Jacques Lacau

Desire and Its Interpretation

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan

Book VI

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller

Translated by Bruce Fink

polity
First published in French as Le Semii;iaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VI Le desir
et son interpretation (1958-1959) ©Editions de La Martiniere et Le Champ
Freudien, 2013

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 Contents

Abbreviations Vll
Bibliographical Note Vlll
Figures, Tables, and Illustrations ix

INTRODUCTION

I Constructing the Graph 3

II Further Explanation 25

ON DESIRE IN DREAMS

III The Dream about the Dead Father: "He did not
know he was dead" 43
IV Little Anna's Dream 60
v The Dream about the Dead Father: "As he wished" 78
VI Introducing the Object of Desire 95
VII Desire's Phallic Mediation 111

A DREAM ANALYZED BY ELLA SHARPE

VIII The Little Cough as a Message 133

IX The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 152
x The Image of the Inside-Out Glove 171
XI Sacrificing the Taboo Queen 191
XII The Laughter of the Immortal Gods 210

SEVEN CLASSES ON HAMLET

XIII Impossible Action 233

XIV The Desire Trap 249
xv The Mother's Desire 269
vi Contents

XVI There is No Other of the Other 291

XVII Ophelia, the Object 306
XVIII Mourning and Desire 323
XIX Phallophanies 339

THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE

xx The Fundamental Fantasy 357

XXI In the Form of a Cut 374
XXII Cut and Fantasy 391
XXIII The Function of the Subjective Slit in Perverse
Fantasies 407
XXIV The Dialectic of Desire in Neurosis 422
xxv The Either/Or Concerning the Object 436
XXVI The Function of Splitting in Perversion 453

CONCLUSION AND OVERTURE

XXVII Toward Sublimation 471

APPENDIX

Marginalia on the Seminar on Desire,

by Jacques-Alain Miller 489

Index 519
 Abbreviations

Ecrits Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, by Lacan

GW Gesammelte Werke, by Sigmund Freud (Frankfurt am
Main: S . Fischer Verlag)
!JP International Journal of Psychoanalysis
PQ Psychoanalytic Quarterly
PUF Presses Universitaires de France
RFP Revue Fran(:aise de Psychanalyse
SE Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud

Words followed by an asterisk (*) are found in English in the

original.
 Bibliographical Note

All quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet are from The Complete

Pelican Shakespeare: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works
(New York: Viking Press, 1969). Exact quotes from Shakespeare's
and other authors' texts are placed in double quote marks, whereas
Lacan's paraphrases or extrapolations of their texts are placed in
single quote marks.
All references here to Lacan's Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) are to the
pagination of Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New
York & London: W. W. Norton & Co. , 2006). When I refer to
Lacan's Seminars, I provide the pagination of the English editions,
when they exist; when they do not, I give the page number(s) in the
French editions. All the extant Seminars except the present one were
published in French by Editions du Seuil in Paris. Seminars that
have yet to be published in French are indicated by volume number
and date of class.
References to Freud's work here are always to The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24
volumes) published in London by Hogarth Press, abbreviated here
as SE, followed by the volume number and page(s).
All text in square brackets has been added by the translator.
 Figures, Tables, and
Illustrations

Figure 1.1 The first level [etage] 12

Figure 1.2 The second level 14
Figure 1.3 The second level completed by " Che vuoi?" 15
Figure 1.4 The third stage [etape] 18
Figure 2.1 The simultaneity of the four trajectories 27
Figure 2.2 The homology between the two relationships 36
Figure 5.1 Interpretation between statement and
enunciation 89
Figure 5.2 Distribution of the four elements between the
two characters in the dream 91
Figure 7.1 New distribution of the statement and
enunciation 114
Figure 7.2 The L schema 117
Figure 7.3 The inverted bouquet illusion 127
Figure 7.4 Rotation of the plane mirror 127
Figure 8.1 Simplified graph 133
Figure 9.1 It is a message 158
Figure 9.2 The first loop of associations 168
Figure 13.l The "He knew" in Hamlet 243
Figure 15.1 The interrogative hook 283
Figure 15.2 The unconscious signifying chain 283
Figure 15.3 The line of desire 284
Figure 15.4 The unconscious circuit of desire 285
Figure 25.1 The bad internal object 445

Table 19.l Table of lacking objects 348

Table 20.1 Synchronic schema of the dialectic of desire 370
Table A l The process of logical generation 509

Illustration plate 1 Ophelia, Sir John Everett Millais

Illustration plate 2 Melancholia, Albrecht Diirer
 Book VI

Desire and Its Interpretation

1958-1959
INTRODUCTION
 I 11

CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

Reintroducing the word "desire"

Poets and philosophers
The three schemas
A defense against distress
Darwin and the Devil's shudder

This year we are going to talk about desire and its interpretation.
A psychoanalysis is a therapeutic process, as people are wont to
say. Let us say that it is a treatment, a psychical treatment.
This treatment concerns different levels ofthe psyche, first and fore­
most what I will call marginal or residual phenomena, such as dreams,
slips ofthe tongue, and witticisms. These were the first scientific objects
ofpsychoanalytic experience and the ones I emphasized last year.
Examining the curative aspect of this treatment, we find that it
also concerns symptoms, broadly speaking, insofar as they manifest
themselves in subjects in the guise of inhibitions. The latter form
symptoms and are sustained by symptoms.
Lastly, it is a treatment that modifies structures - namely, those
that are known as neuroses or neuropsychoses - which Freud at first
characterized as "neuropsychoses of defense."
In what way does psychoanalysis intervene so as to deal at various
levels with these different phenomenal realities? It intervenes insofar
as they involve desire.
The phenomena that I called residual or marginal were initially
apprehended by Freud, in the symptoms that we see described from
one end of his work to the other, under the heading of desire and as
significant as regards desire.
Similarly, anxiety [angoisse], inasmuch as we consider it to be key
to the determination of symptoms, arises only insofar as some activ-
ity that enters into the play of symptoms becomes eroticized- or, to 12
put it better, is taken up in the mechanism of desire.
 4 Introduction

Finally, what does the very term "defense" mean when it is used
regarding the neuropsychoses? What is there a defense against, if it
is not desire itself?
To conclude this introduction, it will suffice to indicate that
libido, a notion that lies at the heart of psychoanalytic theory, is
nothing but the psychical energy of desire.
I previously indicated in passing - recall my metaphor of the
factory - that in order for the notion of energy to hold up, certain
conjunctions of the symbolic with the real are necessary. I cannot,
however, go into this specific point right now.
Analytic theory is thus thoroughly based on the notion of libido
- that is, on the energy of desire.

