The Perverse Couple : 1967 : Jean Clavreuil

Jean Clavreul (in 1980) was co-chairman of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII. A psychiatrist, he practices psychoanalysis in Paris.

This article was first published as “Le Couple pervers,” in Le Desir et la perversion, ed. Piera Aulagnier-Spairani (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 91-117.

Translated by Stuart Schneiderman as The Perverse Couple,

Available to download at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Clavreil)

Published p215-233 of ‘Returning to Freud – Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan – Selections’ : 1980 : Stuart Schneiderman (Ed & Translator) : 1980 : Yale University, Further details & availability at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Schneiderman or Index of texts)

References

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P219 We should note how different each partner in a perverse couple is, precisely in the most lasting couples. The couple’s disparity is always remarkable. And I cannot fail to recall here that Lacan in his seminar on “subjective disparity” referred continually to the homosexual couples of the Symposium.

-There are many references to Socrates and Alcibiades in Seminar VIII Transference (1960-1961) : From 16th November 1960 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19601116 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts). A few are reproduced below and you are advised to read Jacques Lacan’s analysis for yourself!

-23^rd November 1960, p14 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, … this society game this Symposium we see is not a pretext for Plato’s dialogue, it refers to customs, to habits that are differently regulated according to the locality in Greece, the level of culture we would say, and the rule that is imposed there is not something exceptional: that everyone should bring his share in the form of a little contribution of a discourse determined by a subject (194d). Nevertheless there is something which was not foreseen, there is what one might call a disturbance. The rules were even given at the beginning of the Symposium that there should not be too much drinking; no doubt the pretext is that most of the people there already have a hangover because they had drunk too (3) much the night before. One also notices the importance of the serious character of this elite group that is made up that evening by fellow drinkers.

This does not prevent that at a moment, which is a moment at which not everything is finished, far from it, one of the guests, Aristophanes, has something to say in the order of a rectification of the agenda, or a demand for explanation. At that very moment there enter a group of people, who are completely drunk, namely Alcibiades and his companions. And Alcibiades, who is pretty high, takes over the chair and begins to make statements which are exactly the ones whose scandalous character I intend to highlight for you.

-23^rd November 1960, P17 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : And we see him in a gathering which reunites in short learned, serious men (although, in this context of Greek love on which we are going to put the accent later on which already contributes a background of permanent erotism from which these discourses on love are going to emerge) we see him therefore coming to recount to everybody something which we can summarise more or less in the following terms: namely the vain efforts that he made when he was a young man, at the time Socrates loved him, to get Socrates to have sex with him.

This is developed at length with details, and in short with a considerable crudity of language. There is no doubt that he made Socrates lose control, show how disturbed he was, yield to these direct corporal invitations, to a physical approach.

-23^rd November 1960, P20 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : To see then what is involved, and it is precisely because, what is involved is precisely the point around which there turns everything that is in question in the Symposium, the point around which there is going to be clarified at the deepest level not so much the question of the nature of love as the question which interests us here, namely, of its relationship with transference. It is because of this that I am going to focus the question on this articulation between the text which is reported to us of the discourses pronounced in the sumposion, (416BC) and the irruption of Alcibiades.

-30^th November 1960, P30 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, Is our access to this being one of love or not? Has our access some relation with what we know about the point we place ourselves at as regards the nature of love? This as you will see will lead us rather far, precisely to know that which – if I may express myself in this way by using a metaphor – is in the Symposium when Alcibiades compares Socrates to some of these tiny objects which it seems really existed at the time, to little Russian dolls for example, these things which fitted into one another; it appears that there were images whose outside represented a satyr or a Silenus, and, within we do not really know what but undoubtedly some precious things.

-30^th November 1960, P35 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, … namely the entry of Alcibiades, to which corresponds the subversion of all the rules of the Symposium, if only because of the following: he comes in drunk, and he puts himself forward as being essentially drunk and speaks as such in drunkenness.

Let us suppose that you were to say to yourselves that the interest of this dialogue, of this Symposium, is to manifest something which is properly speaking the difficulty of saying something about love which hangs together. If it were only a question of this we would be purely and simply in a cacophony but what Plato – at least this is what I claim, it is not particularly daring to claim it – what Plato shows us in a fashion which will never be unveiled, which will never be revealed, is that the contour that this difficulty outlines is something which indicates to us the point at which there is the fundamental topology which prevents there being said about love something which hangs together.

