by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in psychosis and the
passing into the real that this foreclosure implies.
Melanie Klein could have taken note of these three results that Lacan
obtained in 1953. It is difficult to imagine, however, that this was the case.
She continued developing the notion of the fantasy as a “primary content”
of the unconscious, according to Isaacs’s formula, to the point where it is
possible to say that for her the unconscious is structured like a fantasy. This
effect to reduce the formations of the unconscious to the fantasy has major
consequences for the practice of interpretation. I would like here to examine
just a few by studying the case history published posthumously in 1961 by
Melanie Klein under the title “Narrative of a Child Analysis”.“Richard” is
ten years old and goes to speak with Melanie Klein, manifesting a symptom
that isn’t easy to delimit from what Melanie tells us.
In fact, Richard, like Little Hans, suffers from a phobia, and like Hans
develops a great preoccupation with transportation (planes, boats, buses).
Like Hans, he fabricates myths and invents a character that has many of the
characteristics of Hans’s stork.
This character is called Hitler. He is a Hitler à la Lubitsch, a kind of
raging Ubu who produces the book’s effect of Unheimlichkeit. It just so
happens that the world is, in fact, encumbered by a Hitler at the time when
Richard meets Melanie (1941). It is due to this that at times there is
verisimilitude in Richard’s supposed psychosis. This is an effect of
perspective in phobias.
Melanie Klein proceeds in her interpretation by exultantly naming
what we might call the blazons of the feminine body: the good and bad
breast, the buttocks, the genitals extend across Richard’s world. The most
striking moments are those when she describes this finally-possible sexual
relationship that Richard seems to accomplish with his analyst with the help
of the fantasmatic organ that she suggests. I would like here to explore
Richard’s reaction to this injection of the imaginary and of this “language of
the body”: the best guide will be dreams qua formations of the unconscious
as distinct from the fantasy. We will consider them as punctuations in the
imaginary world that is woven into the analysis.
In the beginning, Richard, who is well aware that he has met a
psychoanalyst, decides that he can confide in her the two major nightmares
that sum up his childhood.
The first nightmare consists of “being given ether by the queen in
Alice in Wonderland.”3 The other: “A car looking ‘old, black, and deserted’
with lots of number plates.”4 The mark of the phallic does not deceive.
The statement of the two nightmares at the beginning is followed by a
phase of elaboration. Richard establishes a preliminary cartography of the
maternal body (the drawings of the empire) and at the same time explores
phallic rivalry (with the drawings of all sorts of boats bearing suggestive
names like “salmon”).
After this, Richard recounts the first important nightmare in the
analysis: the leader of the fishes invites the Other under water for dinner.
He refuses. The leader threatens him, so he goes to Munich, probably to
make peace. He finds himself on a bicycle with his family when an engine
appears, on fire and coming toward him. He wakes up and, as the text says,
“went on ‘awake with the dream’” [English in original].5 In this state, he
goes to get water and extinguishes the fire. The ground becomes fertile.
I would consider this dream to be a response to the first two
nightmares from the beginning. Indeed, you simply have to understand this
narrative to split it around the point of anxiety that is the awakening.
Starting with his study of Irma’s injection, Lacan’s teaching has made us
sufficiently attentive to these turning points not to miss them. The point of
awakening divides the dream into two parts: the first takes up the threat of
the desire of the mother, which is articulated around the oral object; she is
symbolised in this flaming engine, the complete opposite of the black car.
Having crossed the point of awakening, Richard finds a meaning for the
engine. It can be used for pissing and making children. Essentially, Richard
states that in order to appease the fire of the desire of the mother, she needs
to have a child. Thus, we understand why he always rebels, to Melanie
Klein’s great surprise, when she tells him that his mother can no longer
have children. Richard does not share the Kleinian point of view that the
worst evil is rivalry. He knows that the worst is for the mother not to have
the words to symbolise her desire.
It seems to me that what follows in the analysis confirms this
accentuation of the symbolisation of the desire of the mother in the phallus.
On the one hand, Richard elaborates a discourse on women as the kind of
bus conductresses he is dealing with. He distinguishes two types: one is
pretty and scares him by repeating, “Half fares stand up.” The less pretty
type, although not ugly, doesn’t have the same effect on him, although he
ends up admitting that she also might want to make the half fares stand up.
Melanie Klein easily interprets these oppositions in the dialectic of the good
and bad mother up until Richard adds a third. And here, as a good Freudian
who has read “The Three Caskets” we start to suspect that Richard has
traversed an imaginary obstacle. In fact, we are convinced of this by the fact
that with the introduction of this third woman, the one that is a semblance, a
“painted face” [English in original], he confides what will be the most
important dream of the analysis.
In order to articulate this dream we mustn’t forget that not long
before Richard had overcome another imaginary obstacle. At the end of a
session filled with stories of battles between ships, he suddenly makes an
outdated, mysterious call to a father who represents something other than
rivalry. A call that seems to us to be death and paternity. So Richard has just
related his important dream, the one that will link the imaginary children he
dreamed of giving his mother and the call to symbolic paternity. This is the
dream of the black island. Richard begins by explaining how, rather than
finding himself in a bus with Melanie Klein, he finds himself in a caravan
with a family, children and a cat with remarkably white teeth. The cat is
strange: it’s a cat that comes and goes in a rather unordinary way. The
strange family, completed by this toothy, phallic cat, passes by a black river
where lots of awful animals — scorpions and others — look dead. All this
is terrifying. Richard doesn’t wake up. He calls out “Ahoy there” and
everything becomes alive.
In this dream, Richard makes the children of his imagination live by
the signifying mark of his call. But one question remains: the avoidance in
the beginning, the avoidance of the bus, of the caravan and of Melanie
Klein.
The bus in fact returns in the following dream that is analysed.
Richard is in a bus that is taking him far from his home. It’s empty; there is
no conductress.
There is, however a car next to the bus, with a little girl inside.
Everything is very flat. Oddly, after this narrative, Richard’s associations
stop. The flat thus precedes a silence made all the more curious by the fact
that the following session, the antepenultimate, Richard completes the
dream. The empty bus is a moment of Unheimlichkeit. Then he pulls the
bell and gets off the bus. The landlady, Mrs. Wilson is there and welcomes
him. The car is still there.
This dream is the culmination of the analysis. Everything confirms
this and Melanie Klein doesn’t miss it. Richard accompanies it with a
comment on the pretty conductress, “saying that he ‘would not have her, not
on my life.’”6 This is Richard’s final position regarding women, and the
question is how to interpret it. Melanie Klein imagines that, after having
imagined being able to have children, he gives up his ideal claims and
accepts the less pretty conductress. But is that really what’s going on?
Whether she is Richard’s fantasmatic sister, as Melanie Klein thinks, or his
feminine side, as D. Meltzer, an eminent Kleinian critic of this case, thinks,
the fact remains that it is to this little girl that the custody of the enigmatic
car from the beginning of the analysis is given.
All this reminds us of Little Hans who ends up giving his sister the
reins of the horse of desire that so preoccupied him.
In 1954, when Lacan was commenting the “Analysis of a Phobia in a
Five-year-old Boy,” Hans’s name and what had become of him were not yet
known. Lacan hypothesised that by handing over to his sister the key to his
desire and by holding onto his mother, leaving his father to his
grandmother, Hans would remain in the position of the cicisbeo, regarding
women.
Well! I believe we can make the same hypothesis about Richard.
After his four-month analysis, Richard, like Hans, saw his symptom
reduced. We can’t be certain, however, that his fantasy had been changed.
Seeing as he had evoked Alice in his childhood nightmare, how can we
miss recognising the same Alice in the car upon his arrival? Especially
given that the cat with the pearly-white teeth can only evoke the Cheshire
Cat. Wonderland is a kind of double to the Eldorado of Richard’s fantasies.
Meltzer is right to worry about little Alice, who is an effect and a limit of
the Kleinian interpretation.
Here we have a question that the final developments of Klein’s work
leave just as acute. Indeed, the wish for gratitude enables her to give us a
final notion of the sexual relationship. A woman would supposedly
experience, in the best of cases, a feeling of gratitude at being given back,
by the man’s penis, the good breast that he had stolen from another woman,
namely his mother.
It seems to me that it is this that Melanie Klein knew about the
impossibility of the sexual relationship. She tries to resolve this
impossibility in love. Man, it seems, gives woman what he doesn’t have and
never has had: the good breast. This Kleinian formation has greatly
preoccupied her students. We have the best testimonies with Meltzer or
Winnicott. However, much as the latter distances himself from Kleinian
orthodoxy, we see him suggest the same formulation of the egress of the
feminine Oedipus complex in his Piggle.
Kleinian interpretation introduces phallic signification as what is
articulated from the Other. This is, however, only one aspect of the analytic
experience. As Lacan taught us in “Position of the Unconscious,” there is
another side: separation. According to Melanie Klein, the way out of
alienation is not separation, but rather reparation. It is for this reason that it
seems to me that Lacan’s and Melanie’s basic orientations confirm each
other here. What she knew is on the side of the subject. As to what she
knew about the object as the cause of desire, we can only speculate.
In 1977, Gabrielle is a decidedly modern little girl, for she meets an
analyst at two and a half, which is indeed early. It’s a case of a feminine
phobia, which is currently a crucial question for psychoanalysts. And it’s a
precocious phobia. It is perfectly structured, and yet we are told that her
anxiety is psychotic.
Richard wasn’t crazy, and neither is little Gabrielle. She has a “black
phobia” magnificently set off by the birth of her little sister. But, since she
is a remarkable little girl, not only does she have a black phobia, but she
also says that, in order to fall asleep each night, she calls her mother and
tells her she’s scared of the “babacar,” which is a mixture of black car and
baby car. In other words, she too has a signifier that designates a number of
things. She goes to see her analyst with this. This girl’s parents are as
Winnicottian as Little Hans’s parents were Freudian. They write their first
letter to Winnicott in fluent Winnicottese. The style is temperate and
observant phenomenology. The parents are visibly intelligent and invested
in their child, whom they speak about as of a clinical Winnicott case. They
find it very serious for a child not to play and that it is a very worrisome
sign that she scratches her face, which, in her moments of nocturnal anxiety
she must have done. And, beginning with the first session, Winnicott
behaves, like an enlightened Kleinian, with extreme gentleness. He treats
this child with the utmost respect, like a subject. As soon as she arrives, he
introduces her to his bear, Winnicott’s bear..., anyway, he immediately
engages the little girl in conversation, but he doesn’t lose his bearings. That
is, he explains to her the essentials. The kid immediately takes an object,
sticks it somewhere and says, “it’s stuck”. He immediately tells her
something about how men put things in women in order to make babies and
she understands. She answers, “I’ve got a cat. Next time I’ll bring the
pussycat. Another day.”7 So there is the injection that marks the first
session. The phallic value is introduced, especially given that Winnicott is
well aware of what is going on. The phenomenon is framed, he can go to
the essential, but by following what the child says. For example, she starts
feeling all the objects, saying, “Here’s another one... and here’s another
one.”8 And he goes, “Another baby”. He slips the thing in — this we can
clearly see. It’s not Melanie Klein’s simple “I tell him things in order to tell
him”. He slides into the vein of the subject’s signifiers, he penetrates them.
During the second session she shows that she has understood. That is,
she leaves the room to get her father in the waiting room. “Needing father
for communicating with me” writes Winnicott. You have to believe in
communication! This is no longer the object seeking libido, it’s the third
stage of the libido, the communication seeking libido. It’s an idealisation of
communication. Why does she need her father? Indeed, here analytic
interpretation is only possible if there is a Name-of-the-Father. This is the
only reason she needs her father to communicate. She takes her father by
the hand and plays at falling between his legs, whereby Winnicott rightly
says that she’s playing her birth. And in the commentary of this scene there
are no fewer than three margin notes that Winnicott does not explain.
The first margin note - page 30 in the English edition, the second
session - is, “first relief from black phobia.”9 Who knows why. But there
are two more notes on the page. The first is from the mother who,
correcting the book’s proofs, comments, “How strikingly the use of the
transference emerges in the knife edge between participation and
interpretation.”10 The mother is amazed, and Winnicott adds, “Being
conceived of, i.e., born as an idea in the mind; wanted.”11
What’s the connection between this and being “wanted?”
Rather than experiencing the beyond-biology that concerns paternity,
he concludes that the girl is treating the body of her father as if it were a
woman’s, and he goes on about femininity and paternity. It’s like Michèle
Montrelay. Anyway, even so, the whole myth of humanity implies the fact
that at a certain point, girls come out of their father’s brains fully armed.
There’s a long tradition of this. It’s how Athena came into the world.
If she can escape her phobia, if there is the first relief from her
phobia, it is because there is the making of a myth. It isn’t because it’s
conceived of as an idea, but rather because the “symbolic” is an order that is
different from that of the imaginary. We have evidence in the text itself that
a symbolic mechanism is being put into place: Gabrielle says, “I am just
born. And it wasn’t black inside.”12 Winnicott’s interpretation of the
preceding session was: “It was black inside and that’s why you are scared of
the black.”13 To this she responds with a negation, which is indeed the sign
of the emergence of the subject. As a good Freudian Winnicott is entirely
docile vis-à-vis this signifier.
Now little Gabrielle has entered the Oedipus complex, like Richard
with his little engine. This takes them a little further towards the ninth
session, which takes place a year later, during which we have what
Winnicott calls the crucial experience, and in his own terms “the signifiant
theory” [sic, English in original], the signifying thing, the Freudian thing of
the analysis in the behaviour of the child in the analytic device. What
happens? The kid tells him that she now knows what the black is. She has a
moment of anxiety and Winnicott writes, “Anxiety had certainly to do with
the black mummy dream.”14 She says, “I dreamed she was dead. She wasn’t
there.”15 We can see that the fear of death doesn’t wait for a certain age. At
three this child is just as haunted by a black widow as Gide with whom this
happens at age nine, and which follows him his whole life; this fear arises
in his dreams: the woman in black who would crumble into a woman of
sand. For Gabrielle, the presence of death, the dream of the black mummy,
isn’t just a bad mummy — the black mummy is herself dead, and when
Gabrielle says that she dreamed that she [the black mummy] was dead, it is
also about herself whom she is speaking of. Who is she at the horizon of all
these identifications, who is she, in desire, once she is dead? A moment of
fading of the subject, S.
With narratives like these we can expect the patient immediately to
bolster him- or herself with an object. And this is what happens: she
immediately grabs an object. And Winnicott explains what for him is the
most significant thing about the behaviour of this child in treatment,
namely: “She took the blue eyebath” — throughout the analysis the child
has taken objects without any meaning: trains, houses, etc., but what really
interests her is an electric lamp that doesn’t work, on the one hand, and, on
the other, a blue eyebath. “She took the blue eyebath and put it in and out of
her mouth, making sucking noises, and it could be said that she experienced
something very near to a generalised orgasm.”16 The crucial experience, the
one that Winnicott places at the heart of the way out of the Oedipus
complex, is a happy encounter with the jouissance experienced in the
analysis. What exactly does this mean? After confronting death in the
dream, she fades, then grabs hold of this object and immediately has the
experience of jouissance. There is an eroticism of death that is not only due
to the dimension of aggression that comes with any erotic object. Of course,
there is an ethology of deadly jouissance, but there isn’t only ethology. In
this encounter, we are dealing with a way out of the Oedipus complex that
opposes the Freudian way out, item by item. The Freudian way out, for girls
and boys alike, consists of encountering what isn’t there in the form of the
phallic object, the object qua object of jouissance. If there is an encounter,
it is a strictly and necessarily missed encounter, for both boys and girls.
Whereas here we have a successful encounter with jouissance that
Winnicott considers to be the pivot beyond any ambivalence and beyond
any dialectic. I think that the quest for this point is important for modern
psychoanalysis, especially Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis.
You know that Winnicott had the ambition of reinventing a
psychoanalysis where the death instinct would no longer have any place. He
considered that it was at the level of an original sin, a world where it would
be possible for sexuation to function without the dialectic of a drive. So we
can see what is Kleinian about Winnicott as well as the point where he
deviates. His object is one that can elicit positive encounters. Not only can
we get hold of it in order to sleep, we can even have generalised orgasms!
Once this happy encounter is established, the Oedipal dialectic with the key
interpretation is introduced: you are a little girl, your daddy and mummy
sleep together at night and your daddy gives back to your mummy the good
object that he took from his mother when he was little.17 The possible
Kleinian sexual relationship is a gift for a gift, consisting in a man’s stealing
the good breast from his mother and, in the best of cases using it well, that
is, giving it to another woman. The woman must consent to accepting it,
and he, to thanking her, which is called gratitude. This opposes Freud’s
Oedipal dialectic item by item. For Freud, the little boy sees right away
what his mother doesn’t have and not what she does have.
Whereby he has to lose it, and at that point he can give it back. This
means that he doesn’t have to become a thief, he must necessarily become a
depositary of what he doesn’t have.
With Melanie Klein the boy is in the highly symbolic place of the
thief who sees what his mother has. It is as a thief that he must find a
depositary... the depositary is the woman he will love and put in this
symbolic place and thank her for holding it. This perspective of possible
reconciliation between the sexes is not the notion that Lacan was able to
extricate from Freudian psychoanalysis. Rather, he envisions a “love
competition” [tournoi amoureux] to which he doesn’t see an end. The best
each can do is to choose a side and stay there. Indeed, he talks about going
beyond penis envy, which is what we’re dealing with here, but, he says, by
realising the envy of the love competition. The imaginary function of envy
must become a symbolic function of envy.
“The Piggle” accepts Winnicott’s interpolation, but she has a dialogue
with her mother that is extremely interesting. This is after the tenth
session18 and mother and daughter are talking together one evening. The
mother asks her daughter “so you think I also have a wee maker”.“Yes of
course, it is daddy who gave it to you”.“And daddy, where did he get it
from?” The girl responds, “From his students.”19 Because the father is a
teacher. It’s amazing that the kid understands that no one is a father but by a
“name of the father”. Being a teacher is one of the Vater Vertreter. As Freud
says, these are the people in procession in the fantasy “a child is being
beaten”: the teacher, the schoolmaster, the policeman. This is part of the
panoply of father uniforms, one of these imaginary names. This gallery of
uniforms originates from the fact that the Name-of-the-Father is
unpronounceable, and there is no uniform for the right jouissance. Like in
Jean Genet’s brothel where everyone can come and get off (jouir) by
dressing up as a judge, a civil servant, a chief of police... but it’s never the
right one, there is never the right uniform for jouissance because the Name-
of-the-Father remains unpronounceable.
Gabrielle’s landmark is that the father doesn’t have “it” all for
himself, and that he didn’t get it from a mother. She knows he got it from
his students. Whereby, and this is striking, once we have news of little
Gabrielle at age fifteen, she has a career goal: she wants to be a biology
teacher. We get the feeling that she isn’t fully satisfied with the explanations
she has been given regarding the function of the phallus. She has to go
study some biology for that, and what’s more, she wants to be a teacher like
her father because she knows that it’s there that she will indeed have the
phallus. Do you see? An analysis that leads to university vocations! Let’s
stop here and conclude our chat about the interest in rereading Richard and
Gabrielle with Little Hans.