Yet, as we have been seeing for some time now, analytic theory is
moving ever further in a different direction.
Those who champion this new orientation very consciously
indicate its originality, at least those among them who are most
conscious of what they are doing. Fairbairn, who is the most typical
representative of this trend, has written on several occasions -
because he never stops writing - and, specifically, in a collection
entitled Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, that modern psy­
choanalytic theory has changed its axis somewhat compared to the
one Freud initially gave it, inasmuch as it no longer considers libido
to be "pleasure-seeking"* but, rather, to be "object-seeking."*
I have frequently discussed this trend, which views libido as corre­
lated with an object that is supposed to be in some sense predestined
for it. I have already shown you its impact on psychoanalytic theory
and technique in a thousand ways. I believe that I have managed on
several occasions to designate the deviations from analytic practice
that this trend entails, several of which might well be characterized
as dangerous.
In order for us to broach the problem we will be focusing on this
year, I wish to point out the importance of simply reintroducing the
13 word "desire" into our vocabulary, a word that is manifestly veiled
in all of current psychoanalytic experience. By reintroducing it, we
produce a feeling, not of revitalization, but of disorientation. I mean
that, if instead of speaking about "libido" or the "genital object," we
speak about "genital desire," it may seem harder to take for granted
that the development of this desire automatically implies the pos­
sibility of opening oneself up to love, or the possibility of a total
actualization of love. The latter seems to have become a doctrinal
 Constructing the Graph 5

tenet in a certain perspective regarding the maturing of libido over

time.
This trend regarding the maturing of libido is all the more surpris­
ing in that it has arisen at the heart of a doctrine that was the first to
not simply highlight but even to account for what Freud classified
under the heading of debasement in our love lives. Freud argued
that, whereas desire seems in fact to bring with it a certain quantum
of love, it is very often a love that leads to conflict within oneself, a
love that is not owned, a love that refuses to be owned.
On the other hand, the simple fact that we reintroduce the word
"desire" - instead of currently used terms like "affectivity" and
"positive" or "negative feeling" that stem from what I would call a
disgraceful approach to the forces at work in the analytic relation­
ship, especially regarding transference - creates a split that will in
and of itself, it seems to me, have an enlightening effect.
Indeed, if - instead of considering transference to be constituted
by affects or positive or negative feelings, given everything those
terms bring with them that is vague and veiled - we name what is
experienced here with the single term "desire," and speak of sexual
desire and aggressive desire with respect to the analyst, it will
become immediately visible that these desires do not constitute the
whole of transference. It will become clear that transference must be
defined by something other than more or less confused references to
the notion of affect, whether positive or negative.
The final benefit of pronouncing the word "desire" and of
using it in its fullest sense is that we will ask ourselves, "What is
desire?"
This is not a question that we will be able to answer simply. Were 14
I not bound here by what I might call an urgent rendezvous with the
needs of psychoanalytic practice, I would allow myself an investiga-
tion into the meaning of the word "desire" in the work of those who
are the most qualified to highlight its usage - namely, poets and
philosophers. But I will not do so.
We will see how the word "desire" is used, transmitted, and func­
tions in poetry later, assuming we take our investigation far enough.
If it is true, as all of my work this year will show you, that desire's
position is profoundly marked by, moored to, and riveted to a
certain linguistic function - that is, to a certain relationship between
the subject and the signifier [or: system of signifiers, le signifiant] -

psychoanalytic experience will take us far enough in this exploration

(at least I hope it will) for there to be ample time to take advantage
of the specifically poetic evocation of this term. This will also allow
us, in the end, to better understand the relations between the nature
of poetic creation and desire.
 6 Introduction

I will simply comment that the difficulties characteristic of the

game of hide-and-go-seek that lies at the basis of what our experi.1
ence reveals to us can already be seen in the fact, for example, that
poetry clearly bridles, as it were, at the depiction of desire's object.
In this respect, figurative poetry- the kind that I would say virtually
paints beauty's "roses and lilies" - always expresses desire with a
singular coldness. Curiously enough, the opposite is true in the type
of poetry that is dubbed metaphysical. This is owing to the law that,
strictly speaking, rules the evocation of desire. For those among you
who read English, I will refer here only to the most eminent of the
metaphysical poets of English literature, John Donne, inviting you
to read a famous poem like "The Ecstasy," for example, in order to
observe how impressively the question of the structure of our rela­
tion to desire is raised in it.
The very title of Donne's poem indicates the beginnings of the
direction taken by the poetic approach to desire, on the lyrical level
at least, when desire itself is targeted. To be sure, when the poet's
play girds itself with dramatic action, it goes much further in ren-
15 dering desire present to mind. For the time being, I will leave this
dimension to one side. But I am mentioning it already because we
broached it last year- it is the dimension of comedy. We will have
to come back to it later.
Let us not dwell on poets any longer here. I mentioned them only
as a preliminary pointer, and in order to indicate that we will return
to them later, more or less sporadically. I would like to dwell for a
moment, instead, on a position espoused by certain philosophers,
for it is quite exemplary, I believe, as regards where the problem lies
for us.
I have taken the trouble to write the following terms on the
blackboard for you: "pleasure-seeking"* and "object-seeking."*
Speculative thinkers and moralists have always broached the
problem in just such terms. I am referring to theoretical morality,
the morality that is enunciated in the form of precepts and rules and
in the operations of philosophers - above all, those referred to as
ethicists.
I have already pointed out to you the basis of all morality that
one could call "physicalistic," in the sense in which, in medieval phi­
losophy, people talked about the physical theory of love as opposed
to the ecstatic theory of love. Up to a certain point, we could say
that every theory of morality that has hitherto been expressed in
the philosophical tradition has, in short, taken as its basis what one
might call the hedonistic tradition. The latter involves establishing
a sort of equivalence between two terms, pleasure and the object, in
the sense in which the object is the libido's natural object insofar as
 Constructing the Graph 7