-25^th January 1961, P116 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, (9) The dimension of love is in the process of showing before us this something in which we must all the same recognise being delineated one of its characteristics, and first of all that it does not tend, wherever it manifests itself in the real, towards harmony. It does not seem after all that this beauty towards which the procession of desiring souls seems to be ascending is something that structures everything into this sort of convergence. Curiously, it is not given in the modes, in the manifestations of love, to call on all to love what you love, to blend themselves with you in the ascent towards the eromenon. Socrates, this most lovable of men, because he is put before us from the first words as a divine personage, after all, the first thing that is in question, is that Alcibiades wants to keep him for himself. You will say that you do not believe it and that all sorts of things go to show it, that is not the question, we are following the text and this is what is at stake. Not only is this what is at stake, but it is properly speaking this dimension which is introduced here.

-25^th January 1961, P117 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, Of course we are in the dimension of the truth that comes from wine and this is articulated in the In vino Veritas which Kierkegaard will take up when he too recreates his banquet. No doubt we are in the dimension of the truth that comes from wine, but all the boundaries of shame must have been broken to really speak about love as Alcibiades speaks about it when he shows what happened to him with Socrates.

-1^st Feb 1961, P118 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, … after these games of praising regulated as they had been up to then by this subject of love, there enters this actor, Alcibiades, who is going to change everything. As proof I only need the following: he himself changes the rules of the game by making himself the presiding authority. From that moment on he tells us, it is no longer a question of praising love but the other person and specifically each one is to praise his neighbour on the right. You will see that this is important for what follows, that it is already a lot to say about it, that, if it is a question of love, it is in act in the relationship of one to the other that it is here going to have to manifest itself

-& 8^th February 1961 …

-& 1^st March 1961 …

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P214-215 Such an approach would necessarily imply that we consider the perverse act to be a fantasy enacted by a normal or neurotic subject. Now, all the recent works tend to show that on the contrary, the perverse act is engaged in by subjects whose libidinal investments, whose relations with desire and the Law, are profoundly different from those of the neurotic. That is why, rather than speak of perversion (in the singular or plural), we speak of the perverse structure, since this term permits us to approach the problem of perversion independently of the particular form that any perverse act may take.

Here we encounter the paradox: in isolating a perverse structure, as distinguished from that of the normal or neurotic subject, do we not deny to the pervert a knowledge of and participation in the ultimate goal of libidinal evolution, the greatest achievement of sexual life, the “love” that each of us would say is alone capable of maintaining the solidarity of a couple?

Is the perverse structure compatible with love? This is the first question to which we are tempted to respond in the negative.

But if there is no love, what is the tie that assures the extraordinary solidarity of certain perverse couples? This could be a second question. Finally—and this is not the least important of the problems that I will raise today—what happens in the psychoanalytic relation when a pervert is introduced into it?

Does our conceptual apparatus permit us to speak of the couple formed by the pervert and his analyst?

Notably, is it possible to take up the notion of “transference” as we utilize it in the analysis of a neurotic?

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P220 Such disparities do not allow themselves to be reduced to the waverings of our categories. The masochist would not be so interested in seeing his torturer in action if this latter did not incarnate some model of force or virility. And even the characters of the divine Marquis [de Sade] are not interested in Theresa because she is a masochist. For Theresa is first “Justine,” which is to say “the misfortunes of virtue.” What would she be, this designated victim, if she did not incarnate a value, one of those values that the entire century venerated? It is through her, through this victim, that the perverse act finds not only its sense but also its place in a contemporary discourse—this in the same sense in which we said above that love, more than being an alibi, is a moral reference.

-See Kant with Sade : April 1963 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19630401 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

Possibly, the last two paragraphs, William J. Richardson’s translation, www.Freud2Lacan.com, However that may be, it appears that one has gained nothing by replacing Diotima here by Dolmancé, an individual whom the ordinary way of mankind seems to frighten more than it should, and who, Sade saw, closes the whole business with a Noli tangere matrem. Syphilitic and sewed up, the mother remains taboo. Our verdict is confirmed by the submission of Sade to the Law.

As a treatise truly on desire, there is little here then – in fact, nothing.

What is introduced here in this attempt at an encounter, is no more, at the very most, than a tone of reason. (And, again, a somewhat ironical comment on Kant‟s moral law).