Questions for Éric Laurent

Q — Psychosis and muteness.

Éric Laurent — Lacan addresses the question of language and not of

speech: are psychotics in the field of language, or not? He responds to this
with the “speaking being” (parlêtre), which points out that we are all
speaking beings, after all, whether we speak or not.
This field of language we’re all caught in, means that certain
psychotic mechanisms in children who don’t speak are nevertheless
structured like language. For psychotic-mute children, there’s a set of
phenomena of the realisation of the symbolic that attests to the fact that they
are in language.
Take as an example a hyperactive child who comes and goes around
the rooms where we try to confine him to, to get him to play — who’s there,
totally lost, but who starts screaming when he sees a pipe disappear into a
wall. He’s exactly like the reel in the fort-da. He becomes the reel, which
comes and goes, and this is what gives him his agitation. The only thing
that kind of ties him to the signifier and that makes him a being of language
is that he starts screaming at the moment when there is a signifying
phenomenon: for example, the pipe that disappears into the wall.
As for non-psychotic mute children, little Nadia, the case by R. and
R. Lefort20 attests to this, she’s given the label of psychotic. But with her,
the mechanisms of symbolic realisation are limited. There are more
phenomena of the absence and fading of the subject. It is what produces
that she doesn’t talk, even though she has been introduced into language. So
it is possible for her to come back from her position of absence.
This crucial question of the field of language allows us to extend the
field of psychoanalysis’s investigation into phenomena that appear to
escape the clinic of discourse and where we see that the clinic of discourse
and the clinic of transference are linked.

Q — Subject-object dialectic?

Winnicott considers a happy encounter between the subject and the object
possible, and this would allow one to escape their dialectic. But I believe
there is no position of the object without the fading of the subject and no
fading of the subject without the object. In analysis it’s especially important
to look out for whether our place is stuck to that of the object.

Q — Is Dick really psychotic?

Lacan approaches the question of psychosis from at least two different

sides: one consists in having a very distinct line between what points to
foreclosure and what points to repression. The other looks to identify the
scope of the foreclosure, which supposes a scale. At the same time, in the
clinic of states at the limit of language, it’s mostly belatedly that we get our
bearings. This is true for Dick in the aftermath of the fact that the analytic
interpretation had a remarkable effect on this child.
But, fifty years after Melanie Klein’s original article, it remains very
difficult to settle this kind of question, and there is much to be done by us to
explain the results of our practice regarding phenomena at the limit of
experience.
Q — The function of the name?

The function of the name in the cases that concern us, is important. It’s not
talked about because of the ontological difficulties — although there are
other difficulties — that it creates.
In the study of the psychoses this can be striking: for example, a
patient dressed up in a name like “dog” who starts living in a kennel and
eating trash in the most acute moments of his psychosis. There’s the
realisation of his name. It’s an extreme case, but this kind of thing can be
read in smaller letters in every analysis.

Q — Language and organ? Language and body language?

Freud opened up an experience that led him to the foolish conclusion that
the drive had a relationship with the inanimate.
Lacan, with the contribution of linguistics, added that what Freud
designated in the living (le vivant) as a beyond the living, is the parasite of
language. Language, which parasitises the brain, only partially takes over in
the cortical zones.
There is no language organ, as Noam Chomsky supposes. What
psychoanalysis accounts for is that we talk by losing an organ — we lose
something and that is called castration. There is a kind of object (called
objet petit a by Lacan) that has seized the living — the subject gives up for
it an organ called the phallus — whereby it can scamper along in the
procession of the signifier and be able to chatter. Can the light that
psychoanalysis sheds on language be useful to those who deal with body
language anterior to language? I think so, at least in this regard: to try to get
away from the idea that there is something to communicate. There is no
communication. We are communicated.

Q — Synchrony and diachrony of the psychoanalytic approach?

Lacan teaches us that the experience is structured. In this respect, Richard is

Lacanian. The fact that I showed you this analysis in its diachronic progress
is not to say that it’s a question of simple geneticism, but rather a shift of
the structure through logical time.
In analysis, what signals a formation of the unconscious is that it has
a temporality. Lacan immediately diverged from Jacobson.
 Talking about the arbitrariness of the sign is introducing a dream: that
of a limitless discourse of the master.
But there is at least one: the master doesn’t have the power to modify
language (la langue).

Q — On the subject of Richard, you talked about dreams as the

interpretation of the analyst?

Dreams are already structured like interpretations — interpretations of

desire — even though they are wild.
We need to substitute these with rational interpretations.
Moreover, during the analysis, the patient’s dreams interpret the
analyst’s interpretations. They are inscribed in a chain of dialogue with the
analyst. This is the case for Richard. Similarly, Dora gave Freud her two
weeks notice with a dream.

Q — From little stories... to structuration by the desire of the other: the

signifying chain?

Grasping how this is transmitted through the signifying chain is a rather

particular contribution of the French school.
Françoise Dolto approached this under the auspices of the secret, of
silence. The child is produced as an object all the more because he is in the
place of a fundamental not-wanting-to-say. The desire of the Other is to be
located between the lines, in the beyond of what it can say.
This is an important point to consider: fantasies are transmitted, like
everything else.

Translated from the French by Ian Curtis

1 Lacan, J., Ecrits, trans., Fink, B., W.W. Norton and Co., NY, 2006, p. 202
2Lacan, J., British Psychiatry and the War, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Wolf, B. (ed), issue 4,
Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, London Society, 2000
3 Klein, M., Narrative of a Child Analysis: The Conduct of the Psycho-Analysis of Children as seen
in the Treatment of a Ten year old Boy (1961), The International Psychoanalytical Library, p. 47
4Ibidem
5Ibid.,p. 101
6Ibid., p. 451
7 D.W. Winnicott, The Piggle (1977), The International Psychoanalytical Library, p. 11
8Ibidem, p. 10. [Gabrielle saw Winnicott in 1964]
9Ibid., p. 30
10Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12Ibid.
13Ibid., p.24-5
14Ibid., p. 117
15Ibid.
16Ibid. p. 118
17 Cf. ibid., p. 127-8
18 Cf. ibid., p. 132-3
19[TN] Here Laurent paraphrases; cf. ibid., p. 133: “On the evening she asked me whether I had a
long wee. Said she thought I had. I said I was a woman like she was going to be. ‘I suppose you wear
skirts and blouses’ (she said doubtfully). I asked where she thought I got my long wee from. ‘The
daddy.’ ‘And the daddy?’ — ‘From his students.’”
20Lefort, Rosine with Robert; Nadia or the Mirror, in Birth of the Other, Trans., Ry, Watson and
Rodriguez, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1994
The interpretations of the little “Piggle”
Esthela Solano-Suárez

Gabrielle is two and a half years old when she meets Winnicott, and will
only see him 16 times in the course of two and a half years of analysis. The
record of this cure1 is offered to us via an account of the sessions. Winnicott
added little theoretical commentaries in the margins to the notes he wrote,
as well as the letters exchanged with the parents. The letters, rich in clinical
details, give us a knowledge of the effects of transference, permitting us to
appreciate the involvement of the parents in the analysis of their daughter,
and more particularly the subjective involvement of the mother.
The little analysand lived a long way from her analyst, which is why
there were so few sessions. One knows that Winnicott called these types of
cures “treatment on demand”, where the sessions were requested in each
instance, one by one. The meetings were rare, and Gabrielle or her parents
had to insist in order for Winnicott to offer them one. This mode of working
was not without great importance in Gabrielle’s analysis, because in this
way the dialectic of the lack found a place.
The clinical picture is painted by the mother in a letter addressed to
Winnicott.

The black mummy and the babacar

Piggle, as her mother calls her, has some torments that keep her awake at
night. Two signifiers serve the child to name what torments her and makes
her suffer: ‘the black mummy’ and the ‘babacar’. These two enigmatic
signifiers cipher the jouissance of the symptom and serve, like the horses of
little Hans, to transform the fear into anxiety.
‘Black mummy’ and ‘babacar’ harbour the fullness of the meaning of
the phobia, and at the same time they cannot say anything, because they
don’t have any meaning. This is why these two a-semantic signifiers arouse
a call in Gabrielle, a call that aims at receiving a complement of meaning
from the Other: asking her mother ‘Tell me about the babacar, all about the
babacar’ (p. 7), aiming to obtain a reply which concerns the enigma of her
desire. In her analysis, Gabrielle will come to decipher these symptoms and
will find a way out of the impasse of desire.
For that, it was necessary to deploy the “what does it mean?” of
interpretation, implicated from the beginning in the demand addressed by
the child to the subject supposed to know. The interpretations in this
analysis respond to two lines of force which continuously cross each other,
only to disjoin again for most of the time, or to join up at certain fecund
moments which will mark the decisive turns of this cure. The first is part of
the interpretative principles that determine the actions and words of the
analyst; the second is that which is articulated at the level of the task of the
analysand, as interpretative logic, thanks to which Gabrielle constructs an
exit from the phobia.

Sexual meaning
Winnicott interprets right away from the first session. He does so starting
from the idea that he has of the position of Gabrielle: the ‘black mummy’ is
linked, he says, to the rivalry with her mother, because both love the same
man.
As a result, from the first session until the twelfth, Winnicott never
stops steering the interpretation to the side of sexual meaning.
The sexual meaning takes the value of a prevalent signification: that
of the parents’ coitus. The child’s play is interpreted on this side, as it
would state this intention of signification. For example, if the child pushes a
little stick into a car, that would be to say “what the man puts into the
woman to make a baby” (p. 11).
In this order of things, the baby would be that which the little girl
would like to have, in the way that her mother has had one. The
interpretation aims at the axis of the imaginary covetousness in the mother-
child relationship.
In order to soothe the lack of having, it only remains for the child to
practice the devouring in order to make babies. Also, the sexual meaning of
the infantile appetite would be stretched between two poles: that of the
devouring and that of the parents’ coitus. From there can be deduced two
privileged objects, which the interpretation names the breast of the mother
and the penis of the father.

The mother’s breast

The breast and the mother are one and the same thing. If the child eats the
breast, she devours, consequently, the mother. Here the cut does not pass
between the breast and the mother but between the child and the mother
who has the breast, and who is the breast. One devours it because one loves
it, but also because one is angry with it, because of jealousy that one
experiences with regard to what she has. On the basis of this axiomatic,
Winnicott does not hesitate, in the course of the second session, to incarnate
the voracious baby that wants to eat the mummy Piggle (p. 28). This
produces an effect of anxiety in the child. Gabrielle runs to find the safety
of her father, who stayed in the waiting room. But before leaving, she
articulates something very interesting in reply to the proposition that has
been made to her by the analyst: she says to him that what is the question
for him is to find himself at the vacant place that should have been occupied
by her father, and that she wants to know what she must carry to the Other
to calm him in his game, in order to be able to subtract herself from it. By
means of a little game about one toy less or one toy more, she opens the
dialectical series which will put the couple (-)(+) to work. From our
perspective, she poses there the first nucleus of a symbolic elaboration of
the lack, on the basis of which she will find the exit.
We can note that this response of the child counters the logic on
which the analyst’s interpretation is founded. This is enounced very clearly
in the next session, when Gabrielle asks Winnicott to take his place as
analyst: “Winnicott must not be a baby, he must be a Winnicott...” (p. 41).
This rectification is deduced as a necessity by Gabrielle once she has
delimited her task as analysand: because she comes “to know why the black
mummy and the babacar”. Winnicott acquiesces and says: “We will try to
find out” (p. 40). The analytic pact has been made.