it is a boon [bienfait]. Once one adopts this criterion, pleasure must

be admitted into the ranks of the goods [biens] sought by the subject
and even into the ranks of the Sovereign Good, even if one refuses
oneself pleasure.
Once we enter into Scholastic debates, the hedonistic ethical tradi­
tion no longer surprises us and we no longer perceive its paradoxes.
Yet, in the end, what could be more contrary to what I shall call the
experience of practical reason than the supposed convergence of
pleasure with the good?
If we look at it closely - if we look, for example, at how things
are expressed in Aristotle's work - what do we see being developed?
In Aristotle's work it is very clear, things are very pure: pleasure
and the good can only be equated in what I will call the master's
ethics. This flattering ideal awards itself the term "temperance," 16 �
as opposed to "intemperance," suggesting as it does the subject's
mastery over his own habits. Yet the inconsistency of this theory is
quite striking.
If you reread the famous passages [in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7]
concerning the use of pleasures, you will see that everything that
enters into this moralizing perspective has to do with the register
of mastery, with a master's morality, and with that over which the
master can achieve mastery [discipliner]. He can achieve mastery
over many things, primarily his behavior when it comes to his habits
- in other words, when it comes to the handling and use of his ego.
But as concerns desire, things are quite different.
Aristotle - who was quite lucid about and conscious of what
results from this practical and theoretical conceptualization of
ethics - himself recognizes that desires (epithumia) go beyond a
certain limit, which is precisely that of mastery and the ego, and
that they very quickly enter the realm of what he calls "brutishness"
or "beastiality." Desires are exiled from the field proper to man,
assuming man identifies with the master's reality. Brutishness is, in
this case, akin to perversion. Aristotle has, moreover, in this regard
a singularly modern conception that might be translated by saying
that the master cannot be judged on this score. This is almost tanta­
mount to saying, in our vocabulary, that he cannot be recognized as
responsible [for his desires]. These texts are worth recalling to mind
and will enlighten you if you reread them.
In the camp opposing this particular philosophical tradition,
there is someone whom I should like to name. He is, in my view,
the precursor of something that I believe to be new, that we must
consider to be new in, let us say, the progress or meaning of a certain
relationship of man to himself, which is that of psychoanalysis such
as Freud developed it. This someone is Spinoza.
 8 Introduction

It is, after all, in his work that we read, at least with a rather excep­
tional stress, a formulation like the following: "Desire is the very
essence of man." So as not to separate the beginning of his formula­
tion from what follows, I will add: "inasmuch as it is understood to
be based on one of his inclinations, understood as determined and
dominated by one of his inclinations to do something."
We could already spell out in detail what in this formulation
17 remains unrevealed, as it were. I say "unrevealed" because, of
course, one cannot translate Spinoza using Freud. But I am men­
tioning it here as a quite singular bit of evidence. I no doubt have
a greater fondness for Spinoza's work than others do, owing to the
fact that I spent a lot of time reading Spinoza a very long time ago.
Yet I do not believe that this is the reason why, in rereading his work
on the basis of my own experience, it seems to me that someone
who is involved in Freudian practice can feel quite at home reading
texts like De Servitute Humana, written by someone for whom all of
human reality is structured and organized on the basis of the attrib­
utes of divine substance. But let us leave this introductory remark
aside as well for the time being, with the understanding that we will
return to it.
I would like to give you a far more accessible example, with
which I will conclude my philosophical references to our topic. I
selected it at the most accessible level, or even the most common
you can find. Open the dictionary by the late, charming Lalande, his
Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie ["Technical and
Critical Dictionary of Philosophy" (Paris: PUP, 1960)]. Attempts to
establish such dictionaries are extremely perilous and yet simultane­
ously fruitful, language being crucial to every problem we examine.
You can be sure that in putting together a dictionary, you will come
up with something suggestive. Here we find the following: "Desire:
Begehren, Begehrung. " It is worth recalling what desire means in
German philosophy; it is:

A spontaneous and conscious need tending [tendance] toward

a known or imagined end. Desire is thus based on need, of
which it is a special and more complex case. It opposes the will
(or willing in general) insofar as the will also presupposes: (1)
at least temporary coordination of the needs; (2) opposition
between the subject and the object; (3) consciousness of its own
effectiveness; and (4) an idea of the means by which the wished­
for end can be realized.

These reminders are extremely useful, except for the fact that, in
an article designed to define desire, there are but two lines to situate
 Constructing the Graph 9

it in relationship to the needs, while the rest is related to the will.

This is what the discourse on desire in this dictionary comes down
to, except that the following is added to it: "Lastly, according to 18
certain philosophers, there is a specific kind of fiat in the will that is
irreducible to the needs and that constitutes freedom." There is an
air of irony in that last line, which is quite striking on the part of this
philosophical author.
In a footnote, Lalande adds, "Desire is the need to procure oneself
an emotion that has already been experienced or imagined; it is the
natural will to have a certain pleasure." He follows this with quotes
from the work of Rauh and Revault d'Allonnes, the term "natural
will" being of interest as a reference. To which Lalande personally
adds the following:

This definition strikes me as a bit too narrow in that it does not

adequately take into account the fact that certain needs precede
their corresponding emotions. Desire essentially seems to me to
be the desire for an act or a state, without a [mental] represen­
tation of the affective character of this end being necessary in
every case.