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P222 Since we are proposing to go beyond the clinical facts into the psychoanalytic interpretation of the perverse couple and the perverse structure, we cannot avoid referring to the question of disavowal, exactly as Freud discusses it in his article on fetishism. I do not have to recall the questions raised about this matter, notably those that led Freud to utilize notions such as “splitting of the ego” and “coexistence of contradictory beliefs,” notions that are finally obscure but whose sense appears clearer, thanks to the elaboration given them in Lacanian theory through the notions of “subjective splitting” and of noncoincidence between “knowledge” and “truth”.

– Some references for “subjective splitting” from Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts (1963-1964) : from 15^th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan

-5^th February 1964, p44 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, I am not saying that Freud introduces the subject into the world—the subject as distinct from psychical function, which is a myth, a confused nebulosity—since it was Descartes who did this. But I am saying that Freud addresses the subject in order to say to him the following, which is new—Here, in the field of the dream, you are at home. Wo es war, soil Ich werden.

This does not mean, as some execrable translation would have it, Le moi doit délager le ça (the ego must dislodge the id).

-22^nd April 1964, p141-142 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, In my own vocabulary, on the other hand, I symbolize the subject by the barred S [$], in so far as it is constituted as secondary in relation to the signifier. In order to illustrate this, I will remind you that the thing may be presented in the simplest possible way by the single stroke. The first signifier is the notch by which it is indicated, for example, that the subject has killed one animal, by means of which he will not become confused in his memory when he has killed ten others. He will not have to remember which is which, and it is by means of this single stroke that he will count them.

The subject himself is marked off by the single stroke, and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers. When this signifier, this one, is established—the reckoning is one one. It is at the level, not of the one, but of the one one, at the level of the reckoning, that the subject has to situate himself as such. In this respect, the two ones are already distinguished. Thus is marked the first split that makes the subject as such distinguish himself from the sign in relation to which, at first, he has been able to constitute himself as subject. I would now warn you against confusing the function of the $ with the image of the objet a, in so far as it is thus that the subject sees himself duplicated—sees himself as constituted by the reflected, momentary, precarious image of mastery, imagines himself to be a man merely by virtue of the fact that he imagines himself.

-29^th April 1964, p154 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, I maintain that it is at the level of analysis —if we can take a few more steps forward—that the nodal point by which the pulsation of the unconscious is linked to sexual reality must be revealed. This nodal point is called desire, and the theoretical elaboration that I have pursued in recent years will show you, through each stage of clinical experience, how desire is situated in dependence on demand—which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder that runs under it, an element that is not indeterminate, which is a condition both, absolute and unapprehensible, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued (méconnu), an element that is called desire. It is this that makes the junction with the field defined by Freud as that of the sexual agency at the level of the primary process.

The function of desire is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the subject. Desidero is the Freudian cogito. It is necessarily there that the essential of the primary process is established. Note well what Freud says of this field, in which the impulse is satisfied essentially by hallucination.

-Two early references to “knowledge” and “truth” – there are others!

-Seminar II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955) : from 17^th November 1954 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19541117 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

-17^th November 1954, P4-5 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation, Yesterday evening, I underlined, in the few comments I made, transforming Meno’s equations, what one can call the function of truth in its nascent state. Indeed, the knowledge to which truth comes to be knotted must actually be endowed with its own inertia, which makes it lose something of the virtue which initiated its deposition as such, since it exhibits an obvious propensity to misrecognise its own meaning. Nowhere is this degradation more obvious than in psychoanalysis, and this fact, in and of itself, reveals the truly nodal point which psychoanalysis occupies within the limited advance of human subjectivity.

This singular ambiguity of knowledge and of truth can be seen at the original though one never really gets completely to the origin, let us take Plato as the origin, in the sense in which one speaks of the origin of coordinates. Yesterday evening we saw it revealed in the Meno, but we could just as easily have used Protagoras which wasn’t mentioned.