The father’s penis

The father’s penis is the second object around which the sexual meaning of
the Winnicottian interpretation is articulated. If Gabrielle hitches the
wagons to the locomotive, and says that it’s about “a long train” as “a long
snake”, Winnicott replies that it is “like a big daddy thing” (p. 137).
Later, the little girl takes a little toy man and pushes her finger on the
place where the man’s penis would be and Winnicott interprets: “You are
angry with the man’s wee-wee, he ought not to have it” (p. 142), and he
comments in the margin that his interpretation is aimed at Gabrielle’s penis
envy.
It seems to us that the child’s questioning undoubtedly relates to the
phallus, which is not to be confused with the male appendage. It is true that
from the first session, the trains, wagons and locomotives have great
importance and seem to enable Gabrielle to express her questions and to
articulate some responses. The problem, for her, is that the train is broken, it
does not start. Consequently, she asks for help to make it start, as well as
help to reinflate the deflated blue balloon that she presents to the analyst in
the first session. It is rather the deficiency of the father that is foregrounded
here. This father, does she not call him to attend to all her wishes, when she
asks him to come to her aid at night, to “give the black mummy raisins” (p.
34) in order to calm her appetite, so that she won’t be devoured? If the
mother is unfulfilled, it is the child who will bear the brunt of her phallic
gourmandising. It is one of the lessons that we can draw from little Hans.2

The man is a thief and the mother is not castrated

But it is different for Winnicott, and we can appreciate how he pronounces
that which he calls the interpretation of Gabrielle’s fantasy: “The man is a
thief. He steals the mother’s breasts. He then uses the stolen breast as a long
thing (like the train), a wee-wee, which he puts into the hole for the baby of
the girl, and in there he plants babies [...]. So he doesn’t feel so bad about
having been a thief” (p. 142-3).3
The interpretation pronounced by the analyst is far from producing
effects on the axis of an allusive virtue. It presents itself as spoken
knowledge, from the place of the analyst, who consequently incarnates the
unbarred Other. This position, in practice is in solidarity with the theoretical
conception of the un-castrated mother. For Winnicott, the mother has the
object, the breast, the object par excellence. It is the equivalent of a fetish
object, to the extent that it assures the denial of maternal castration. In this
sense, the man must withdraw it from the body of the woman in order to
have it. When he has it, it does not make him the one who possesses it, but
rather someone envious of, or frustrated with, the woman who has it
without contest. Attesting to this is the interpretation by Winnicott when he
says to Gabrielle: “You are laughing at me as a man who has a wee-wee in
the place of breasts” (p. 141).
 At the horizon of this breast-penis equivalence in the Winnicottian
cure is “[the] phallic devouring, the brunt of which is borne by the image of
the analyst”.4 The interpretation of transference love, brought back to the
register of reality, on the side of inter-subjectivity, carries this “mystical
consummation”5 which enunciates itself thusly: “...[You are frightened to
think that] when you love me you tear the stuffing out of my wee-wee!
Gabrielle: Yes. Me: If it’s the mother’s breast, you get the stuff out to get fat
and to grow, but when it’s a wee-wee you really want to have stuff to make
into babies” (p. 157). We cannot find a better example of what Lacan called
“a unitive pathway”6 whereby one promotes not only the exit from analysis
by identification with the analyst, but also the rejection of castration and in
consequence a sexuated position that does not take account of sexual
difference. What Winnicott aims at, as the outcome of the treatment, is a
sutured subject, in contrast to Freud, who made castration and the division
of the subject the bed rock of the end of analysis. Regarding the object,
Winnicott is also separate from Freud. For Freud, the object as lost is
central, since the coordinates of castration imprint the loss of jouissance
inherent in the phallic negativity. In Winnicott’s view, the breast and the
penis are the positive objects not including loss. In consequence, a recovery
of lost jouissance is not only promised, but also sought after.
We can take into account in such a conception the discernible effects
of the push to enjoy [pousse de jouir], which guides the interpretative
practice with the little analysand, who, during the long months, comes to
suckle in a frenetic fashion at the breasts of her mother, and also to suck the
thumbs of her father, or some such object in the course of a session, just
until she approaches “something very near to a generalised orgasm” (p.
118).
Winnicott considers this development as evidence of progress in the
cure because “Gabrielle discovered the lost good mother along with her
own orgastic capacity which evidently was lost with the good mother. [...]
There is now a recollection of an actual mother, orgiastically eaten ...” (pp.
118-9). It is on these grounds that Jacques-Alain Miller7 once justly
underlined that this therapeutic orientation only “spreads a perverse
propaedeutic”.

The mother’s penis envy

The interpretative principle of the analyst can be opposed, in parallel, to the
interpretations the child articulates around the crucial question of the desire
of the Other. A fundamental interpretation, spoken by the child concerning
the position of her mother, can be detected in the course of the fourth
session.
The analyst had just said that Gabrielle was angry because of the new
baby, and then he kept on saying “making mummy go black”, to which
Gabrielle retorts: “Mummy wants to be daddy’s little girl”. It is a decisive
interpretation confirmed by Winnicott, who considered it as “the main
interpretation of the session” (p. 61). Gabrielle indicated by this that her
difficulties do not only stem from jealousy with regard to her sister, or from
her will to be identical to her mother, but that in the imaginary relation to
her mother, the impasse of the maternal position is an obstacle for her. Her
having interpreted the position of the mother allows her to dialectise a
series of questions, which are related to her phobia. The first therapeutic
effects of the cure make themselves felt from that moment: resuming the
game, taking an interest in things around her and a reduction in fear that the
little girl confirms: “Yes, but I tidied the black mummy away” (p. 72).
On the basis of this interpretation Gabrielle constructs her own
insufficiency to satisfy the penis envy of her mother. In fact, the birth of the
little sister can be considered as a perturbing element that had shown, for
Gabrielle, the maternal lack and her castration.
On one side, Gabrielle is excluded by the birth of that other child, and
on the other, the birth of her sister makes her perceive that, if the phallus is
an object coveted by the mother, neither she nor her sister can cure the
mother of her lack, because “she wanted a boy but she had a girl” (p. 115).

Castration and debt

Between these two interpretations, the anguished questioning of the child
revolves around her insufficiency to find an exit to her castration, because
she doesn’t find anything of it in her mother, except that awful debt that
she, Gabrielle, believes she has to pay to her. She can only pay with her life
–and then all that remains is to make herself dead.
Consequently, Gabrielle interprets her sleeping problem and says that
she does not want to sleep because “I want to feel alive” (p. 108).
Confronted by these aporias, Gabrielle found a solution that bets on
life: together with her sister, to grow boys for her mother. It seems to us that
this solution has oriented her destiny, since, in the postface written by the
parents, we learn what Gabrielle wants to be when she grows up: “To be a
teacher of biology seems at the moment to be what she wants to do. The
growing of indoor plants is her chief hobby” (p. 200).

The desire of the mother

What is the fundamental interpretation in the Piggle case? It is that which
occurs in the twelfth session. It is a refreshing interpretation: it comes as a
surprise and knots together an effect of the encounter between the words of
the analysand and the interpretation of the analyst.
That day, Gabrielle leaves her toys in the basket and says: “Black is
nothing, what is it?” Winnicott listens and says to her, “Is black what you
don’t see?” and Gabrielle replies, “I can’t see you because you are black”
(p. 152). She goes on to explain that when she wants to see him and he is
not there, he becomes black. From this interpretation, Gabrielle finds an
exit from the phobia, as well as an exit from the treatment. The enigma of
the black and the black mummy have been deciphered under transference:
the black names the void dug out by the absence of the Other. This place,
“firstly symbolised by the operation of the absence of the mother”8, and
which the matheme of Lacan designates the signifier of the Desire of the
Mother (DM), is what induces the value of an enigmatic X into
signification, as enigma of the desire of the Other. Lacking symbolic
support, Gabrielle was lost in the black of the enigmatic labyrinth of desire.
Now that she has named the black and has also defined its
coordinates by deciphering the symptom, she can take a key out of her bag,
because she has found the key to her phobia (p. 159). What is outlined here
for the child is a question of separation. And this key helps her to find the
exit from her analysis: “It unlocks your door” (p. 154), she said to the
analyst.

The exit from analysis: from black to blue

Gabrielle moves towards the exit of her analysis, as shown by the dream of
the pool: she exits with her family from the pool of Winnicott, where they
had all dived in (pp. 187-8). How did she leave the pool of Winnicott? Not
without getting a bit wet, indeed, but one can ask what remains, for her, of
her analyst at the end of her analysis. In the course of the fifteenth and
penultimate session, she works on reducing her analyst to a remainder: “I
am throwing you right away” (p. 189).
Nevertheless, failing to separate the tractor which was welded to the
trailer, Gabrielle grabs the Optrex eyebaths and looks at the world through
these blue glasses. “She asked how they could be tied on over her eyes,”
writes Winnicott. “This gave her the feeling she was swimming or under
water ...” (p. 190). The little girl expresses the wish to her analyst “I’d like
to take them home with me”.
Quickly, Gabrielle makes an object with folded paper and glue, and
she colours it and puts it on: “I must put a little more blue” (p. 191). On this
slippery surface, she makes a hole and attaches a string. What does she say
about this new object? It is her analyst: “All used up... It’s smelly, it’s
horrible...” (p. 192).
Gabrielle leaves, but takes with her this remainder of the blue gaze
that she pasted to the unnameable black hole, of what had looked at her.

Translated from the French by Janet & John Haney

(First published in the Lettre Mensuelle, No 150, 06/1996, pp. 7-11)

1 Winnicott, D., The Piggle: An Account of the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl, ed. Ishak
Ramzy (1980). The International Psycho-Analytical Library, 107: pp. 1-201. [Page numbers appear
next to specific quotes in the text to aid cross-referencing.]
2 Lacan, J., Le Séminaire Livre IV, la Relation d’objet, Paris, Seuil, 1984, chapter XI, p. 195.
3 Ibid., p. 140.
4 Lacan, J., “The Direction of the Cure and the Principles of its Power”, transl. B. Fink, Écrits, New
York/London, Norton, 2006, p. 508.
5 Idem.
6 Ibid., p. 507.
7 Miller, J.-A., Quarto, No 1, 1981, p. 43.
8 Lacan, J., “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” op. cit., p. 465.
Pragmatics in praxis
An attempt to make a language out of the
symptom
Yves Vanderveken

We are After Oedipus1

In other words, the discourses that once organised and codified the social
bonds and the relations of body and sexuality, based on tradition and its
transmission, are less and less operative. Their arbitrary nature and their
semblance have been laid bare and stripped to the bone. Because of the lack
of a discourse to knot together the social bond, each One, all alone, is now
in charge of trying to establish one, using their own singular mode of
jouissance, if – in the best case – they manage to rely on their symptom and
thus to elevate it to the status of an alternative social bond. We can then
“generalise the psychotic effort which consists in giving order to the world
without the assistance of established discourses”2, constituting it as a
measure of the clinic in so far as it comes under “the general effort of
writing one’s own symptom”.3
Éric Laurent specified that “it is from the psychotic subject that we
must learn how, for each and every one of us, the whole of language takes
charge of the effort of naming jouissance”.4 He invites us, by way of the
next Congress of the New Lacanian School in Athens5, to collect, to put the
emphasis on the singular subjective bricolage and to thus list a catalogue of
symptomatic inventions – how “the subject makes a language out of the
symptom”6 from its symptomatic mark, seal on the body, trace in lalangue,
which determines his mode of jouissance. This catalogue could lead us to
re-examine, in this context of generalisation, the psychotic effort, that
which we still call, in our Lacanian clinic, psychosis.
In this exercise of aggiornamento [TN: updating], we can take
support from the unfolding of a clinical case, by following precisely the
tracks of its successive constructions, made from the signifying variety in a
treatment, which lasted more than five years. It seemed to me necessary and
all the more useful, to consider the paradigmatic character that it highlights
in relation to the questions that we are dealing with. Moreover, it is
retroactively a demonstration of what an analytical treatment can
occasionally produce, in as much as it distinguishes itself from any
psychotherapy or re-education.
Sam, ten years old, was sent to me by a children’s court, with the
request for follow-up and post-traumatic support. He had just been placed
in a fostering institution after the death of his mother. This death had
plunged his father further into his melancholic depression and severe
alcoholism, which had begun when his wife was hospitalised. His own
hospitalisation was also necessary and was to last several years. In addition,
a classmate of Sam died brutally. I was told three things: we can no longer
distract Sam from his sadness that is not in doubt, “there is a work of
mourning to do” and, I’m told, “all this must anguish him terribly.”
Unexpectedly, when we first meet, the deaths and the losses of
objects are not particularly to the fore in his complaint. Sam sets out the
facts with little emotion. At most, he numbers the events: he recounts the
dates, the hours, the room numbers in the hospital, which is at this moment
the only way for him to apprehend things in a structured way. He does not
want, or visibly cannot take up the matter. He also refused to speak to the
psychologist who had come to the school to meet the children after the
death of the classmate, which she had wanted to tackle ‘up front’ -
considering the symptom to be grief and sadness - by inviting him to speak
about it.
Phenomenologically, there were no traces of anxiety or fear.
However, by letting him speak, and by listening to what he had to say, as he
takes distance from any evidence that he could only be suffering from the
grief that struck him – he testifies that he is in danger and depressive,
because he feels rejected, which others subject him to: “I try to keep
cheerful, but there is nothing to do, they detest me; that’s all, it will always
be like that!” he says. He seems to be a little displaced, lost. The institution
that deals with him insists on a pedagogical project which advocates
autonomy, which only makes the wandering worse. The teachers testify that
he makes himself the prey for the bullying and beating of the others. He
desperately tries to make a social bond, to link himself to others, they say,
but in such a clumsy, awkward, badly timed way that he gets himself
rejected.
 Sam did appear to be going through a time – without anxiety it must
be said – where far beyond the grief he is touched by, he is left stranded
after the disappearance of his parental figures. This only lays bare, or
redoubles a little, his structural lack of anchorage to the Other, to the
signifiers and to the social bond they establish. No one had noticed this;
deaf to his speech, blinded by the false evidence bereavement evokes in
each one’s fantasy. His delusional questioning about the body also testifies
to his fragmented, hardly unified, and strictly schizophrenic structure.
In his institution, besides those problematic moments in his relations
to the other, and the schooling that he follows very well (he had a proper
relation to knowledge), he seems to “drift in an elsewhere”, unanchored,
and new ways of organising his life don’t seem to bite. “It is as if they do
not register”, they say.

His inscription in the Other through the mark on the body

He addresses himself to me and to the other, with a body presented as
injured, manhandled, marked. Again, if we listen to him, we can hear that,
paradoxically, this is his first attempt, clearly ravaging, to reunify his body
through an identification and to hook a signifier in the Other that will
represent him to the others. Here is what he says about it: “I always have
bruises (les bleus) on my body. They sometimes call me “blue” (le bleu)7,
he says with an intense pleasure which accompanies this naming, this
floating S1, which pins him to his new community of life, like “newby”,
inscribing him in a social bond.
Unfortunately, one sees that the failure of the paternal metaphor, and
thus his psychotic dimension, leads this signifier to inscribe itself in his
body in the real, and thus to ravage him. This little statement marks,
surprisingly clearly, the “real-isation” (réellisation) of the signifier in his
body, but also, it must be said, his extreme dependence that in reality there
should be signifiers, which represent him, present in the Other. If the Other
is no longer there – which the loss of his parents confronts him with – we
can ask ourselves the question: Who is he still? It is as if the disappearance
of his parents and the bearings he found there, had provoked the radical
departure in reality of all the signifiers that represented the subject.8 We
find ourselves with a more delicate, more radical dimension than “the work
of grieving that has to be done, regaining self confidence, etc”. And he tries
desperately to hook onto one or the other.
 One can thus read the ciphered remainders of the death of his mother
which constitute some of those signifiers. “Blue” is another one in his new
community of life, which constitutes his new Other of the signifier and of
the social bond. These blows and these marks on the body consequently do
not anguish him at all. On the contrary, he shows them to me and relates
them with laughter and jubilation. Against all evidence, the case indicates
that these are the first steps of self-treatment by this subject, although they
are ravaging for the body. Dropped out of it, there is nothing left but a
drifting, a Hilflosigkeit, a dereliction of the fragmentation of the body.
To offset this, the first sessions are centred on the body, the question
of the permanence of its unity, and of life and death. This manifests in his
passion for robots, to which I make myself a partner. He brought me his
robots and the drawings of plans of assembly that he replicates. We make
some together. “These drawings are an assurance for me. If my robot breaks
into pieces, I know how to redo it. That is my thing, my personal touch. It is
my invention so that it does not snuff it.” This is what the subject engages
me with, and with which I collaborate.
We can hypothesise that through this invention, which comes from
him, singularly, and which is without any pre-existing technique, he found
an imaginary crutch for the fragmentation of the body. To come and speak
to me about it, to make me a partner to it, is already, in the first moments, to
move the question of the fragmented body a little more towards the register
of semblance, of the imaginary, there where, for this subject, the signifier is
much too real, not imaginarised enough9, leading him to injury, in the
reality of his body.
Nevertheless, it is ethically impossible to stop there. Outside these
moments of respite and of support that he finds in the session, his relation to
the other remains marked by his rejection, which simply reflects his
exclusion from the structure of the signifier and the social bond that this
structure produces.