I think he is referring to the representation of pleasure or of some­

thing else. Whatever the case may be, it certainly does not fail to
raise the question of what is at stake, whether it is the representa­
tion of pleasure or pleasure itself. I certainly do not believe that it is
a simple task to home in on the signification of desire by means of
such a dictionary, all the more so in that one cannot say that the way
was paved for this task by the tradition to which the author refers.
Is desire a psychological reality that rebels against all organiza­
tion? Would we manage, in the final analysis, to broach the reality
of desire by subtracting the characteristics indicated [by Lalande],
insofar as they are those of the will? We would then have the con­
trary: we would have a non-coordination of the needs, even if only
temporary; and the opposition between the subject and the object
would truly disappear. Similarly, we would be faced with a need
lacking in consciousness of its own effectiveness, and without an
idea of the words by which it would realize the desired end. In short,
we would find ourselves in a field in which psychoanalysis has con­
tributed more precise formulations.
In effect, within these negative determinations, psychoanalysis
very precisely traces out different levels: the drive, inasmuch as it
is the non-coordination of the needs, even if only temporary; and
fantasy, inasmuch as it introduces an essential link [articulation] or,
more precisely, an altogether blatant type of link within the vague
 10 Introduction

determination that we designate as the non-opposition between the

subject and the object. It will be our goal this year to try to define
9 what fantasy is, perhaps even a bit more precisely than the psycho­
analytic tradition has hitherto been able to.
As for what remains of Lalande's definition, which implies ideal­
ism and pragmatism, I will retain but one thing for the time being
- namely, how difficult it seems to be to situate and analyze desire
with reference to objects alone.
I am going to stop here, in order to turn more specifically to the
terms with which I believe I can lay out the problem of our experi­
ence for you this year: the terms "desire" and its "interpretation."

The internal or connecting link between desire and its interpretation

in psychoanalytic experience has a feature that habit alone stops
us from seeing - namely, the degree to which the interpretation of
desire is already, in and of itself, subjective [or: concerns the subject,
subjective], being linked just as internally to the very manifestation
of desire.
You are aware of the vantage point from which we, I won't say
are starting out, but are making headway. We have been working
together for quite some time. We have been trying to conceptualize
the outlines of our experience for five years already. These outlines
are converging this year on a problem - which may be where all
these points, some of which are quite far flung, converge- a problem
that I am trying to pave a way to broach for you.
Since we have marched side by side these last five years, I can
immediately posit that psychoanalysis essentially shows us what I
will call the taking up [prise] of man in the constituent [ constituant]
of the signifying chain. This taking up is undoubtedly linked to the
existence of human beings, but it is not coextensive with it. Humans
speak, and in order to speak they must enter into language and into
a pre-existing discourse. The law of subjectivity that psychoanalysis
O forcefully brings out - namely, the fundamental dependence of sub­
jectivity on language - is so essential that all of psychology literally
hinges on it.
I will say that, at the very least, there is a form of psychology that
is utterly subject to language, the psychology that we can define as
the sum total of studies concerning what I might call sensory expe­
rience [sensibilite], in the broadest sense, insofar as that experience
functions so as to maintain totality or homeostasis. What is involved
are, in short, an organism's sensory functions. Here everything is
 Constructing the Graph 11

included: not only all of the experimental data of psychophysics, but

also everything that can be contributed, most broadly speaking, by
employing the notion of form in grasping the means by which con­
stancy is maintained in an organism. An entire field of psychology is
inscribed therein; it is sustained by the experience that is characteris­
tic of it and it gives rise to research that continues to be carried out.
Nevertheless, the subjectivity in question - insofar as man is
caught up in language, whether he likes it or not, and insofar as he
is caught up in it far beyond his knowledge of it - is not immanent
in sensory experience, if we understand the latter in terms of the
stimulus-response pair. This is because the stimulus is given [by a
researcher] as a function of a code that imposes its own order on
need [that of the subject involved in the experiment], which must
express itself in that code.
From an experimental perspective, one can at least try to account
for the workings of the stimulus-response cycle in terms of signs.
One can say that a stimulus is a sign given by the external environ­
ment that requires an organism to respond or defend itself, and that
the organism in turn gives a sign. If you tickle the soles of a frog's
feet, the frog responds with a certain muscular relaxation. But when
it comes to subjectivity that is caught up in language, it is not a sign
that is given, but rather a signifier.
Keep in mind the following, which appears to be simple: in the
theory of communication, people talk about the sign as something
that addresses someone and concerns a third thing that the sign
represents. Quite recently again, we have been told that three is the
minimum number of terms. Without even bothering to include a
sender, they claim that, apart from someone who hears, we need but
a sign, which signifies the third thing that the sign simply represents.
Now, as regards signifiers, this construction is false because a
signifier does not concern a third thing that it supposedly represents 21
but concerns another signifier that i t is not.
I would like to show you, not the genesis, but rather the construc­
tion of the three schemas I just put up on the blackboard [Figures
1.1, 1.2, and 1 .3]. Now don't go thinking that we are talking about
"stages" [etapes] here, even if we do occasionally find something like
stages that are in fact gone through by the subject. The subject must
come to occupy his place therein, but don't think of these schemas
as typical stages of development; what is at stake is rather a genera­
tion, or a logical anteriority of each schema with respect to the one
that follows it.
What does capital D represent? D represents the signifying chain.
This basic, fundamental structure subjects every manifestation of
language to the condition of being regulated by a succession - in
 12 Introduction

'
'