Who is Socrates? He is the one who within human subjectivity inaugurates that style from which the notion of knowledge as tied to certain requirements of coherence has arisen, knowledge which is the prerequisite for any future progress of science as experimental – and we will have to define what the sort of autonomy which science has acquired within the experimental register signifies. Well then, at the very moment when Socrates inaugurates this new being-in-the-world which here I call subjectivity, he realises that science will not be able to transmit the means to achieve the most precious thing, the arete, the excellence of the human being. Here already there is a decentring – it is by starting off with this virtue that a domain is opened up to knowledge, but this very virtue, with respect to its transmission, its tradition, its formation, remains outside of the domain. That is something which merits attention, rather than rushing off into believing that in the end everything will sort itself out, that it is only Socrates’s irony, that sooner or later science will catch up with this through a retroactive action. Yet, up until now, nothing in the course of history has proved this to us.

– a further reference to “Knowledge” and “Truth”

-25^th November 1959 of Seminar VII Ethics (1959-1960) : from 18^th November 1959 : Jacques Lacan, See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19591118 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P24 of Dennis Porter’s translation, But we must be careful. One must not always trust words and labels. This truth that we are seeking in a concrete experience is not that of a superior law. If the truth that we are seeking is a truth that frees, it is a truth that we will look for in a hiding place in our subject. It is a particular truth.

But if the form of its articulation that we find is the same in everyone though always different, it is because it appears to everyone in its intimate specificity with the character of an imperious Wunsch. Nothing can be compared to it that allows it to be judged from the outside. The quality that best characterizes it is that of being the true Wunsch, which was at the origin of an aberrant or atypical behavior.

We encounter this Wunsch with its particular, irreducible character as a modification that presupposes no other form of normalization than that of an experience of pleasure or of pain, but of a final experience from whence it springs and is subsequently preserved in the depths of the subject in an irreducible form. The Wunsch does not have the character of a universal law but, on the contrary, of the most particular of laws – even if it is universal that this particularity is to be found in every human being. We find it in a form that we have categorized as a regressive, infantile, unrealistic phase, characterized by a thought abandoned to desire, by desire taken to be reality.

That surely constitutes the text of our experience. But is that the whole of our discovery, is that the whole of our morality? That attenuation, that exposure to the light of day, that discovery of the thought of desire, of the truth of that thought? Do we expect that as a result of its mere disclosure the area will be swept clean for a different thought? In one way, it is indeed so, it is as simple as that. Yet at the same time if we formulate things thus, then everything remains veiled for us.

If the reward or the novelty of the psychoanalytic experience were limited to that, it wouldn’t go much further than the dated notion that was born long before psychoanalysis, namely, that the child is father of the man. The phrase comes from Wordsworth, the English romantic poet, and is quoted respectfully by Freud. (Quoted by Sigmund Freud in The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest :1913. See The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest : 1913 : Sigmund Freud, on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19130101)

– See also Seminar XIII- Science & Truth : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

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P222 If it is true that the discovery of this absence of the penis in the mother counters the presence of a penis in the child, and if it is true that such a discovery brings with it the theme of castration in showing that what is can also nor be, we must also recall that Freud always designated the true knot of the castration complex as the acquiring of knowledge about this absence. And he has said that this acquisition is made at the cost of great internal struggles. Then, aside from the threat (of being castrated) that this discovery brings virtually (it is possible to be dispossessed of it), there is something else that bears on the discovery, which concerns knowledge itself.

-Possibly Seminar IV, see Seminar IV The Relation from Object [La Relation d’objet] & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21^st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19561121)

-21^st November 1956, p12 of EC Collectives’ translation, mentions castration anguish.

-28^th November 1956, p10 of EC Collectives’ translation, ‘castration at the centre of the decisive crisis, the formative crisis, the major crisis which is Oedipus,’

-9^th January 1957, p1 of EC Collective’s translation, This, meanwhile, must lead to exhausting a certain number of texts, specifically those of Freud’s that range from 1923, which you might note as the date of his article on the infantile genital organisation[1] in which he posits, as a principle, the primacy of phallic assumption as the end of the infantile stage of sexuality, a typical phase for the boy as for the girl[2]. The genital organisation is attained for one as for the other, but on a model that makes the possession or the non-possession of the phallus into the primordial differential element with which, at this level, the genital organisation of the sexes are opposed to each other. According to Freud, there is not a realisation of the male and the female at this moment, but of what is endowed with the phallic attribute, and that what is not endowed with it is considered to be the equivalent of castrated[3].