A first S1
In the course of a session, a master signifier emerges: “It is normal that I
have problems with the others, because I have a rat head”. He will hold on
to this signifier for a time, against all odds, and despite all my attempts to
chip away at it. “There is no point opposing it”, he will say, “it is true, it is
certain, I know it. It is not the others saying it, it is me who knows it”.
The ravaging psychotic S1
Suddenly a quilting point emerges, a name. The flight of meaning stops; he
does not drift anymore. He stabilises. In this sense, it constitutes an
advance. It shows the effort of this schizophrenic subject to make himself a
name10 in his infinite attempt to be able to name the enigmatic jouissance
that inhabits his body and his relation with the other. But we could say that
this name is too real. It is an identification that is more real than
imaginary11, as is the case in psychosis. We could say that it is too real
because it is too close, carrying too much of the object, of Sam’s being of
waste. It is his ‘being dropped’ and abjection. The dimension of insult
attests to it. Saying everything about his being the object, it is a
“compacted, holophrased”12 signifier. It lacks the structure of reference to
another signifier, which gives a place to the failure of signification.

S1 = a

This master signifier, moreover, is not what opens onto the social
bond, but is the very signifier that speaks his rejection. In this, it carries too
much, it is the auto-erotic jouissance of this psychotic subject. It is not a
“good master-signifier”.13 It is ravaging. It points to the slope of
melancholia for the subject, like his father.

An assistance against14
In listening to the psychotic subject, and as secretary to his journey, I
nevertheless always refused to ratify the signifier rat head and the
consequences it carries. I did this either through my opposition, or by
inviting Sam to say more in a variety of ways, or to pursue its
“translation”.15
In the same way, I always bet on the fact of showing my close
attention to his body and letting no bruise (bleu) go without explanation,
without being inserted in a signifying chain, without trying to prompt a
signifying variation, there where, as we have seen, the bruises on the body
are rather a matter of a signifying “petrification”. That series of bruises on
the body will find their acme with a serious fall down the stairs where he
breaks his leg. Each time he recounts with hilarity the scenes where he
breaks something. I always refuse to laugh, even at the risk of causing him
some perplexity. There is still no trace of anxiety.
Time of production: declensions
The ravaging master-signifier is nevertheless the first one that will find a
way to re-inscribe itself within a chain. The fact that Sam insists on
“extracting”, “isolating”, “separating”, “elevating” this very signifier to the
rank of one that distinguishes itself from the others, this “tearing” of an
“element which forms part of (his) chain of jouissance”16, turns out to be,
retroactively, a clear indication this subject gave us, of the knowledge he
had about the potential of this signifier of a possibility of rebuilding, re-
weaving a signifying chain that little by little will re-inscribe him in a link
to the Other - even though it was ravaging at first.
A series of new productions, constructions, will emerge from it,
around various declensions of this identificatory master-signifier.

First: Rocky beautiful ears

Sam embarks on a historisation of his wounds, with the memories attached
to them. He will pay attention to the fact that I collect these reconstructed
memories by writing them on sheets of paper. “It is funny, there is a page
each time” he will say. “It is as if we were writing the story of my life. I
imagine my grandson reading this. After a while he will be dead, so long it
will be. Well, it depends: if I come here for more years... or if I stop. In any
case, for the time being, I won’t stop, that’s for sure.” It can only strike us to
see that this work introduces him to the question of time and of his own
representation within this time. It re-inscribes him in a generational lineage.
This will make the parental figures resurface, in his discourse.
During a reading of this list, he declares again: “Well here you go,
this is my destiny, there is nothing to do, it’s because I have a rat head.” On
the way out, without thinking too much about it, benevolent and a little
ironic, I venture to ask him if he had checked this out in a mirror. “Yes”, he
replied, “and to tell the truth I rather have an elephant head, because of my
sticking out ears”. His reply introduces a little signifying slippage that will
prove important. As if this first tiny little sliding allowed the signifying
chain to start producing variety and to get hooked onto the signifiers of his
parental Other.
In fact, it introduces a whole period where that which first inscribed
itself as a signifier charged with insult, rejection, and jouissance (via
laughter and jubilation for example), will find a way to be re-inscribed as
the nostalgic series of nicknames that his mother gave him. This operation
will humanise the master-signifier and re-inscribe it in a relation to a loving
Other, for whom he counts. He coats with love his position of melancholic
waste. This is when questions about the place he occupies within my list of
patients emerge. “You can’t turn back time. We were having fun with
nicknames: Rocky beautiful ears. It was the word itself which made me
laugh. Because, Rocky is an idiot/animal (c’est une bête), but contrary to
him, at least I have beautiful ears. I used to say this to myself. All the
family said it to me. My mother used to laugh a lot about it. She also gave
me other nicknames.” This statement – it was the word itself which made
me laugh – already points to the beginning of irony which will develop in
his relation to language (langage), to the tongue (langue); it is an
investment in words that Freud underlined as constituting the “first attempts
at recovery or cure which so conspicuously dominate the clinical picture of
schizophrenia”.17 He ends this speech by telling me how much he loved his
mother and proposes bringing me a photo of her the next time.

Second: dull, worthless, and sissy

It is at this time that, rather than laughing or lamenting it as a fatality, for
the first time he marks a proper refusal of the insults, subtracting himself
from them, by running away from the institution. “I’ve had enough of being
insulted”, he will say.
He then sets about reconstructing his lineage from different photos,
including there, against any resemblance, sometimes through very
delusional links, people presently around him. Without encouraging him in
this way, it nevertheless appeared necessary and beneficial to him, as if he
found some way to re-inscribe himself in the Other. A little myth arose that
concerned his first words: “I am three or four years old, I am walking and I
say my first words: I am dull.” A new declension of his unanchored being.
However the insult re-emerges with vigour during a session he will
sometimes mention to me, as it impacted on him so much: “I am fed up
with being their target. They tell me I am worthless and a sissy and I know
it is true.” I propose to write this sentence, and once done, tear and throw
the paper negligently in the bin, ending the session without a word and thus
breaking with preciously keeping all his sayings that were written down. He
comes back the following session declaring that they have stopped insulting
him.
Third: Ratface (the game)
The question about nicknames, more or less insulting, however is obviously
not over. But it takes another form: that of a game, within the bond with the
other. This is a shift, by no means insignificant if we consider the first
phase, and a translation in the present time of the work of re-elaboration
that he is doing at that moment. “It’s funny, we have fun giving each other
nicknames... I give myself the nickname... rat face!” The depressive side
has markedly subsided. Instead he makes friends. And quickly he tells me
that they have decided to give up the game, which finally ends up “not
being funny at all”.
The dimension of the nickname [sur-nom], even though it remains
within the dimension of insult, inscribes a modification, which has its
significance. One can write it like this:

S1
a

In parallel, Sam constructs a whole knowledge on the functioning of the

human body that he transmits, based both on what he learns in school and
his personal research in the library, and on delusional constructions that I
will not develop here.

Fourth: the clever one, the sonny – an identity

Some slight modulations will still interfere with this clinical picture. If the
question of the injured or endangered body remains in the forefront of his
preoccupation, it is not without nuances, which are minimal variations of
the same, but variations that do matter. Thus he will speak of his own ways
to avoid hurting himself when he falls. Here too he develops a whole
knowledge that allows him to qualify himself as “clever”. Or he will speak
about others who injured themselves by making a point of indicating “that
he would not want to be in their shoes”.
All this finds a way to latch on to his story: “We must be careful not
to die. There are already so many deaths on earth. I’ve known two deaths:
my mother and the girl in my class. I wish my mother had not died. I would
not want to be in their shoes.” He then seals a photographic montage of his
mother, who seems to be mourning. Something of the image i(a) finds a
restitution.
 Whilst he elaborates a delusional organic version explaining the death
of his mother, he declares: “Now I have an identity”, and lists the
nicknames (all benign) that his father gives him during his visits: my sonny,
my kid, or simply Sammy.
From this moment onwards, when something of the ego image seems
to be better established, we can note retrospectively the beginning of the
emergence of some phenomena of fear, anxiety and of Unheimlichkeit. To
follow Lacan, it seems to be inscribed in a logic: this surfacing of anxiety is
a consequence of the reconstitution of his ego image. Far from constituting
a symptom to be eradicated, or an avatar of the therapeutic method, it points
towards a progress in the treatment and a return of the “signal” against the
worst. That this subject begins to feel fear is a protection of his physical
integrity.
Let us continue to follow the various signifying declensions of Sam’s
trajectory.

Fifth: The altruistic position

This ego that found a way to reconstitute itself, will henceforth oscillate its
position between two poles: “the rejected, weak and sad” and “the one who
makes others laugh” (sometimes, and even often, at his own expense).
His status of exception, of ex – as outside of – will find its
precipitation from elements already present in the previous versions, in the
construction of fantasmatic scenarios that will, from this point, determine
his position in the world. These scenarios will conjoin the two faces of the
object: palea (waste, wounded body - melancholiform) and agalma (the
saviour, immortality - megalomania).
They find their first expression in a dream: “I see myself grabbing a
bomb to save my friends. I explode. I burst into pieces. I am dead. But in
my grave, my friends call a lady, a witch who jabbers incomprehensible
words, who brings me back to life. I knew in advance that I would be
resuscitated by the lady, otherwise... it would have been a suicide. And that,
I don’t want... but I can let myself get caught and be told off (se faire
attraper et engueuler) in place of the others, that way, they do not get it in
the neck. Here you go, that’s me.”
Or again: “When I play and I get a little injury, it does not matter...
it’s good even. Then I tell myself that this way the game stops and I think
that if I had not got injured, then it is the other I was playing with who
could have got a more serious injury afterwards. And I don’t like that...
another to be injured. I prefer it to be me. I sacrifice myself and it allows it
to stop... well... until the day it will be me who gets seriously injured or
dies... and this, that must not happen to me.”
“I sometimes have strange ideas like that”, he concludes. “With my
mother... I would have liked to die instead of her... not really to save her...
but at least I would not have seen her suffer... well now it’s too late. If I had
come from the future, I would have told her to go to hospital sooner.”

A sinthomatic construction: the Ocellus

His hooking onto a naming from outside, from the Other, is going to gather
these scattered signifying elements, to elaborate a new variation and
precipitate a singular sinthomatic construction. From the Scouts he receives
his totem: “Ocellus”. He is delighted about it. From elements of the
lexicological reality together with invented elements, this particular S1 will
act as a naming, will come to name his being, but in a completely different
manner.
He will indeed develop a whole knowledge on the ocellus and I will
leave aside numerous details. “It’s a clown fish, this is why one likes it...
just like me. This is the reason why they have chosen this name. But in
addition to this, it’s a clever fish. It’s got just the thing for escaping its
predators. It’s got a fake eye on its tail. If one bites it, one only bites its
tail... and it never dies, it always pulls through. It never gets caught. This
too is just like me, I always have a little corner where I can hide when I get
too annoyed. It’s full of clever traps so that I don’t get caught. Well, the
ocellus is a fish that wriggles all the time (which also says something of his
being) to defend its territory and not to get devoured, or rather scaled, by
the gannet, that is to say that it removes the scales part by part. But it never
manages to catch it. It tries again every time, but it does not manage,
because they live in shoals. I would like to be a fish that lives within reach
of that bird. Tweet, tweet... missed again. But in the end, it always catches
one because otherwise, it can’t feed and it’ll die. But as long as it is not me,
as an ocellus, that he catches... it’s ok.” “The ocellus is one of the most
beautiful fishes in the world... no, I’m joking”.
This construction is rich, as it points out – in an imaginarised but also
a valorised way – both his extreme dependence on the signifiers of the
Other and his work to escape from the too real hold over his body by those
signifiers of the Other: this schizophrenic mark, too real, that they imprint
in his body.
A loop closes in the signification of this S1. He will indeed revisit the
list of his wounds, in order to pin down the first one and the memory of it
he reconstructs. It is a construction that he makes at that precise moment: “I
remember I was in hospital because I had burst open my head. One could
see my tendons. And I got very scared when I woke up and all of a sudden
saw my parents leaning towards me, like monsters.” Sam pursues the
construction of this memory as follows. “Just after the moment of fear,” he
said, “in fact I had made a mistake, because I also remember that my
mummy and my daddy were nursing me. They always ended up putting
some iodine on my nose... like a little clown”.
In the treatment, the ocellus allows the construction of this scenario,
which acts as a screen-memory. This is what this subject has gained through
his work of elaboration. It does not erase the real (how would this be
possible anyway?), but localises it in a return, in the emergence there,
where beforehand, in the moment of unhooking following the death of his
loved ones, he was only that fragmented body. This scenario, this singular
invention of the subject, indicates to us that there is worse than fear and
anxiety. That the latter is already a defence against what Lacan coined after
Freud with the term of Hilflosigkeit, distress and dereliction. That state
where the subject no longer has any recourse in the Other. This scenario
frames18, wards off, the distress he experienced in a scenario which stages
the persecutory Other – the parents as monsters, just like the gannet, which
incarnates the figure of a ferocious Other of the signifier ready to jump on
its prey (the little being), in order to devour, to dismember it. In this
construction, which speaks of his fundamental relation as subject to the
Other, Sam shows that he is not without resources. This contrasts with the
lack of resources at the start of the treatment. This is demonstrated by what
follows.

An effort of naming in the flight of meaning

Éric Laurent indicates that with regard to the too real identificatory
signifiers in psychosis, compacted, holophrased, we have good grounds for
attempting to reintroduce space and declensions of those signifiers,
translations, so that they become decompacted, in “favour of new ridges in
the circulation of the flow of the flight of meaning”.19 This is where it is a
matter of accompanying the psychotic subject in his speech, by inviting him
to speak. It is not about making him be out and out delusional, because it
would end badly. It nonetheless aims at obtaining a quilting point where the
sliding effects between signifier and signified attempt to stabilise, in an
effect of naming.
What we endeavour to obtain in the partnership with the psychotic
subject is a displacement of the ravaging dimension of jouissance towards a
symptomatic dimension of it. This is not a disappearing of the dimension of
jouissance, but rather an operation which shifts what does not change (the
drive) in a regime (too real, ravaging, auto-erotic) towards another regime,
in a more imaginary dimension, more integrated in the social, more
compatible with the social bond.