�
I
s
I

I
I
I

LI
I Id

Figure 1.1: The first level (etage)

other words, by diachrony, that is, by something that unfolds over

time. S stands for "signifier."
I will leave to one side the temporal properties that are involved;
we will perhaps be led to return to them later. Let us say that the
fullness of the fabric [etoffe] of temporality, as they say, is not at all
:2 involved here. Things boil down to the notion of succession here
and to what it may already imply as regards the notion of scansion,
but we are not there yet.
Our concern is with the subject's involvement [or: embeddedness,
implication] in the signifier. It can only be established on the basis of
a discrete or differential element.
Given what I just pointed out - namely, that a signifier is defined
and takes on its value and meaning on the basis of its relationship to
another signifier in a system of signifying oppositions - the signify­
ing chain develops in a dimension that implies a certain synchrony
of signifiers: a signifying battery.
We can raise a question: "What is the smallest possible battery?"
I've tried to answer this little question. It seems to me that four is the
smallest possible battery. Can one construct a language with four
signifiers? I do not believe that it is unthinkable. Trying to figure out
if it is possible will not lead you too far away from your experience,
but let us leave that to one side. It is clear that, given the current
state of affairs, we are far from being reduced to only four.
The following is of the essence: that which is indicated by the
 Constructing the Graph 13

dotted line intersects the line that represents the signifying chain
twice, first on the right and then on the left [d'avant en arriere].
The first intersection [the one on the right] takes place at the syn­
chronic level, that of the simultaneous existence of signifiers. Point
C is what I call the point at which the dotted line intersects the code.
In other words, we have here the play of the signifier, something
akin to a chatterbox. The child addresses a subject whom he knows
to be a speaking subject, whom he has seen speaking, and who has
talked his ear off since the beginning of his awakening to the light of
day. Very early on, the subject must learn that, in order for his needs
to be satisfied, their manifestations have to stoop to get through this
doorway or narrow passageway.
M, the second point of intersection, is the one where the message
is produced. It is always through the retroactive play of a series of
signifiers that signification is, in fact, affirmed and becomes precise.
It is only afterward that the message takes form, on the basis of the
signifier or code that precedes it. Conversely, the message, as it is
being formulated, constantly gets ahead of the code, placing a bet
on the future [tire une traite].
I have already told you what results from the intentional process 23
that runs from the id to capital I.
What is at its origin presents itself in the f orm of the blossoming
of need, or of "disposition" [or: predisposition, tendance], as psy­
chologists say. This is represented in my schema at the level of the
id. Here there is no return pathway that closes the circle, for the id
is caught up in language, but it does not know what it is; it is not
reflected on the basis of this innocent approach to language in which
the subject initially turns himself into discourse.
The fact that the subject has relations with other speaking sub­
jects results in the following, even when this is only just barely
apprehended by him: what I have called the first or primal identifi­
cation, I, occurs at the end of the intentional chain.
This is the first realization of an ideal about which one cannot
even say at this point in the schema that it involves an ego-ideal, but
simply that the subject receives the first stamp [seing] or signum of its
relationship with the Other here.

Now for the second stage of the schema.

It can be thought to overlap in a sense with a certain stage of
development, assuming that we do not view these stages as discon­
tinuous. There are clear discontinuities in development, but they are
 14 Introduction

not f ound in the stages of this schema. These discontinuities can be

found, as Freud observes somewhere, at the level of the judgment
of attribution in relation to simple naming. That is not what I am
talking about now, although I will turn to it later.
The first part of this schema represents the infant (in/ans) level of
discourse, for it is perhaps not even necessary that the child begin to
speak before the mark or seal placed on need by demand begins to
work, as his alternating cries show. The second part implies that the
child, even if he does not yet know how to speak coherently [tenir un
discours], already knows how to speak, for this starts quite early on.

24

,,

<f
D'

I
I
I

I �
Figure 1.2: The second level

When I say that he knows how to speak, I mean that, at the second
level of the schema, there is something that goes beyond being in the
grip of language. There is a relationship here with the Other, strictly
speaking, inasmuch as there is an appeal to the Other as presence,
presence against a background of absence. This is the moment of the
fort-da that so impressed Freud in 1 9 1 5, as we can determine, when
he had been called in to see one of his grandsons, the one who would
later go on to become a psychoanalyst. I am speaking of the child
whom he observed.
At the first level, what the chain of discourse articulates as exist­
ing beyond the subject imposes its form on the subject, whether he
likes it or not. We have here, as it were, an innocent apprehension
by the subject of linguistic form. But beyond this articulation and
 Constructing the Graph 15

beyond this apprehension, something else occurs, which is based on

his experience of language - namely, the subject's apprehension of
the Other as such. This takes us to the second level of the schema.
The Other involved is the one who can respond to the subject,
answer his call. We see this Other to whom he fundamentally asks
a question in The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte; it is the bel-
lowing of the terrifying form that represents the appearance of the 25
superego, in response to he who invoked it in a Neapolitan cave;
the response is "Che vuoi?" or "What do you want?" The subject
asks the Other what he wants. The question is asked from the place
where the subject first encounters desire, desire being initially the
Other's desire.

<f
D'

I
I
I

L1
I A
Figure 1.3: The second level completed by "Che vuoi?"