[1] See Freud, S. (1923). The infantile genital organization (SE XIX), pp. 139-145. See The Infantile Genital Organization [Die infantile Genitalorganisation] (An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality) : 1923e : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19230101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

[2] See ibid., SE XIX p140 – “At the same time, the main characteristic of this ‘infantile genital organization’ is its difference from the final genital organization of the adult. This consists in the fact that, for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the phallus.”

[3] See ibid., SE XIX p144 – “The lack of a penis is regarded as a result of castration, and so now the child is faced with the task of coming to terms with castration in relation to himself.”

-30^th January 1957, p1-2 of EC Collectives’ translation, We must see that what is at stake is not a real phallus, insofar as it exists or does not exist as real, but that it is a symbolic phallus the nature of which, insofar as it is symbolic, is to present itself in the exchange as absence. An absence functioning as such, since everything that can be transmitted in the symbolic exchange is always something just as much absent as present. It is made to have this sort of fundamental alternation such that, having appeared at one point, it disappears, only to reappear at another. This means that it circulates, leaving behind the sign of its absence at the point of its origin. In other words, we immediately recognise that the phallus in question is just this symbolic object which limits the direction and the use of the real phallus by establishing the structural cycle of imaginary threats. Moreover, this is the meaning of the castration complex. This is the sense in which man is caught in the castration complex. But there is another function [usage] that is hidden, as it were, by the more or less formidable fantasies involved in man’s relation to prohibitions insofar as they bear on the use of the phallus – this is its symbolic function.

-30^th January 1957 p4 of EC Collectives’ translation, This, strictly speaking, is the relationship at stake in the fetishist’s relation to his object. In fact, if we follow his text, Freud emphasises it. He speaks of Verleugnung[9] with respect to the basic stance taken in the resolution of the relation to the fetish. But he also speaks of holding up this complex relation, as if it were a piece of decoration. This is how the terms of Freud’s language, both vivid and precise, take on their full value. He also says: “The horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute”[10]. And he also says that this fetish is a trophy. The word trophy does not occur, but in truth it is there, reinforcing the ‘token’ [Zeichen] with ‘triumph’ [Triumphes][11].

[9] ‘Denial’, but usually translated as ‘disavowal’ in psychoanalytic literature.

[10] See Freud, S. (1927). Fetishism. SE XXI p154 at Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud on this site 3 Sigmund Freud (19270101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

[11] Ibid. The full sentence reads “[The fetish] remains a token of triumph [Zeimen des Triumphes] over the threat of castration and a protection against it.”

-Probably all of 6^th March 1957, p1-2 of EC Collectives’ translation, the beginning paragraphs,

Today we will try to talk about castration. You can see that in Freud’s works, even though castration understood in terms of the Oedipus complex is everywhere, it is really only for the sake of the Oedipus complex that Freud attempts to fully articulate its formulation, in an article from 1931[2] about something completely new. And yet, the Oedipus complex is there from the beginning in Freud’s thought[3], because we might say that the great personal problem he started off with is: ‘what is a father?’ There can be no doubt about this because we know that his biography – his letters to Fliess – confirm that the presence of this topic and his preoccupation with it are at the origin of the Oedipus complex. And Freud only explained this at a much later date. As for castration, we can’t find it anywhere, or anything comparable. Freud never fully articulated the precise meaning, the precise psychic impact of this fear, this threat, this insistent plea, this dramatic moment – where these words can also be laid out with a question mark regarding castration.

Ultimately, when last time I started to approach the issue through the covert arrival of frustration[4], the imaginary phallic game with the mother, many of you – even if you understood the way I illustrated it with the intervention of the father (his symbolic persona being purely and simply the symbolic persona of dreams) – remained perplexed on the topic: What is this castration all about? What does it mean to say that for the subject to attain ‘genital maturity’, he more or less has to have been castrated? If you consider things simply at the level of reading – even though it is nowhere articulated in this way – it is literally implied everywhere in Freud’s works.

If you will, castration is the sign of the Oedipal drama, for it is its implicit hinge. This may pass unnoticed, may be taken as a sort of ‘as if’** , which comes down to hearing the flow of analytic discourse which seems questionable in its […] But from the moment when it’s enough that the text makes you stop for a moment – as I am doing now – so that in fact the abruptness of this statement will appear to you as problematic, as it in fact is. And moreover, as paradoxical as it may be, you may take this formula which I was just alluding to as a point of departure. What does such a formulation mean, then? What does it imply? What does it presuppose?