Ocellus: a “good S1”20

We can bet, having reached this point in this leg of the journey, that the
signifier ocellus is a good S1. Not a priori, but in Sam’s decision to grasp it,
through the use that he makes of it. It is different from the S1 rat head
which was too confused with object a. With ocellus we are closer to an S1
that contains jouissance, which is only a signifying declension of the first
one, but holds it sufficiently in a register of semblance, so that the psychotic
subject can make of it, in its identificatory dimension, a use which re-
inscribes him in the social bond in his relation to the other in a more
dignified and appeased manner. Then we come back to what Jacques-Alain
Miller proposes as writing of the sinthome.

[S1, a] 21

Sam’s identification to this signifier that comes from the Other

(precisely because it comes to him from the Other of the social, of the
fellow creatures, as acknowledging him as one of them and by naming his
particularity) is rich, rich like “a good master-signifier [...] that picks a word
in a use that does not come within an already known utility”.22 Moreover, it
opens a space, in the dimension of it not being stuck to new variations of
the social bond in which Sam is incessantly engaged. Of course it is with
the dimension of jouissance, singular to him, which constitutes the mark of
his being, and which does not cease to return, but which demonstrates that,
in relation to this, he is no longer without resources and is able to make a
certain use of it. And this, in reality. It has concrete consequences, in his
everyday life.
At that time he had just changed the direction of his studies with
success, in order to obtain the adequate diploma for the profession he wants
to embrace: namely, teacher. “I like giving advice, clever tips, and this way
help children who need help.” He has shown himself to be an expert,
acknowledged as such, in the handling of language, in relation to which his
irony does wonders. Besides, he enters surefootedly the dimension of
semblance and representation, since he takes, at his request, drama and
improvisation classes. He knows about stage fright. Since then, he comes to
rehearse during sessions with me.
All this, of course, is simply a change of regime against the same
backdrop, which insists. But now he manages to make a social bond and to
find a place in the world, made from what initially was ravaging for him. It
is partly a kind of reversal of the symptom, an effect of creation (un
rebroussement du symptôme en effet de création) – to use Dr. Lacan’s
famous expression.
On this subject, see below his first composition exercise, which he
reads to me. It is about inventing a letter of complaint:

“I'm ugly, I can never get it, all my plans fail, I can’t stop falling, I
always get beaten up, I blow a fuse, I always hurt myself.
Dear Mr Warner Bros.
I'm fed up with playing this role. If you want me to continue to play
this role, things must change. I want to be more handsome, my plans
to work, my fuse not to blow up in my face, not to be hurting any
longer.
And you have the choice: either I run faster and without getting
beaten up, or the Beep-Beep is replaced by a slower animal. In short,
that I catch that lousy Beep-Beep.
Signed: Coyote.
PS: Make these changes ... or I quit.”

Translated from the French by Alexandra Langley & Janet Haney

1 “After Oedipus” was the title of the second European Congress of Psychoanalysis, Pipol VI,
Brussels on 6 and 7 July 2013.
2 Reference to Lacan’s quote “... that in which the schizophrenic is specified to be taken into without
the assistance of any established discourse” Lacan, J., “L’Étourdit”, (1972), Autres écrits, Seuil,
2001, p. 474.
3 Holvoet, D., “The Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era. Typicality and Symptomatic Inventions”,
argument of the XIth NLS Congress, The Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era, typicality and
symptomatic inventions, Athens, 18-19 May 2013. http://www.amp-nls.org/page/fr/116/argument
4 Laurent, É., “Psychosis, or Radical Belief in the Symptom”, Hurly-Burly Issue 8, October 2012,
p243 http://www.amp-nls.org/page/fr/125/vers-athnes/0/856
5 XIth NLS Congress, The Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era, typicality and symptomatic inventions,
Athens, 18-19 May 2013.
6 Holvoet, D., ibid.
7 In French, “blue,” is slang for “newby”, a new recruit, someone inexperienced – [TN] much like
being “green” in English.
8 As Éric Laurent has shown, the structure in “Le trait de l’autiste” Les feuillets du Courtil, No. 20,
“La psychose appliquée à la psychanalyse”, publication of the Freudian Field in Belgium, Tournai,
2002, p.14.
9 Laurent, É., “Interpreting Psychosis from Day to Day”, Bulletin of the NLS, 4, 2008.
10 Laurent, É., Psychoanalytic Treatments of the Psychoses, Psychoanalytic Notebooks, 26, 2013.
11 Laurent, É., “Interpreting Psychosis from Day to Day”, ibid.
12 Id.
13 Laurent, É., “Politique de l’unaire”, La Cause freudienne n°42, Politique lacanienne, Navarin
Seuil, Paris, mai 1999, p. 30.
14 Expression of Jacques Lacan to qualify the position of the analyst.
15 Laurent, É., ibid.
16 Laurent, É., ibid.
17 Freud, S., Papers on Metapsychology [1915], S.E. XIV, pp. 203, 204
18 Lacan indicates to us that “anxiety is framed”, Lacan, J., The Seminar of J. Lacan Book X,
(19/12/1962); Le Séminaire Livre X, L’angoisse, Seuil, 2004, p.89.
19 Laurent, É., “Politique de l’unaire”, in La Cause freudienne n°42, Politique lacanienne, Navarin
Seuil, Paris, May 1999, p. 30.
20 Ibid.
21 Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, 1986-1987 “Ce qui fait insigne”, unplubished.
22 Laurent, É., “Politique de l’unaire”, ibid.
For a humanising practice
Éric Zuliani

The debate about Autism today seems to me, more than ever, divided
between always more abstract ideas about what autism is - the continuous
increase of the number of autists underlines this – and the practices that,
when they are oriented in a certain way, can end up being inventive and
fruitful for autistic subjects. When, 20 years ago, I began to encounter very
young so called autistic subjects in a nursery, it first made me turn away
from the desire to know the origins of autism – there were already many
things written on this – to rather focus my interest on the everyday and
concrete consequences that unfold from these subjects’ singular position,
and the effects on the parents.

The fact of speaking

There is an anecdote that is linked to this time. When I went to fetch
Antonin, an orphan of three and a half years, from his hall for the second
time, his child welfare worker told me with great tact that there had been
effects from the first meeting. Antonin was no longer rocking for hours
inside a wardrobe, biting himself until drawing blood from one of his
fingers, but instead galloped around in all directions while shouting. She
asked herself, as I did, what to make of these new phenomena. It took
several conversations to agree on the fact that incessant rocking inside a
wardrobe and auto mutilation did not constitute a life. So I continued to see
him.
His welfare worker used a treasure trove of inventions for all
moments of his life; nothing was part of a routine for Antonin. She invented
with him, and all those she looked after, custom made and without recourse
to any common meaning - having learnt to recognise the moments of
anguished distress - a way of getting up, washing, eating or going to sleep.
Each invention initiated what one calls a social bond, a relation.
Meeting with her regularly, made me able to make a distinction that
might seem trivial, but which is fundamental, between communicating and
speaking. I had started for some time to regularly see what one calls a
psychoanalyst, and experienced a situation in which it is precisely a matter
of speaking, without communicating. Moreover, the most serious linguists,
like E. Benveniste, know how to take account of this difference by
reserving communication in the strict sense for the animal kingdom, and the
fact of speaking for human beings.
In the sessions, Antonin practically did not speak except to say the
essential; I spoke little, and always to no-one in particular, from the off. I
learnt little by little to spot that he did not appreciate useless words: a ‘How
are you doing today?’, for example, could trigger the beginning of a
breakdown.
Although talk was sparse, thousands of things happened in the
sessions around small objects, which let appear little by little the structure
of his personal significations, in which he started to move around.
This did not appear through observation, of one by the others; but
through the strong involvement of the one and the others, together.
When his social worker said for example ‘to lunch’, Antonin placed
himself before his plate for a meal that promised to be epic. When the same
social worker spoke to him saying ‘are you coming to eat’, involving the
structure of the ‘you’, and thus of the ‘I’, Antonin remained deaf. In the
paediatric atmosphere of the nursery this fact earned him a number of
impressive audiograms, all proving he couldn’t hear. It seemed to me
therefore that the establishment of a social bond depended on the idea one
had of what speaking means.

The autist savant

For psychology the social bond is only possible if certain competences
linked to social habituation, today included in cognition, are combined; the
capacity for empathy before going in pairs, for example, linked to the
capacity of autonomy. The age in which a child is capable of empathy is
pre-defined. These abstract considerations and ideals are then elaborated in
relation with communication and information theories, which do not
include what speaking really means. A new university discipline is thus
born: education in mental health, aimed at acquiring these competences.
Here we must re-read the critique G. Canguilhem makes of medicine when
it works from abstractions, which is to say from norms.
 The writings of autists teach us that this point of view of capacities
and incapacities turns out to be reductive, because they describe at the same
time a very complex sociality on one side, and on the other side, a relation
that is absolutely not univocal to competences: the autist can in fact turn out
to be a savant.
The book by D. Tammet entitled ‘Born on a Blue Day’1 bears witness
to his life as an autist and the way in which he started to mathematise his
world. The editor qualified Tammet as an ‘autist savant’. Tammet is in fact
known in the social field for the record he achieved in pronouncing the
most numbers after the comma of the number Pi. It can seem fascinating,
but by that one forgets the suffering that is at play, and the use value of
numbers for him. These numbers have a precise definition for him: “The
number one, [ ] is a brilliant and bright white”. “Three is round”. “Five [ ] is
the sound of waves crashing against rocks”. “Eighty-nine, reminds me of
falling snow”.2 Nine, ‘rises to the highest intimidating blue’. Numbers have
a hard, soft, bright and dim kernel. Reading the book, one discovers that
this mathematisation has an eminent function, linking what, for him, is
separated: on one side the symbol, and on the other what for him makes the
things of the human world. It is not a mathematised physics, as the one of
the movement of the celestial bodies can be. It is rather physical, in that it
involves the dimension of the body: his and that of others. Because, what
counts for Tammet is to attest to what the hard, the soft, the luminous or the
dim, do to him in his body. This way, the social bond for him has to do with
what it means to be a living being, speaking alongside other speaking living
beings.
The construction of the book is very singular. The account of his life
effectively divided between so called scientific considerations that all start
with anonymous formulations of the type “One says that autists...”;
“Scientists have shown that autists...” or “It is said that the language of
autists is this or that...” Tammet does not make any comments on these
fragments of discourse. The linking between these fragments, the examples
of common knowledge circulating about autism, and taking up the thread of
the account of a life in first person, produces an effect of a total non-
relation. Everyday discourse remains wide of the mark. His account is
rather centred by the element that through its absence haunts him: the
relation to the other, highly problematic, feared, menacing. In this regard, a
fact has attracted my attention due to its exemplary nature. Tammet explains
that it is at the moment where his parents put letters on his shoes – L for left
and R for right – that he could put them on all alone. The sequence can be
appreciated in two ways. From an educational perspective, obviously, it is
progress: he finally learnt the word that names the thing. But, from another
point of view, the ‘all alone’ as a value is paradoxical for someone who is
already in a certain isolation, is it not? Our modern passion for autonomy
takes a strange accent here.

The language of education

How can we conceive of language as a social bond? The answer is simple:
our conception of language is that of Victor de l’Aveyron3 and not that of
Itard. You know the story: Itard, enlightened teacher (maître) of the
beginning of the 18th century, son of the Enlightenment, was interested in
the most vulnerable of children, namely the deaf. He was fascinated with a
child said to be wild, Victor. This was part of a noble reflection: education
as a way out for a subject in his social condition. We know the beautiful
film Truffaut made of this story. The book is the account of this story of a
man who wanted to establish a social bond with some-one who was not
social, in the form of a teacher and his pupil. As Itard was an honest man,
the account contains the intervention, but also its failing.
What does the lesson Victor teaches us consist in? The teacher
suggests the following to Victor: “You will have the glass of milk when you
say milk”. The account of the scene, each day beginning afresh, permits us
to see the outcome. Victor does not understand. It is not that he is deaf –
Itard asked himself that question – but he does not understand...how to
consent to this type of social bond. Itard notes however the affective bond
that develops in parallel, with the maid of the house, who herself does not
want anything. That does not work though: Victor does not speak. Itard
ends by giving up: a renunciation ... and there it is, Victor grasps the glass,
drinks it greedily, and in an ejaculation says “Milk!” But the teacher is not
satisfied. For him, that is not speaking. However, it should have been, based
on Victor’s modality of language.
Through this sequence Victor teaches us – nothing less – that the
word does not only have to do with the thing, but equally with what it
produces in the body; “the jouissance of the thing”, as Itard rightly says, is
also the jouissance of the word - as it is commonly verified with small
children who discover the fact of speaking. The experience of Itard also
makes us understand that he who wants to give the glass of milk, and thus
the word “milk”, better know from where he gives it, from which place. It
seems to me that the methods that we propose for the education of autistic
subjects has to include a clear insight into this place, above all when one
introduces the possibility of authoritarian restraint there.

The object, condition of the social bond

Language (le langage) is the starting point of a possible dialogue with an
autistic subject, but also objects. This permits the routines of the social
bond to develop. With Antonin we did not do anything other than transform
the manifestations, not in his behaviour, but in his wanting to say, which we
deciphered little by little.
The routine of the relation and meaning of a life, therefore, make a
pair, which puts second any meaning that would be established in advance.
This routine that is constructed starting from significations that belong to
the subject himself, and that is guided by his appeasements and his
anxieties, permits him to gain an idea of a certain continuity in himself,
based on encounters, habits and activities. In a word, this gives him a place
in the world and the possibility to give signification, a horizon, to his
existence. In all cases I could verify that the parents had this kind of
knowledge too, which was all important for me in the dialogue with them.
One then understands the stereotypical aspect better, that occurred at an
early moment in the existence of their child. This thing is often not
recognised in so-called autists, who are not always respected in their
defences, which take the form of phobias or senseless attachments to certain
objects.
Here is the case of Manon, 7, whom the members of the team at the
institute where I work, saw as soon as she arrived. I remember meeting her
mother who said: “I was told it was genetic”. This did not prevent a diffuse
guilt: “Do you realise what I passed on to her?” she confided in me. I
remember telling her that the guilt was her desire to keep 100% involved
with her child. It had a greatly appeasing effect.
As for Manon, we quickly saw that she was very far away from being
in her own world and that it would require us to go and look for her and to
lead her towards constructing a world. There are indeed two possible
conceptions of this: either one considers that there exists a world that is
already there, valid for all, into which one must insert oneself. Or that such
a world does not exist and that humans are made in a way that they can
construct their world starting from their singularity, which they assert and
which they share.
We then noted Manon’s relationship to language (la langue), which
was very singular. We saw also that to invite her, in order to meet her, had
provoked a “seizure”: massive, direct, very little mediated, fragmented,
ready for close combat, and for her own ejection. Here also, we had to go
through a soft forcing, as one of our colleagues said. One does not take into
consideration enough the double use of our institutions: to ensure on one
hand that the subject does not return to his status as object through a
passage to the act, whether it is hetero or auto aggressive; and on the other
hand, that he can register what he is the seat of, in discourse, always to be
established with him, always more or less partial.
With Manon, it started rather calmly. She basically engages in an
activity of nomination, speaking to no-one in particular, of a choice of
objects. There is no articulation between “gas pump” and “bird”, between
“chandelier” and “gorilla”. During this activity of nomination, she
sometimes says ‘look’, but to whom? Or she whispers the words she just
said. Sometimes sentences emerge: a range of words dominated by
commandments and injunctions that then make her suffer. These sentences
have the particularity of never situating her in a place; in fact nobody is
around her. It is not a world (monde) therefore, but a “mess” (immonde)
which she cannot escape other than by climbing into the bin in the office,
for example, stuffing the waste that she finds there into her mouth.
It is the speech therapist, who made it possible for Manon to stabilise
herself a little: the therapist had the idea to receive Manon with the door of
her office open: Manon sat down and started to play with a choice of
objects. We all began to do “open door day”, wagering on the individual
significations of Manon rather than on conventional significations.
Then, there had to be a hole - that of the same wardrobe she had
taken anxious refuge in, but now her finger sticking out – in order to hear
her speak for the first time: “This is my finger!” – “Alright”, I replied. The
words started to circulate, at the same time as the objects circulated too:
from her home to the institution and back again, or from one office to
another, within the institution. The teacher’s suggestion to her that she put
her objects into a bag in the morning and to take them out again in the
evening, was taken up by Manon, only to use the bag all day to make it
easier to transport all the objects: It wasn’t what the teacher had intended,
but as an invention it was welcomed. Then at the end of a session with me,
leaving with her little objects, one was lost: Aladdin’s lamp. She comes
back to the next session to show me all the objects except one, but in its
place she asks me an anxious question: “Aladdin’s lamp?” At the next
session she does not want to come, being tormented by this loss; I say to her
“Come, we will play with Aladdin’s lamp” – “Yes” she replies. The object
was lost forever and the game of life could begin for Manon.
“Aladdin’s lamp”, that is the beginning of a world. In this sense, one
is mistaken in saying that such and such a subject is in his own world. Quite
the contrary, it is a matter of allowing the subject to constitute a world.
Each contributor in the institution tries to be part of her parish, which does
not yet exist. We note in passing that the beginning of a world starts with a
missing object, an object of which one can speak, which permits Manon to
stop wandering, and to start talking on and on with some of us in the
institution, about this missing object. She can go to school now, because
“she asks questions”, her teacher says, “sometimes too many, and
sometimes bizarre ones”, – which one, I wonder? – “where is Aladdin’s
lamp?”