This experience of the Other's desire is essential because it allows

the subject to realize something that is beyond linguistic articula­
tion, around which the following revolves: it is the Other who does
or does not enunciate certain signifiers. Up until then, the battery of
signifiers, among which a choice could be made, was there, but only
in itself. Now, experience shows that this choice is commutative,
inasmuch as it is within the Other's power to make it such that one
or another of the signifiers be there.
 16 Introduction

This entails that two new principles be introduced, at this level of

26 experience. They are added to what was initially a pure and simple
principle of succession implying the principle of choice.
The first new principle is that of substitution. The following point
is essential: what I call the "bar" between the signifier and the sig­
nified is established for the subject on the basis of commutativity.
That is to say, there is coexistence or simultaneity, which is marked
at the same time by a certain impenetrability, between the signifier
and the signified. I mean that the difference or distance between the
signifier and the signified is maintained.

s
s

Curiously enough, group theory, as we learn about it in the

abstract study of sets, shows us the absolutely essential link between
all commutativity and the very possibility of using what I am calling
the "bar," a sign that is used to represent fractions. This is a tangen­
tial remark that I shall set aside for the time being.
From the moment at which the structure of the signifying chain
makes us call on the Other [a realise /'appe/ de /'Autre] - in other
words, at which the process of enunciation is distinguished from
the formulation of the enunciated and is superimposed on it - the
taking up of the subject in the articulation of speech, a taking up
that was initially innocent, becomes unconscious. Similarly, the
commutativity of the signifier becomes an essential dimension for
the production of the signified. This means that the very substitution
of one signifier for another signifier comes to lie at the origin of the
multiplication of significations that characterize the enriching of the
human world in an effective way - that is, in a way that reverberates
in the subject's consciousness.
A second new principle can also be seen: the principle of simi­
larity. A certain dimension, the metonymic dimension, begins to
operate as a function of the fact that, within the signifying chain,
one signifying term may resemble another. It is essentially in this
dimension that the characteristic and fundamental effects of what
we might call poetic discourse - that is, the effects of poetry - are
produced. I will show you this in what follows.
27 What happens at this second stage [etape] will thus allow us
to situate the appearance of what constitutes the signified of the
Other, s(A) - as opposed to the signifier given by the Other,
S(A) - in the very place where the message was in the first
schema. The latter [S(A)] is produced along the dotted chain
line, since it is a chain that is only partially articulated, merely
 Constructing the Graph 17

implicit, and represents the subject solely insofar as he underpins

speech.
As I told you, the second stage [etape] is produced by the experi­
ence of the Other as an Other who has a desire. From the very first
moment of its appearance, at its very origin, desire, d, is manifested
in the interval or gap that separates the pure and simple linguistic
articulation of speech from what marks the fact that the subject
actualizes something of himself in it, something that has no scope or
meaning except with respect to the production of speech, and that is
his being - what language calls "being."
A horizon of being is situated for the subject between, on the one
hand, the manifestations of his demand [demande] and what these
manifestations have made him become and, on the other hand, the
demand [exigence] to be recognized by the Other, which we might, in
this case, call the demand [exigence] to be loved. We want to know
if he can reach that horizon or not.
The experience of desire is situated in this interval or gap. It is
first apprehended as being experience of the Other's desire, and it is
within this experience that the subject has to situate his own desire.
His own desire cannot be situated anywhere other than in this space.

This [Figure 1 .4] represents the third stage [etape], form, or phase
of the schema.
Here is what constitutes it. Finding himself in the primitive pres­
ence of the Other's desire as obscure and opaque, the subject has no
recourse, he is hiljlos. Hiljlosigkeit, to use Freud's term, is known
in French as the subject's "distress." It is the foundation of what,
in psychoanalysis, has been explored, experienced, and qualified as
"trauma."
What Freud taught us, at the end of the journey that allowed 28
him to finally situate the experience of anxiety in its true place, is
that anxiety has nothing to do with the in some sense diffuse, or so
it seems to me, nature of what people call the existential experience
of anxiety.
In philosophy, people have gone so far as to say that anxiety
confronts us with nothingness. Such formulations are assuredly
justifiable from a certain vantage point. Nevertheless, you should be
aware that, on this topic, Freud teaches us something that is positive
and clearly formulated. He views anxiety as something that is thor­
oughly situated in a theory of communication, when he says that
anxiety is a signal. Assuming that desire must be produced in the
 18 Introduction

.,

<t' S'
D'
($0a)

'

�
s

I
Figure 1.4: The third stage [etape]

very same place where distress originates and is experienced, anxiety

is not produced at the level of desire.
We will carry out a detailed, line-by-line study of Freud's work
entitled Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. As it is our first class
of the year, I can only sketch out for you today a few major points
that we will come back to, specifically the following: Freud tells
29 us that anxiety is produced as a signal in the ego, on the basis of
Hilfiosigkeit, which anxiety is called upon to remedy insofar as it is
a signal. I realize that I am going too quickly and that this would
warrant an entire Seminar; but I will not be able to talk to you about
anything if I do not begin by tracing out the pathway that we must
follow.
Specular experience - that is, the experience of one's relationship
to the other's image insofar as it is at the core of the ego's Urbild -
comes in at this third stage. We thus find here anew what I laid out
at the end of my first Seminar concerning the relationship between
the ideal ego and the ego-ideal. I am not simply alluding here to
what I said and propounded about specular relations - namely,
the subject's confrontation with his own image in the mirror - but
to the 0-0' schema: the one where we find the concave mirror,
 Constructing the Graph 19