[2] Freud Sigmund “Female Sexuality” (1931b) SE XXI p221-243. See Female Sexuality [Ober die weibliche Sexualidit] : 1931b : Sigmund Freud on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19310101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

[3] Freud’s letters to Fliess enable us to see him get to grips with the Oedipus complex. In the summer and autumn of 1897 his self-analysis revealed the essential features of the Oedipus complex. The first hint of the Oedipus complex can be seen in Draft N – Notes (III) (31st May 1897), enclosed with Letter of 31st May 1897 – Letter 64: ‘It seems as though this death wish is directed in sons against their fathers and in daughters against their mothers.’ p250 of The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 Translated & edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Belknap Press (1985). See Letter to Wilhelm Fliess (Letter 64) & Draft N (Notes III) : 31^st May 1897 : Sigmund Freud on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (18970531)

[4] References to frustration in the last session :

Seminar IV : 27th February 1957 : paragraph 1, p1, Today I intend to take up, once again, the terms in which I am trying to formulate for you this necessary re-casting of the notion of frustration

** ‘as if’case : see Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia (known as the ‘as if’ case) : 1942 : Helene Deutsch. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Deutsch or Index of Other Authors’ texts)

-Then about 23 further references to frustration TO

-Seminar IV : 27th February 1957 : paragraph 54, p12, When it appears, when it truly reveals itself, it’s the fetish. What does this mean? It means that what emerges at this stage and just before the Oedipus is a primitive relation, which I established for you today and which I set out from: primitive frustration and Oedipus.

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P223 We can pose the question in the most precise way, “precise” as regards psychoanalytic theory, in the very terms Freud used in his article “Drives and Their Vicissitudes” where he speaks to us of the separation that we should make between the external, exogenous excitations, which one can be rid of through an appropriate act, and the endogenous drives.

-See Drives (mistranslated as Instincts) and their vicissitudes : 1915c : Sigmund Freud, SE XIV on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19150101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

-SE XIV p120, External stimuli impose only the single task of withdrawing from them; this is accomplished by muscular movements, one of which eventually achieves that aim and thereafter, being the expedient movement, becomes a hereditary disposition. Drive (Instinctual) stimuli, which originate from within the organism, cannot be dealt with by this mechanism. Thus they make far higher demands on the nervous system and cause it to undertake involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation. Above all, they oblige the nervous system to renounce its ideal intention of keeping off stimuli, for they maintain an incessant and unavoidable afflux of stimulation. We may therefore well conclude that drives (instincts) and not externa stimuli are the true motive forces behind the advances that have led the nervous system, with its unlimited capacities, to its present high level of development.

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P223 Freud does not really take a position on the question of the drive in his article on fetishism. We can even say that in isolating the moment of the discovery, Freud’s text lets it be understood that the discovery is in some sense accidental. But no text of Freud really states that the libidinal development is perverted because the child was taken unawares by a traumatizing discovery.

-See Fetishism : 1927 : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19270101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts) for examples of the moment of discovery.

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P223 In isolating this moment of discovery—we can consider it to be mythic—

Freud separates a “before” from an “after.”

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P224 Here we find one of the themes that I evoked at the beginning of this report, concerning the pervert’s wager, where it is easy for us to recognize the challenge that he presents to our position with respect to the “supposed subject of knowing,” to use Lacan’s term.

-10^th June 1964, Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts (1963-1964) : from 15^th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan (See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19640115 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts) p232 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere—I have abbreviated it for you today at the top of the blackboard as S.s.S. (sujet suppose savoir) there is transference.

What does an organization of psycho-analysts mean when it confers certificates of ability, if not that it indicates to whom one may apply to represent this subject who is supposed to know?

Now, it is quite certain, as everyone knows, that no psychoanalyst can claim to represent, in however slight a way, a corpus of absolute knowledge. That is why, in a sense, it can be said that if there is someone to whom one can apply there can be only one such person. This one was Freud, while he was alive. The fact that Freud, on the subject of the unconscious, was legitimately the subject that one could presume to know, sets aside anything that had to do with the analytic relation, when it was initiated, by his patients, with him.

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P225 I will ask only one essential question: what is the quality of a knowledge that does not leave any place for the field of illusion? We know that this field of illusion is necessary to the constitution of the symbolic order in which Lacan has designated the object a as the first term of the only algebra where the subject can be recognized.