There is not only meaning in life

I would like to finish my paper by indicating that the dialogue with
someone cannot come about if there is not at least one who says yes,
accepting to not understand what happens in the way of the bizarre or the
senseless. A colleague in Bordeaux4, writing an article on autism, reminds
us that nobody has to align themselves to meaning only: the writings of
autistic subjects bear witness to that. One must remember here that in
essence in many registers of the human – art, science, but also in analysis or
the diverse interests of autistic subjects - common meaning does not come
first. Language produces meaning, but also and above all, it produces an
effect on you. The sensational invention of the machine to grab hold of
cattle, by T. Grandin, is proof, which had its roots, in the most singular way,
in making herself a body when she was young.
When we welcome what we do not understand, we ensure that the
fact of speaking does not get relinquished. And when this speech does not
rest on common meaning, it does not mean that it does not have the back up
from elsewhere, which is never absent from any human experience –
namely that of a language that makes us alive. Since Freud, a psychoanalyst
does not pretend to heal, but to welcome singularities in order to give them
the dignity of an experience. In this way it is a humanising practice. It is
also, I would say, what the mother and the teacher of Manon take part in.

Translated from the French by Natalie Wülfing

1 Tammet D., Born on a Blue Day, The Gift of an Extraordinary Mind, Hodder & Stoughton,
London, 2006 Cf. Closing speech by É. Laurent at the study days Hommage aux Lefort on 15 Sept.
2007, with the title: « En conséquences », where he comments on Tammet’s book –
unpublished/untranslated. Cf. also Zuliani É., « Savants autistes », La petite Girafe, « Dialogue avec
les autistes », n°27, Paris, Agalma, mai 2008, p.107 - untranslated
2 Ibid., pp.3
3 Malson L.; ‘The Wild Boy of Aveyron’ by J.-M.-G. Itard in Wolf Children and the Problem of
Human Nature, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972, pp. 95 - 179
4 Philippe La Sagna, Partager la planète autiste?, petite Girafe n°27, pp. 83-86 (not translated)
If writing is not speaking.
And psychoanalysis has something to do with writing
And psychoanalysts sometimes leam from artists

Then a POETRY RUBRIC

QED.
Put together by Vincent Dachy

‘The acute point on which i remain suspended is indeed to know at which

point the fact of signifying [ta signipance] , as far as it is written,
distinguishes itself from the simple effects of phonation.” (Jacques lacan,
20th January 1976, The Seminar, Book 23)
CONIUGAISON OF BE

AN IS THE OF IT
IT IS AN OF THE
AN IS IT OF THE
IT OF THE IS AN
THE IT IS AN OF
IT IS OF AN THE
THE AN IS OF IT
AN IT IS OF THE
THE OF AN IS IT
IS AN IT OF THE?
IS IT AN OF THE?
IS THE AN OF IT?
OF AN IT THE IS
OF THE AN IT IS
OF IT THE IS AN
(thanks to T. Grandin)
SLANT
LEST
SLEET
LOST
SLOT
LAST
SLAT
LUST
SLUT
LIST
SLIT
STILL
VDcollective is a front for Discreet Ventures in art DIY.
Vincent Dachy acts as spokesperson of VDcollective.
www.vdcollective.com
Seven critical and invigorating remarks on
the contemporary contemporaneity of arts
and psychoanalysis, with a succinct
preamble and no conclusion.
Vincent Dachy

Preamble
The Lacanian doxa says that the object of creation (with ‘artistic value’ if it
has an impact on the Other) goes through a transformation, called
sublimation, consisting in its elevation to the dignity of the Thing. In later
Lacanian words: the artwork occupies an emptiness, a real created by the
Signifier, and allows some veiling of it, some recuperation of the object-
loss (not dissimilar from a joke in some ways, from humour especially).
Doesn’t this ‘elevation of the object’ echo with the Christian consecration?
Is there not a discursive reification of this great ‘Absence-Emptiness-Loss’
in the metaphor of the empty tabernacle?

Remarks
• Firstly, psychoanalysis claims to learn from artists following the idea that
artists precede* psychoanalysts. From Sophocles, Leonardo, Holbein,
Shakespeare, Joyce, Duras, etc. But you may have noticed that there is not
much taken from Expressionism, abstract or not, Pop art, so-called
Conceptual art for example, and even less from the entire field of music. So
we could wonder what psychoanalysis has learned from the arts? Would it
often be as illustrations or analogies of a point already encountered
elsewhere - in the praxis perhaps? - that psychoanalysis has used references
in art? Not always though. If Freud found in Sophocles something that
suited him, Duras, according to Lacan, knew things without him and Joyce
inspired him a great deal.
When it comes to the so-called ‘decline of the Father’ and the
changes of the Symbolic order nowadays, we could refer to Futurism, Dada
or Fluxus. These more or less fleeting outbursts of artistic endeavours have
pounded on if not deposed the ideals linked to the imago of the Father quite
a while ago. The invention of Collage, Ready-mades, Sound poetry,
Performance art, Chance or constraint generated texts, Assemblage,
Appropriations, not to mention composers intrigued by indeterminacy for
instance, could prove to be mines of ideas for those wondering about the
plurality of the Names-of-The-Father, or creation and works of art as
symptomatic ways of organising modes of living with-out The Name-of-
The-Father. Marinetti’s call for the ‘destruction of syntax’, Tzara’s or
Khlebnikov’s poetry may echo Joyce’s efforts in fruitful ways. And the ‘art
of noises’ of Luigi Russolo just as much. Perhaps the relative lack of
attention of psychoanalysts to these creations is due to the difficulty
psychoanalysis has to do without the figure of the Father (and that of the
Mother too?), transcendence and verticality. To do without transcendence
while making use of it is perhaps more easily said than done.

• Secondly, it would be ludicrous to make general statements about the arts

today. So let us try.
By and large the arts today do not support hopes for a new world, a
revolution of some kind, a break from the past as did artists (and
intellectuals, philosophers or politicians) at the start of the 20th century. But
we do not observe a return to the past either. There is rather an exaltation of
the present, in its ‘post-modern’ guises or otherwise. A generalised thirst for
the new, yes just as before, but now all consumed in its novelty, not as the
inception of something to come: the every day Phoenix, rising again and
again from its ‘hashes’. No wonder many people often ponder about the
difference between works of art and gadgets, especially in art fairs (unless,
of course, one indulges in spiritual ambitions like an Anselm Kiefer for
example). This urgency of the present, the craving for surprises and shocks,
the supreme Now, the persistent demand for a ‘New Now’, testifies to
something well known in psychoanalysis: the urgency of satisfaction. After
all, is it not an ideal that gives you a good enough reason to postpone your
satisfaction? Or, perhaps, a power that wields enough peremptory dictates
to defer dreaming of satisfaction as it urges to reach immediacy. Some see
signs of such increasing authoritarianism in many institutions today.
Many works of art (one will remember the circumstances of the
submission and rejection of Mr Mutt’s urinal) seem to highlight if not
denounce the super-egoic effects of contemporary Western economies and
ecologies. But for a while now it has been increasingly difficult to
distinguish these denunciations from collaborations.

• Thirdly, the avant-gardes* have asked the public not to believe in

appearances, they wanted the audience to be unsettled, to reflect, to ponder,
to think things through. But, still, they proposed appearances to the public
unless, like some conceptual artists, they wished, pious hope, to only
present ideas. They did not write philosophy though. It is true that
philosophy may lack visual popularity in galleries and which artefacts
would we then find in museum shops? For a long while now the avant-
gardes have taken ideals apart and tried to allude to, to manifest, to show
the real, the world as it is. Yet, interestingly and as an effect perhaps? the
arts have been idealised. It suffices to see the crowds gathered for some
exhibitions – and not only for the various celebrations of impressionism.
But on the other hand, the arts have also been de-idealised, the mercantilism
of the art world shows that well. We are, luckily maybe, far from the
supposed sacred roots of all arts.
So with the avant-gardes we have ended up again and again with
strange paradoxes often open to the criticisms of intellectualism and
hermeticism. Typically, any piece of art that remotely relies on the
enunciation: ‘this is art because I say so’. Thereby contemporary art runs
the risk of being so auto-referential that it loses any real impact other than
some in-crowd self-centred enjoyment. This accentuation of enunciation
has, of course, not escaped the analysts’ attention. Indeed, for them too,
enunciation is most important. But one would hope that analysts find ways
to separate their egos from their acts.
Perhaps there are ‘artists’ but there are only ‘quasi-psychoanalysts’!
‘Psychoanalyst’ as an identification, is ensuring very little being, one can
only practice psychoanalysis. Is art a practice, despite the phrase being used
a lot? Does one practice art, is art a discipline, especially if ‘anything goes’?
The practice of the elevation of any-thing?

• Fourthly, why did Lacan not write an artistic discourse along the five
others he put forward? I would suggest that the arts always intervene in an
already existing discourse. They do not constitute or create a discourse by
themselves. They invent something in the inconsistency or incompleteness
of a given discourse. Art is always an intervention, an interpretation.
Unless, reversely, they honour, eulogize or memorialize an existing
discourse and therefore belong to academism. Their interventions then can
be called collaborations.
Contemporary art (i.e. art that has a pertinence on the master
discourse of the day) intervenes on an instance of inexistence of the Other
[an instance of S(Ø]. When they create something the arts, the artists, the
works of art do not amount to the formation of a social bond but they
provoke transformations of social bonds – what we call changes of taste.
(Psychoanalysis is a social bond inasmuch as it allows passages from
an established discourse to another by ways of eliciting what is at stake in
them and, ultimately – if it can reach that limit-point, in its own. So,
conjecturally, the arts have an ‘intra-discourse’ tropism when
psychoanalysis’ tropism passes ‘inter-discourse’.)

• Fifthly, what about the mutual enrichment of the arts and psychoanalysis
or: what about their difference?
Psychoanalysis produces, aims at producing a new knowledge about
the singular modes of enjoyment of a subject and, in the end, aims at that
subject finding a new arrangement with them. The aim would be, in
fortunate cases, that the knowledge opens onto an invention: a ‘savoir-y-
faire’, a know-some-how with one’s sinthome.
The arts do invent, they create new forms, new arrangements, new
inhabitations of satisfaction. Do they also produce new knowledge? That is
less sure. It can happen of course but it is not a necessary part of the
creation itself. And public success is certainly not a guarantee of it. What is
sure though is that the artist, with a degree in Fine Art or not, is not that
often the best person to speak about his own work (when, in
psychoanalysis, the analysand is the only one who could testify to his
experience).

• Sixthly, psychoanalysis does not show a keen taste for music but I would
like to draw your attention, amongst so many others, to the music of
Giacinto Scelsi. Most of his works are evocative rather than explicit. Most
of his developments form a space-time of indistinctness. A music in which
it is not easy to pin things down, to attribute identifications. It is constructed
music though. We could say it is music of sounding marks in constant
transformation. It does not offer itself as clearly legible and by doing so it
makes present both the problem of legibility and the possibilities of
transformation. A music of poiesis. A music that could inspire
psychoanalysts.

• Seventhly, what can psychoanalysis learn from the arts of today?

Amongst many things, one main, obvious and massive evidence: that
everything, anything can and will be exploited. The appetite for the ‘New
Now’, as I called it, combined with the self-commented enunciation
confirms the effectuation of the object of satisfaction, the object we call
object (a) with Lacan, the object petit (a), the (a)-petit, the (a)ppetite.
Particularly in its addictive guises?
Another thing also: that the diversity of artistic endeavours is such
that it becomes very difficult to classify them. And perhaps that is not
necessarily a ‘bad thing’, it attracts modes of legibility other than that of
identifying discriminants.
And this as well: as imperious as ever, the detritus, the ready-debris,
the refuse perseveres (per-severs).
Plenty to play with (cheek in tongue).

February 2013
Book reviews
Like an open sky, Mariana Otero
Like an open sky, Mariana Otero (Dir); Doc & Film International,
(subtitled), 113 mins.
Like an open sky, Le Courtil, Invention from day to day, Mariana Otero
and Marie Brémond, transl A. Price, Paris, Buddy Movies, 2014.