which allows us t o conceptualize the function o f a real image that

is itself reflected, and that cannot be seen as reflected except from a
certain position - namely, a symbolic position which is that of the
ego-ideal.
We shall use all of this in a context that will give it a very differ­
ent resonance, insofar as we shall be led to reconceptualize it in the
context of the kind of symbolic action that I am showing you to be
essential.
If the imaginary element - namely, the relationship between the
ego, m [for moi] , and the other, i(a) - thus comes in at the third
stage of the schema, it is inasmuch as it allows the subject to deal
with his distress in his relationship with the Other's desire.
How does he deal with it? With something he borrows from the
game of mastery that the child, at a specific age, learned to handle
with reference to his semblable as such. We are talking here about
the experience of the semblable in the sense in which he is a gaze, the
other who gazes at you, and who brings into play a certain number
of imaginary relations, first and foremost, the relations of bearing
[prestance], and also those of submission and defeat. The subject
proceeds by means of this.
In other words, just as we must not say that the soul thinks, but,
like Aristotle, that man thinks with his soul, we must say that the
subject defends himself with his ego. This is what psychoanalytic
practice shows us.
The subject defends against his distress; and with the means 30
given to him by his imaginary experience of his relationship with
the other, he constructs something with the other that, unlike
specular experience, is flexible. In effect, what the subject reflects
are not simply games of bearing, and not simply his appearance
to the other in [the form of] prestige and feigning; it is himself as
a speaking subject. This is why fantasy is what I am designating
to you here as the exit or reference point by which desire learns to
situate itself.
I formulate fantasy for you with the following symbols: ($0a).
The subject is barred here because he is a speaking subject, one
who relates to the other as a gaze - that is, to the imaginary other.
Whenever you come up against something that is a fantasy, strictly
speaking, you will see that it can be articulated in these primary
terms, qua relationship between the speaking subject and the imagi­
nary other. This is what defines fantasy. The function of fantasy is
to provide the subject's desire with its proper level of correction or
situation. This is why human desire is fixed, attached, and coapted,
not to an object, but always essentially to a fantasy.
This is a fact of experience. Although it managed to remain
 20 Introduction

mysterious for a long time, let us not forget that it is nevertheless

an experiential fact that psychoanalysis made common knowledge.
It is only thanks to psychoanalysis that this ceased being an
anomaly - something opaque, something like a deviation, corrup­
tion, or perversion of desire.
It is on the basis of psychoanalysis that all of this - which can at
times be called corruption, perversion, deviation, or even delusion -
was conceptualized and articulated in a dialectic that, as I have just
shown you, can reconcile the imaginary with the symbolic.

I realize full well that I am not leading you along an easy path in our
first class of the year. But if I did not begin by laying out our main
terms immediately, if I confined myself to proceeding slowly, step-
31 by-step, in order to suggest to you the need for such and such a term,
what could I accomplish?
If I did not immediately provide you with what I call the graph
[of desire], I would have to provide you with it little by little as I did
last year, and this would make it all the more obscure. This is why I
decided to begin with it directly. Which is not to say that, by doing
so, I have made your task easier.
To ease your task, I would now like to give you a little illustration,
taken from the simplest level, since what is involved are the relations
between the subject and the signifier. The least one can expect, and
the first thing one can expect, from a schema is to see what purpose
it can serve with respect to commutation.
I recalled an anecdote I had once read in Darwin's book, The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which, I must say,
amused me quite a bit. Darwin recounts that at a soiree he heard a man
named Sydney Smith, who was, I assume, a high-society Englishman
of Darwin's time, come out quite placidly with the following sen­
tence: "I hear that dear old Lady Cork has been overlooked."*
Etymologically speaking, "to be overlooked"* means that one
has not been noticed, that one has been neglected or forgotten - by
an overseer, for example. Literally, someone's eye passed over you.
The verb "to overlook"* is commonly used in English, but there is
no corresponding expression in French. This is why languages are
so useful and so harmful at the same time; they allow you to avoid
making an effort, to avoid carrying out in French the substitution
of signifiers thanks to which we might manage to target a certain
signified; for we would have to change the entire context in order to
obtain the same effect.
 Constructing the Graph 21

Darwin marvels at the fact that the quip was perfectly clear to
everyone present. In fact, no one there had the slightest doubt that it
meant that the Devil had overlooked the dear old lady and had for­
gotten to carry her off to the tomb, which seems to have been at that
time, in the minds of his audience, her natural place, even the place
they wished she would occupy. Darwin raises a question about this
but leaves the question unanswered. "What did Sydney Smith do in
order to have this effect?" he asks himself more or less, and opines, 32
"I truly can't say."
We should appreciate the fact that he highlights, in an especially
significant and exemplary way, that he experienced his own limits in
broaching this question. Since Darwin had broached the problem of
the emotions in a certain way, he could have said that the expression
of the emotions was nevertheless involved here because the subject
did not manifest any emotion - because he said it "placidly"* - but
that would perhaps have been taking things a bit far. In any case,
Darwin does not say that. He was truly astonished by the fact he
relates, and we must take him literally, because, as always when we
study a case, we must not reduce it by rendering it vague. Everyone
understood that the guy was talking about the Devil, Darwin says,
whereas the Devil was nowhere to be found in what he said. And
this is what is interesting: the fact that Darwin tells us that the
Devil's shudder was felt by all those assembled there.
Let us now try to understand this a bit. I will not dwell on
Darwin's intellectual limitations - we will inevitably come to them,
but not right away. What is clear is that there is, right from the
outset, something along the lines of knowledge here, and this is what
is striking. There is no need to posit the principle of metaphorical
effects - that is, the substitution of one signifier for another - nor to
require Darwin to have had some inkling of it, to immediately realize
that the effect of Smith's statement stemmed first and foremost from
the fact that he did not say what was expected.
A sentence that begins with "Lady Cork" should usually end with
"ill."* [We would usually expect to hear something like,] "I hear she
is not well." It seems, in fact, that everyone was expecting news con­
cerning the old lady's health, for, when people talk about old ladies,
it is always their health that is foremost in their minds at the outset.
A substitution thus took place here: the expected news was replaced
by something else, which was, in certain ways, irreverent. Smith did
not say that she was on death's doorstep, nor did he say that she was
quite well; he said that she had been forgotten.
What then came into play to produce this metaphorical effect?
If the word "overlooked"* had been expected, there would have
been no such effect. It is inasmuch as it was not expected, but was 33
 22 Introduction