-30^th January 1957 Seminar IV, p4 of EC Collectives’ translation, And, no doubt, this is certainly at least in part because man’s feeling of a certain fundamental illusion in all his relations of desire is indeed how he incarnates and idolises his feeling of this ‘nothing’ which is beyond the love object. This is the fundamental schema you must keep in mind if you want to correctly situate the elements that are involved whenever we consider the establishment of the fetishistic relation. [Diagram omitted] So the subject is here, and the object is this ‘beyond’, which is nothing, or a symbol, or the phallus the woman lacks. But as soon as the curtain is set up, something is painted on this curtain which says: ‘the object is beyond’. This is the object which can then occupy the place of the lack and, as such, it can also sustain love. But this is precisely insofar as it is not the point to which desire is attached. In a certain way, desire appears here as a metaphor for love, but only along with the illusory object which ties it there, insofar as it is highlighted [valorisé] as illusory. The famous splitting of the ego[8], where the fetish is concerned… which is explained to us by saying that through the fetish, for example, the woman’s castration is simultaneously affirmed and denied, since the presence of the fetish means precisely that she has not lost this phallus but at the same time she can be made to lose it – that is, she can be castrated.

[8] See Freud, S. (1938 [1940]). Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (SE XXIII). See Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence : 1938 [1940e] : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19380101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

***

P226 We return to the interpretation of the scene where the young child discovers the absence of the penis in his mother, since we must elucidate the very important question that P. Aulagnier has rightly posed: with what eye does the mother see her child, who looks at her? It is here that we find the question, left to the side for a moment, of the scopophilic drive, of the look.

-An example of this, and there may be others…, is in Seminar IV & Jacques Lacan’s analysis of Little Hans, 13^th March 1957, Seminar IV, p6-7 of EC Collectives’ translation, You have seen the pertinent remarks concerning the order of the child, but within the order, it is to his mother, first of all, that he asks the question: “Do you also have a “fait-pipi [wee-wee maker]”?

What his mother says to him we’ll talk about later, and Hans blurts out at this point: “Yes, I had only thought…”[11], that is to say that, not bad at all, he is actually in the process of simmering some stuff. He then re-asks his father the question[12], [p206] he revels [se rejouit] after having viewed the lion’s wee-wee maker [13] which is not entirely through chance, and from that moment on, that is to say before the onset of the phobia, he clearly indicates that if his mother must have this wee-wee-maker as she asserts this to him – not in my opinion without some impudence – it should show itself. For one evening, which is not very far from the time of this questioning, he literally stalks her in the process of undressing, pointing out that if she had one, it should be as big as the one of a horse[14].

[11] SE X p7 Hans: ‘I was only just thinking.’ (James Strachey’s translation) See Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy – ‘Little Hans’: 1909 : Sigmund Freud on this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19090101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

[12] SE X p9 Hans (aged three and three-quarters): ‘Daddy, have you got a widdler too?’

[13] SE X p9 At about the same age (three and a half), standing in front of the lions’ cage, at Schönbrunn, little Hans called out in a joyful and excited voice: ‘I saw the lion’s widdler.’

[14] SE X p9-10 Another time he was looking on intently while his mother undressed before going to bed. ‘What are you staring like that for?’ she asked.

Hans: ‘I was only looking to see if you’d got a widdler too.’

Mother: “Of course. Didn’t you know that?’

Hans: ‘No. I thought you were so big you’d have a widdler like a horse.’

This expectation of little Hans’s deserves to be borne in mind; it will become important later on.

***

P227 You will easily recall these mothers, fascinated by the talents of their boys, who let them settle into a homosexuality in which the mothers play the role of accomplice. These mothers pretend not to see the direction taken by their sons’ sexuality and remain in a curious position where they can guess everything, without really knowing, in a reverse reproduction of the scene Freud talks of.

-Note : This sounds familiar and I cannot bring it to mind, it may be Seminar X. In Seminar IV Jacques Lacan examines the Case of the Female Homosexual and Dora and others. This to be investigated further, perhaps.

-27^th February 1957 Seminar IV, p12 of EC Collectives’ translation, Similarly, in masculine homosexuality – to restrict ourselves to that, today – it is still the phallus that is at stake for the subject. But, oddly, it is still his, even insofar as he seeks it in another.