Janet Haney

Mariana Otero, director of Like an Open Sky, spent a year at Le Courtil – a

special institution for children, based on Lacanian psychoanalytical ideas,
on the Belgium/France border – before actually strapping on her camera.
“Right from the start, my wish was to make a film with people who are
offbeat or out of phase, people who have a radically different relationship
with the world, with language, and with their bodies” she says in the book
of the same name (Otero and Brémond, 2014). Making the film required her
to reflect on her own way of seeing: “So long as I am not rid of me,” she
writes, “I will either make them [the children] each identical or totally
foreign”.
To make the film, she had to un-make herself, a process not
unfamiliar to those who work psychoanalytically. “I found people who,
without being filmmakers, do what I do: they try to see the world through
the eyes of others. And with ... these particular [children], I saw that this
was not something that is accomplished all by itself, but thanks to
theoretical tools, lengthy work on oneself, and a daily labour of reflection
and questioning”, Otero says.
Like and Open Sky opens directly on the face of Amina, a young
child who has put her face right up to the camera lens, and is telling the
film-maker that she wants to be her when she grows up. This very particular
sentence – I want to be you – confronts us not only with a child, but with
her use of language. This subtle but pivotal theme crops up repeatedly,
giving the viewer an important perspective on thinking about film. Film
usually privileges what can be seen, but psychoanalysis grounds itself on
what is said.
 The film is structured around four key stories, four special children.
Evanne, Alyson, Jean-Hugues and Amina. Each of these children is
struggling with their own particular difficulties but we see them progress
with their struggle throughout the film. For three of these four children, the
camera – or rather, Mariana plus her camera – clearly becomes an active
Like an open sky, Mariana Otero part of their life. Their intimacy
with her, brings us, the viewer, right up close to their experience.
Alyson, for example, sees bugs crawling out of the cake mix. I found
it surprising and poignant to hear the intervenant (the job title for those who
work at Le Courtil, which manages to say exactly what it means even
through the barrier of language) and co-author Marie Brémond say, in the
kitchen, “it must be a drag, seeing bugs like that. I don’t see them.” Without
making a fuss, she normalised the situation, and without obliterating
Alyson’s experience, she acknowledged that it is not the same for all.
Alyson also feels compelled to touch her genitals. In the garden with
Véronique Mariage (who has worked at Le Courtil since its beginning), she
is clearly troubled by her thoughts and visions, and can be seen engaging in
what she herself calls her ‘TOC’ (French for OCD), but Véronique doesn’t
dwell on it, she simply continues to work on the garden while Alyson gets
on with her explorations of the skin of the earth – scraping away to discover
what is hidden beneath. Véronique’s focus on the garden is not an act
without thought for Alyson, it is full of thought for her, and later in the film
we see footage of her and the team discussing in great detail how they can
bring their concepts, knowledge and experience to bear on these ordinary
domestic scenes, to help these extraordinary children to find their own way
through the difficulties that plague them.
In the music room with Evanne, an intervenant stops turning him
round to the music, and, while still holding his hand, speaks to her
colleague who is playing guitar. She says that she thinks that Evanne is
focussing, in spinning around, a bit too much on creating a sensation in his
body, something that makes his ‘head spin’. She thinks that he does this to
give himself a consistent point of reference, but hypothesises that it could
be more helpful to him to try to build a bridge to the other through words.
Her colleague invents some lines in the song that include questions
addressed to Evanne, inviting him to stop and think, respond with his own
words. Shortly afterwards Evanne hides in a corner, then calls out that he
has pooed. This rather touching moment in the film brings us back to the
reality of Evanne’s body, but in a different way. The film cuts to a later
conversation between the worker and the film maker, and we get to hear
some of the contemporary psychoanalytic ideas that staff use to support
their understanding of the struggle and progress of this child.
These little moments of theorising are peppered throughout the film
in their different forms. The camera catches the workers after the various
sessions, or follows someone into the office when all the children are
asleep, but Otero also goes into the group meetings, and seminars. The
discipline of her film-making produces a haunting beautiful documentary
that stands comparison with the work of Nicolas Philibert (Etre et Avoir,
2002). But it is perhaps fitting that she was so captivated by her experience
of filming at Le Courtil, that she went on to co-write a book – mostly in the
form of interviews – that, like an analysis of a dream, brings out the words
and ideas that structure and inform the essence of this unusual institution,
and her moving film.
At some special moments, you get the impression that it is the
children who are directing the film, and this somehow reflects the ethos of
Le Courtil too. This comes through especially clearly with the older
children, Alyson and Jean-Hugues.
Jean-Hugues introduces himself to us through the camera as he sits at
the meal table. He says: “I am 15, 16 at my next birthday”, and then, with a
very deep breath that suggests his anxiety: “At 18, I’ll finish here for the
future. After that my sign is Virgo. For my whole life.” This extraordinary
statement gives us a moment to grasp the difficulty forming on the horizon
of his life. It returns again later in the film, after a key assessment for Jean-
Hugues. He is interviewed by Alexandre Stevens, the Director of the
Institute, in front of the whole staff. After the meeting we see the staff stay
and discuss how they can support Jean-Hugues in his transition into the
unknown adult world, and for a moment they wonder about his particular
phrasing. Stevens remarks that they don’t know what it means, but adds
“and we must respect that”. Through the camera we are there for a moment,
witnessing Jean-Hugues’ struggle and the networks of care that support and
help him to find his way through a major transition in his life. Through
Mariana Otero’s camera, for two hours, we have the feeling that we have
been living amongst them too.
The film was released in Belgium in early 2014, and has already been
seen by more than 30,000 people. This level of interest prompted the
commissioning of subtitles in several different languages and you can look
forward to the film’s UK release towards the end of 2014.
Previous issues of the Psychoanalytical
Notebooks
No. 1, 1998: Symptom
Miquel Bassols - Address by the President of the ESP; Jacques-Alain Miller et al. -Barcelona
Seminar on the Symptom; Marie-Hélène Brousse - Hysteria and Sinthome; Kevin Polley - DSM IV or
the Clinical Structure of Psychosis: a Case; Esthela Suarez-Solano - Melancholia, an Illness of
Extimacy; Alexandre Stevens - The Encounter with One-Father and the Symptom; Bogdan Wolf -
Truth and Metaphor in Melancholia; Jacques-Alain Miller - Report of the Delegate General of the
AMP: Barcelona 98; Mischa Twitchin - Stories of the Psychoanalytic Movement.

No. 2, 1999: The unconscious

Jacques-Alain Miller - Interpretation in Reverse; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen - Discretion of the Analyst in
the Post-Interpretative Era; Guy Briole - The Dream: An Interpretation of the Subject; Paulo
Siqueira - When the Unconscious Interprets ‘Homosexualie’; Guy Trobas - Perversion of
Sexuality/Perverse Subject; Bogdan Wolf - The Drive and its Blindness; Jacques-Alain Miller -
Return from Granada: Knowledge and Satisfaction; François Regnault - Hegel’s Master and Slave
Dialectic in the Work of Lacan; Victoria Woollard - Perceval’s Narrative; Odile Barthelemy - From
the Father of Origins to the Origin of the Father; Éric Laurent - The Pass and the Guarantee in the
School; Kevin Polley -The Operator of Dissolution; Pierre Thèves - Witz, Transmission and Drive in
the Social Bond; Patricia Seunier - What Can Be Supposed of a Passer? Jason Glynos - Formalising-
to-the Limits and the End of Analysis.

No. 3, 1999: Love

Jacques-Alain Miller - Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes: Patricia Johansson-Rosen - Of a
Love that would be the Semblant; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra -The Paradoxes of Love; Antonio Di
Ciaccia - The Love of God and of the Neighbour, Rachel Fajersztajn - ‘I Love to You’; Bogdan Wolf -
From the Signifier to Love; Véronique Voruz - The Scene by the Lake: When Desire Fails as
Defence; Adrian Price - Jealousy as a Mechanism of Defense in the Case of Dora; Jacques-Alain
Miller - The Disparate; Marie De Souza - From the Subject of Science to the Subject of the
Unconscious; Nathalie Charraud - Cantor with Lacan (1); Richard Klein -Responsibility in
Psychoanalysis; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen - The Pass Between Knowledge and Belief; Vincent Dachy -
Do not Confuse the Real(s); Marie-Hélène Brousse - Sexual Position and the End of Analysis.

No. 4, 2000: Psychiatry and psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan - British Psychiatry and the War; Éric Laurent - The Real and the Group; Philip
Dravers - Making-do with Jouissance; Jacques-Alain Miller -Contraindications to Psychoanalytical
Treatment; Serge Cottet - Four Preliminary Questions to a Renewal of the Clinic; François
Sauvagnat - On the Specificity of Elementary Phenomena; Jean-Claude Maleval - Why so many
‘Borderlines’?; Vicente Palomera - An Error in Diagnosis: Causes and Consequences; Bernard
Porcheret -Hands off my Symptom; Jean-Pierre Deffieux - The Use of Metonymy in a Case of
Psychosis; Roger Litten - Transference and Demand in Psychosis - Nathalie Charraud - Cantor with
Lacan (2); Richard Klein - Technique and Ethics in Psychoanalysis.

No. 5, 2001: Fantasy and castration

Jacques-Alain Miller - The Sinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy; Éric Laurent - Feminine
Positions of Being; Pierre Naveau - To Let Oneself be Maltreated: Event and Fantasy; Pierre
Skriabine - Aporias of a Sacrifice Accomplished; Catherine Bonningue - Family Secret and
Castration; Jean-Luc Monnier - The Act of the Cut; Bogdan Wolf - Heidegger’s Voice and the
Superego; Sophie Marret - Lewis Carroll: the Symbol and the Letter; Penny Georgiou - Lacan’s
Hamlet.

No. 6, 2001: Representation and perception

Jacques-Alain Miller - The Logic of the Perceived; Jean-Pierre Klotz - Perception and Psychosis;
Richard Klein - Gaze and Representation; Guy Briole – Glimpse; Michele Mièch - How the Subject
Enters the Picture; Jacques-Alain Miller - Jacques Lacan and the Voice; Marie-José Asnoun - What
is it to Hear?; Laure Naveau - Bulimia and Perception of the Feminine Body; Gabriela van den
Hoven - A Child Through the Mirror; Véronique Mariage - Hallucination of a Psychotic Child;
Roger Cassin - Time-Lag; Philippe Carpentier- ‘There is no Guarantee’; Frédéric Declercq - The
Practice of Variable Sessions.

No. 7, 2001: Symptoms

Jacques-Alain Miller - Ironic Clinic; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen - Women and the Symptom: the Case of
the Post-Freudians; Esthela Solano-Suarez - The Identification with the Symptom at the End of the
Treatment; Joseph Attié - The Analytic Symptom or the Question of Identity; Gustavo Dessal - A
Diagnostic Problem; Jacques-Alain Miller - ‘I Am so Superficial’: A Clinical Conversation; Hervé
Castanet - A Subject in the Fog; Jean-Pierre Deffieux - Not so Rare a Case; Bernardino Horne -
Phobia as a Turntable; Massimo Recalcati - On the Analytic Practice of the Group Mechanism in the
Treatment of ‘Eating Disorders’; Lucia D’Angelo - The Perversions: Private Morality, Public
Jouissance; Victoria Woollard - Four Ways to Address the Other; Jean-Louis Gault - Two Statuses of
the Symptom; Suzanne Yang - Silence and Illiteracy.

No. 8, 2002: Jacques Lacan 1901-2001

Jacques-Alain Miller - Jacques Lacan; Vicente Palomera - The Mermaid; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen -
The Unbearable between Psychoanalysis and the Feminist Debate -Bernard Burgoyne - A
Neighbourhood on the Montagne Sainte Geneviève; Alicia Arenas - Episodic or what Lacan’s
Teachings are not; Russell Grigg - Enjoy-meant of Language and Jouissance of the Letter; Richard
Klein - The Consequences; Ernesto Piechotka - A Patient Presentation: A Singular Encounter; Éric
Laurent - The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Today; Miquel Bassols - The Analyst and His Politics;
Bogdan Wolf -The Perception and Politics of Discourse; François Leguil - The Pass and Teaching;
Pierre Naveau - The Psychoanalyst’s Passion; Dominique Laurent - Disidentification of a Woman;
Guy Trobas - A Je ne sais quoi; Howard Britton - Teaching between S1 and S2

No. 9, 2002: Fictions in psychoanalysis

Jacques-Alain Miller - The Semblant and the Real; Éric Laurent - The Purloined Letter and the Tao
of the Psychoanalyst; Marie-Hélène Brousse - The Names, the Father, the Symptom; Pierre-Gilles
Guéguen & Jacques-Alain Miller - Fictions and the Partner-Symptom; Sophie Marret - Epiphanies:
James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Josiane Cassin - The Child and the Siren; Fabian Naparstek -
Toxicomania of Yesterday and Today; Gabriela van den Hoven - Toxicomania in Context; Roger
Cassin - The Twinning and After; Roger Litten - Desire Put to Work; Anne Lecroart -Cartel and
Beyond; Victoria Woollard - Knowledge and Truth Beyond Oedipus; Philippe Carpentier - Pregnant
Space of The Bush; Richard Klein - Enjoyment of the Empty Box; Jean-Luc Monnier - Beyond
Oedipus: the Question of Femininity.

No. 10, 2003: Formation of the analyst

Jacques-Alain Miller - The Analytic Session; Éric Laurent - On the Right Use of Supervision;
Roberto Mazzuca & Monica Torres (Dupla) - The Paradoxes of the Desire to Analyse; Mauricio
Tarrab & Adela Fryd (Dupla) - Roots of the Analyst's Desire; Richard Klein - Training Effect;
Véronique Mariage - The Psychoanalyst: An Effect of the Act; Bogdan Wolf - Formation and
Authorisation in Psychoanalysis; François Leguil - On the Nature of the Analysand’s Consent to
Short Sessions; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra - The Length of the Session; Pierre Skriabine - The Logic of
the Scansion or why a Session can be Short?; Monique Kusnierek & Alfredo Zenoni - The Session as
a ‘Unit of Satisfaction’; Dominique Laurent - Paradoxical Effects in the Pass; Patrick Monribot -
The Work of the Symptom; Alain Merlet - Coming to Terms with the Sinthome; Graciela Brodsky -
Applied Psychoanalysis: Five References; Thomas Svolos - The Specificity of Psychoanalysis
Relative to Psychotherapy; Vincent Dachy - On the Affect of Pain in Psychoanalysis.

No. 11, 2003: Sexuation and sexuality

Jacques-Alain Miller - Of Distribution Between the Sexes; Alexandre Stevens - Love and Sex Beyond
Identifications; Vicente Palomera - The Transparent Veil and the Screen of Sexuation: a Case;
Richard Klein - The Birth of Gender; Ernesto Piechotka - Psychosis: Sex, Gender or Symptom?;
Hubert Van Hoorde - Modern Masculinity or ‘The Golden Ass’ Revisited; Marie-Hélène Brousse -
The Push-to-the-Woman: A Universal in Psychosis?; Enric Berenguer - The Challenge of Perversion;
Heather Chamberlain - A Contemporary Case of Obsessionality; Éric Laurent - New Norms of
Homosexuality; Miquel Bassols - The (a)Sexed Object; Vincent Dachy - Towards Sexual Knotality;
Lucia D’Angelo - Notes for an Update of the Clinic; Natalie Wülfing -Symptom and Body in Freud
and Lacan; Pierre Naveau - Man’s Approach to Woman: A Logical Pathway; Dominique Laurent -
The Subject and Its Libidinal Partners.

No. 12, 2004: Psychosis

Jacques-Alain Miller - Equivalence Between the Other and the Symptom; Éric Laurent - Three
Enigmas: Meaning, Signification, Jouissance; Herbert Wachsberger - From the Elementary
Phenomenon to the Enigmatic Experience; François Leguil - The Enigmatic Experience of Psychosis
in the Practice of Patient Presentations; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen - Symptomatic Homeostasis in
Psychosis; Dominique Laurent - An Intelligent Woman; Heather Chamberlain - The Minstrel; Jean-
Louis Gault - The Man with A Hundred Thousand Hairs; Franck Rollier - Paternity Without the
Name-of-the-Father; Stefanie Jaax - “The Mother’s Mouth is Like the Mouth of a Big Crocodile...”;
Gabriela van den Hoven - Psychoanalysis in the World of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy; Alexandre
Stevens - Embarrassment, Inhibition and Repetition; Richard Klein - Delusional Identification.

No. 13, 2004: Lacan with Joyce

Jacques-Alain Miller - Lacan with Joyce; Pierre Thèves - ‘Où est ton cadeau espèce d’imbécile?;
René Rasmussen - On Joyce and Psychosis; Bogdan Wolf - Joy Joys Joyce... How to Work with the
Sinthome?; Marie-Hélène Roch - 21st Century M-A-N; Yasmine Grasser - M-A-N, basic M-A-N, M-
A-N oowaza body; Rik Loose - Joyce’s Administration; Philip Dravers - Joyce & the Sinthome:
Aiming at the Fourth Term of the Knot; Adrian Price - Lacan’s Sinthommage to The Artist: Joyce;
Parveen Adams -The Sexual Relation in James Joyce and in Cronenberg’s Crash; Pierre Skriabine -
Does the Father Say Knot?; Hélène Deltombe -The Child and Lalangue; Vincent Dachy -
Scribbledygook: Remarks on Psychoanalysis and Literature; Joseph Attié - ‘This Mad Play of
Writing’.

No. 14, 2005: Responses from psychoanalysis

Marie-Hélène Brousse – Separation Anxiety: A New Light Cast on Feminine Anxiety; Gil Caroz –
“Going Through Anxiety?”: Presentation of the Theme; Pierre Skriabine – Anxiety and its ‘Beyonds’;
Jean-Louis Gault – The Option of Anxiety; Richard Klein – From Church and State to
Psychoanalysis; Alan Rowan – Anxiety and the Push to Action: Clinical Consequences; Yotvat
Elberbaum – Two Moments of Anxiety; Joost Demuynck – Anxiety, a Nomination; Beata Wolf –
Anxiety and Psychosis; Anne Béraud-Bogino – Ontological Anxiety in a Case of Psychosis; François
Sauvagnat – Psychotic Anxiety and its Correlate in Bodily Experiences: Some Remarks on ‘New
Symptoms’; Marie-Hélène Doguet-Dziomba – Destiny of the Strange Object in a Cure; Bogdan Wolf
– Between Jouissance and Desire: Truths and Lies about Anxiety; Maria-Cristina Aguirre – Anxiety
and the Search for Happiness; Philippe Carpentier ” Anxiety and Repression; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra
– A Short Therapy of a Little Girl Who Bites; Guy Trobas – Alleviating the Anxiety of a Mother...;
Stéfan Verlinden – An Epileptic Symptom: To Let (oneself) Fall or to Come to the Scene; Jacqueline
Nanchen – The Hidden Dimension of the Subject Supposed to Know is Anxiety; Maire Jaanus – The
Passage-to-the-Act in Anna Karenina; Kirsten Hyldgaard – Heidegger’s Anxiety Versus Lacan’s;
René Rasmussen – ‘Kill Me a Son’: On Kierkegaard and Lacan; Susana Huler – The only Judgment
of Existence is Action; Claudia Iddan – Laughter: A Transformation of Anxiety; Jacques-Alain Miller
- The Response of Psychoanalysis to Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen – The
Battle of Psychoanalysis in the Twentyfirst Century; Jean-Pierre Klotz – To Promote a Symptom’s
Culture; Thomas Svolos – The American Plague; Roger Litten – We Are All Health Professionals
Now; Bernard Burgoyne – Curtailments of Desire; John Shotter – The Loss of Relatedness and the
Pathology of an Atomistic Democracy; John Forrester – CBT and Pascal’s Wager.

No. 15, 2006: The name(s)-of-the-father

Jacques-Alain Miller – The Inexistent Seminar; Éric Laurent – The Symptom and the Proper Name;
Alexandre Stevens – How to Get By Without the Paternal Function; Guy Trobas – Depression...
Repression & Modern Symptoms; Serge Cottet – Fire on the Symbolic Order; Ronald Portillo – The
Father as Symptom; Yves Depelsenaire – The White Goddess; Yves-Claude Stavy – ‘If Not the Name
of the Name of the Name’; Laure Naveau – The Gentle Voice and the Empty Casket; Esthela Solano-
Suarez – Jouissance and the Name of the Father; Philippe Lacadée – The Singularity of a Psychic
Reality: Psychoanalysis applied to a Case of Ordinary Psychosis; Vincent Dachy – A Real on the Tip
of the Tongue.

No. 16, 2007: Regulation and evaluation

Jacques-Alain Miller - The Era of the Man without Qualities; Éric Laurent - Blog-Notes: The
Psychopathy of Evaluation; Guillaume Le Blanc - The Unevaluable: The Timeliness of Canguilhem;
François Sauvagnat - The Current State of “Evidence-Based Medicine”; Nathalie Charraud - A
Passion for the Dice, the Other Side of Statistics; Vincent Dachy - Being by Numbers; Hélène
Deltombe - CBT and the Rejection of the Unconscious; Véronique Mariage - CBT’s Hold over
Children’s Speech; Daniel Roy - “In the Course of Events Everything will Become Clear”; Gerard
Wajcman - The Extortion of the Intimate; Philippe La Sagna - On the Public Utility of
Psychoanalysis; Miquel Bassols - The Future of the Pass; Marie-Hélène Brousse -Love of the
Sinthome Against a Hatred of Difference; Marie-Hélène Roch - The Psychoanalytic Act and its
Paradoxes; Penny Georgiou - Letter to ‘Skills for Health’, Department of Health from LS-NLS;
Roger Litten - Letter to ‘Skills for Health’, Department of Health from ALP.

No. 17, 2008: Transference

Jacques-Alain Miller – Clinic Under Transference; Anne Lysy-Stevens – Transference in Psychosis;
Marie-Hélène Doguet-Dziomba – Medication under Transference ; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen –
Paradoxes of the Births of Transference; Réginald Blanchet – The Transitional Space of the
Psychoanalytic Transference; Gabriela van den Hoven – Therapeutic Relation or Transference?;
Dominique Carpentier – From the Complaint to Transference; Pierre Malengreau – Free Association,
a Contingent Practice; Brussels Clinical Section – Transference & Borderline Psychosis; Jacques-
Alain Miller – Pass Bis; Xavier Esqué – The Last Session; Marie-Hélène Brousse – When it Ceases;
Véronique Voruz – Strategies of Resistance; Richard Klein – The Atypical Citizen under Threat;
Gustavo Dessal – The Future of Psychoanalysis; Ian Parker – The Regulation of Psychoanalysis and
its Reverse; Alan Rowan – Being Negative about Happiness; Bogdan Wolf – The Science of the
State; Janet Low – The New Bureaucracy; Adrian Price – Towards a Principled, Not Standard
Edition.

No. 18, 2009: Obsessional neurosis

Jacques-Alain Miller – The Pivot of the Desire of the Other; Esthela Solano - Learning to Read
Obsessional Neurosis; Philippe La Sagna - The Obsessional’s Objects, Philippe de Georges - A
Thought that Burdens the Soul; Serge Cottet - On Feminine Obsessional Neurosis; Lilia Mahjoub -
Obsession and Feminine Jouissance; Jacqueline Dehret - Obsessional Neurosis: A Lesson on Desire;
Lucie Wolf -Transference in Obsessional Neurosis; Pierre Malengreau - The Treatment of an
Obsessional; Bogdan Wolf - The Mysterious Ways of the Obsessional; Françoise Fonteneau -
Symptom and Theory.

No. 19, 2009: Ordinary psychosis

Marie-Hélène Brousse - Ordinary Psychosis In The Light Of Lacan’s Theory Of Discourse; Jean-
Pierre Klotz - Ordinary Psychosis And Modern Symptoms; Russell Grigg - Language As Sinthome In
Ordinary Psychosis; Pierre Skriabine - Ordinary Psychosis With A Borromean Approach; Alexandre
Stevens - Mono-Symptoms And Hints Of Ordinary Psychosis; Jean-Luc Monnier - Ordinary
Psychosis And Liquid Life; Thomas Svolos - ‘Ordinary Psychosis’; Pierre Naveau - Precariousness
And Social Disinsertion; Antoni Vicens - Some Cases Of Ordinary Psychosis In The CPCT Of
Barcelona; Gil Caroz - Some Remarks on the Direction of the Treatment in Ordinary Psychosis;
Jean-Louis Gault - City Full Of Ghosts; Gustavo Dessal - The Strange And Mysterious
Disappearance Of Mr. K.’s Voice; Hervé Castanet - Violaine Or “It Happened At The Smurfs Club”;
Jacques-Alain Miller - Ordinary Psychosis Revisited; Franck Rollier -Looking For ‘Fine Tuning’;
Catherine Meut No Man’s Land, A Case Not Exactly Ordinary; Natalie Wülfing - “I Am Genetically
Dead”; Maria J. Lopez - The Case Of Armand; Julia Richards - A Capitalist Dialect In A Case Of
Ordinary Psychosis; Adrian Price - Lethal Weapon; Véronique Voruz - Democracy and Ordinary
Psychosis; Wilfried Ver Eecke - Philosophical Questions about the Theory of Psychosis in Early
Lacan; Maire Jaanus -Ordinary Happiness in Lispector’s Stream of Life; Éric Laurent - Ordinary
Interpretation

No. 20, 2010: Semblant and object a

Jacques Lacan - Note on the Child; Jacques-Alain Miller - The Family Bond in the Psychoanalytic
Experience; Jacques-Alain Miller - The Child, a Response from the Real; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen -
Semblants and Fictions in the Clinic with Children; Jacques-Alain Miller - On the Nature of
Semblants; Lacanian Clinic; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra - The Object Voice; Alexandre Stevens - The
Real and the Objects a in the Analytic Experience; Bernard Seynhaeve - The Drive; The Voice, the
Gaze and her Smile; Philippe de Georges - On Jouissance; Joseph Attié – Melancholia; Graciela
Brodsky - Truth and Lies; Jésus Santiago - Semblantisation and Nominalism; Hebe Tizio - The
Analyst and the Semblants; Marie-Hélène Blancard - The Invention of a Writing; Pierre Skriabine -
The Ink and the Brush; Remarks on the Particular and the Universal; Alexandre Stevens - The Clinic
of the Letter

No. 21, 2010: Femininity

Philip Metz - Transposing-system ( ) Reversing-object; Jacques Lacan - On Hysteria; Jacques-Alain
Miller - Theory of Caprice; Marie-Hélène Brousse - A Difficulty in Women’s Analysis; Pierre Naveau
- The Hysteric’s Refusal & the Two Jouissances; Adrian Price - Semblants and Sinthome in Freud’s
‘Three Lines of Development’; Jacqueline Dheret - The Hidden Life of Clotilde; Catherine Bonningue
- The Woman Without a Body; Patricia Johansson-Rosen - Woman with Postiche; Laure Naveau -The
Modesty of Hystory; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra - The End of Analysis Through the Pass; Elisa
Alvarenga - The Contingency of the Phallus and the End of Analysis; Éric Laurent - The Uses of the
Neurosciences for Psychoanalysis; Jean-Claude Maleval -Why is the Ideology of Evaluation
Pernicious?

No. 22, 2011: Lacanian practice

Jacques-Alain Miller - Transference, Repetition and Sexual Real; Dominique Laurent -What is
Called Sex...; Sonia Chiriaco - The Joke; Jacques-Alain Miller - Marginalia to ‘Constructions in
Analysis’; Philippe de Georges - Construction of the Case; Éric Laurent - The Case, from Unease to
the Lie; Pierre Naveau - Desire or Care; Daniel Roy - Rosa Doesn’t Sleep; Jacques-Alain Miller -
From the Neurone to the Knot; Nathalie Jaudel - Are You Neurophile or Neurosceptic?

No. 23, 2011: Our orientation

Jacques-Alain Miller - At the Coliseum; Carole Dewambrechies-La Sagna - The true anorexia of a
young girl; Alfredo Zenoni - When the child is the object; Marie-Hélène Blancard - The uncanny
incontestably falls under the imaginary; Martine Coussot -The ringing of the object; Anna Pigkou -
Melite’s pantomime; Jo Rostron - Missing something; Philippe Grisar - Dis-connections. The
treatment of an 11-year-old boy; Jacques-Alain Miller - Mental health and public order; Oscar
Ventura - Without nostalgia; Jean-Louis Gault - Hypermodern civilisation and contemporary
symptoms; Clotilde Leguil - Lacanian uses of ontology; Philip Dravers - The drive as a fundamental
concept of psychoanalysis; Roger Litten - Evaluation - a contemporary form of the social bond?

No. 24, 2012: Subject Supposed to Know

Jacques-Alain Miller - Psychoanalysis, the city and communities; Jean-Louis Gault -Chinese
chronicles: 1. The two ways of speech. 2. This is a walking stick. 3. Me phunai. 4. Mystery of
incarnation; Rose-Paule Vinciguerra - Towards a viable atheism?; Laure Naveau - The symptom at
the end of an analysis; Thomas Svolos-The-supposed-to-know-to-read-otherwise; Alicia Arenas -
Comments on ‘The supposed to know to read otherwise’; Jacques-Alain Miller - The child and
knowledge; Éric Zuliani - The child who comes; Florencia Fernández Coria Shanahan - In me more
than me; Francesca Biagi-Chai - An approach to the case of Harold Shipman; Pierre Naveau -
Gerhard Richter, a panorama; Pierre-Gilles Guéguen - Shame, by Steve McQueen: New York, New
York, galaxy of the Ones all alone.

No. 25, 2012: Autism

Éric Laurent - Autism and psychosis: further dialogue with Robert and Rosine Lefort. Jean-Claude
Maleval - Why the hypothesis of an autistic structure? Éric Laurent -Spectres of autism. Myriam
Perrin – Construction of an autistic dynamic: From the extractor fan to the washing machine. Enric
Berenguer & Mariela Roizner - On route to speaking; speech taking shape in autism. Hélène
Deltombe – From autism to speech. Corinne Rezki – A sinthomatic invention, what is that? Éric
Laurent - Autism: epidemic or the ordinary state of the subject? Éric Laurent - Research and punish:
ethics today. Sylvie Dagnino - A week with ABA. Pierre Naveau - The man who couldn’t get up in the
morning. Dinorah Otero - Attachad(a). Claire Hawkes - The man who came in from the cold. Anne
Lysy - Knowing how to do with one’s symptom. Véronique Voruz - Ethics and morality in the time of
the decline of the symbolic. Kjell Soleim - Symptom formation in the case of a killer. Bogdan Wolf -
Politics of the unconscious: from the paradoxes of psychoanalysis to the ethics of the symptom.
Susana Huler - True or real. Vanessa Place - Here is a joke. Véronique Voruz -L’autiste et sa voix by
Jean-Claude Maleval. Ian Parker - The subject of psychosis: a Lacanian perspective by Stijn
Vanheule.

No. 26 2013: Psychosis today

Éric Laurent – Ordinary psychosis; Marie-Hélène Brousse - Ordinary psychosis in the light of lacan’s
theory of discourse; Jacques-Alain Miller – Ordinary psychosis revisited; Jean-Pierre Deffieux – Not
so rare a case; Hervé Castenet – A subject in the fog; Jacques-Alain Miller and Others - The
conversation of Arcachon (extracts); Jean-François Cottes – ‘Je suis foyante’; Thierry Vigneron –
The use of fiction and lifestyle; Éric Laurent – Psychoanalytic treatments of the psychoses; Alfredo
Zenoni –Orienting oneself in transference; Francesca Biagi-Chai – Jouissance, nomination,
semblant; Catherine Meut – Work on the disaster; Christine Wertheim – Poem.

No.27: Science and the real

Jacques-Alain Miller - Psychoanalysis, its place among the sciences; Miquel Bassols -There is no
science of the real; Éric Laurent - The illusion of scientism, the anguish of scientists; Marco Focchi -
Number in science and in psychoanalysis; Pierre Skriabine - Science, the subject and psychoanalysis;
Philippe La Sagna et al. - Science and the name of the father; Esthela Solano-Suarez - The clinic in
the time of the real; Francois Ansermet - Trace and object; Guy Briole - Error and
misunderstanding; Alfredo Zenoni: A post-scientific real; Jacques- Alain Miller - Spare parts; Pierre
Naveau -Jealousy and the hidden gaze; Veronique Voruz - Reading Catherine M. on jealousy;
Bogdan Wolf - Intricacies of the gaze; Betty Bertrand-Godfrey - Jealousy as a name of the father?;
Laure Naveau - The other man of his life; Holly Pester - I have spoilt a better name than my own.
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