rather put in the place of another signifier, that a new signified was
produced. It was neither along the lines of what was expected, nor of
what was unexpected. This unexpected thing was not characterized
as unexpected, but it was something original that had to be created
in the minds of all of those present in accordance with their own
ways of thinking. In any case, a new signified arose from something
that made it such that, for example, Sydney Smith came across in
his circle as a witty man - in other words, as someone who did not
express himself in cliches.
But why the Devil? It will help us a great deal to look at our little
schema. If we create schemas, it is in order to use them. We could
arrive at the same result without it, but the schema guides us and
shows us what is really [ree� happening. What is rendered present
here is, strictly speaking, a fantasy.
And by what mechanisms? It is here that the schema allows us
to go further than the naive notion, I would say, that things are
designed to express something that wants to be communicated, an
emotion, as they say, as if emotions did not pose in and of them­
selves plenty of other problems - namely, what they are, assuming
they do not already need to be communicated.
Our speaker was perfectly placid, we are told. In other words, he
presented himself in some sense in a pure state, the presence of his
speech being a pure metonymic effect, I mean his speech qua speech
in the continuity of speech. And in this continuity he conjured up
the following: the presence of death insofar as a subject can or
cannot escape it.
Stated differently, he conjured up the presence of something that
is closely tied to the coming into the world of the signifier itself. In
effect, if there is a dimension in which death (or the fact that there
is no longer any death) can be both directly conjured up and at the
same time veiled (but is, in any case, incarnated), in which death
can become immanent in an act, it is certainly that of signifying
articulation.
It is clear that this subject who spoke so easily of death did not
wish Lady Cork especially well. But, on the other hand, the perfect
placidity with which he spoke of her implies that, in this regard, he
had dominated his desire, insofar as his desire could express itself as
34 in Volpone where we find the lovely formulation, "Die, and stink"!
Sydney Smith did not say that; he simply and serenely articulated
that the fate that awaits each of us in tum had been forgotten for
a moment. But this was not the Devil, if I may put it thus, it was
death, and it would come one day or another. Simultaneously,
this character presented himself as someone who was not afraid of
comparing himself with the lady about whom he was speaking, not
 Constructing the Graph 23

afraid to place himself at the same level, subject to the same flaw,
and thus to the same final equalization by the absolute master [i.e.,
death] that he rendered present to mind here.
In other words, in his full command of the language, he revealed
himself as having a sort of familiarity with what is veiled in lan­
guage. This suggests something on which I want to end class today,
which was missing in everything I said in my discussion of the three
stages, and it will complete the mainspring of what I wanted to
formulate for you.
In the first schema, we have the innocent image of the subject.
He is unconscious of course, but it is an unconsciousness that is
just waiting to be [or: is itching to be, ne demande qu'a] transformed
into knowledge. Let us not forget that the Latin term scire is present
in "unconsciousness" [inconscience], and that even in French avoir
conscience [to be aware] implies the notion of knowledge.
In the next two stages, we have, as I told you, a far more conscious
use of knowledge; the subject knows how to speak and he speaks;
this is what he does when he calls on the Other. It is nevertheless
here that we find the originality of the field that Freud discovered,
which he calls the unconscious.
There is, in fact, something in this Other that always places the
subject at a certain distance from his being, and which makes it such
that he can never join up with that being, can never reach it except
in "the metonymy of being" in the subject that is known as desire.
Why is that? Because at the level at which the subject is himself
caught up in speech, and thereby in a relationship with the Other as
the locus of speech, there is a signifier that is always missing. Why?
Because it is the signifier that is specifically assigned to the relation­
ship between the subject and the signifier [or: signifying system, le
signifiant]. This signifier has a name; it is the phallus.
Desire is the metonymy of being in the subject; the phallus is the
metonymy of the subject in being. We will come back to this. The
phallus is the signifying element that is subtracted from the chain of
speech, insofar as speech is involved in any and every relationship 35
with the Other. This is the ultimate principle which is such that the
subject, inasmuch as he is caught up in speech, falls under the sway
of what has been conceptualized under the heading of the "castra-
tion complex," with all its clinical consequences.
What is suggested by any type of usage - I would not say pure,
but perhaps rather impure - of "the tribe's words"? Every type of
metaphorical inauguration, assuming it is audacious, defies what
language always veils. What it always veils is, in the final analysis,
death. This always tends to bring out the enigmatic figure of the
missing signifier: the phallus. It is the phallus that appears here, and
24 Introduction

as always, in a diabolical form, as it is called - ear, skin, even the

phallus itself.
The phenomenon is inscribed here, of course, in the tradition of
English wit, which, although restrained, nevertheless dissimulates
a violent desire. But metaphorical usage suffices, in and of itself,
to make the image of the subject, insofar as he is marked by his
relation to the special signifier known as prohibition, appear in the
imaginary - that is, in the other who is there as a spectator: little a.
In this case, Sidney Smith violated a prohibition, for one simply
does not speak of old ladies in this manner. He revealed what
lies beyond the prohibitions that constitute the law of language.
Wishing to speak as placidly as possible, he nevertheless made the
Devil appear. So much so that dear old Darwin wondered, 'How the
devil did he do that?'

I will leave it at that for today.

Next time, we will once again take up a dream found in Freud's
work, and we will try to apply our analytic methods to it. This will
simultaneously allow us to situate different modes of interpretation.
November 1 2, 1958
 II 37

FURTHER EXPLANATION

Two levels and four processes

Continuity and fragmentation
The two fs
What does "I desire you" mean?
From the first to the second topography

I will first lay out the limits of what I would like to do in class today.
I will thus enunciate what I mean to show you by taking up the
example of the interpretation of a dream, as well as the use of what
we have, for some time now, been conventionally calling the graph
[of desire].
As I do not wish to discuss things in a way that goes over your
heads, if I dare express myself thus, I would like it if a certain
communication, as they say, could be established through this dis­
cussion. I did not fail to receive echoes of the difficulties that some
of you, even many of you, had last time when faced with the repo­
sitioning of this graph, even though the graph is far from being new
to all of you.
We constructed this graph together last year, and perfected it
progressively. You watched it come together to answer the needs of
a certain formulation centered around what I called "unconscious
formations." The fact that its usage is not yet unequivocal to you,
as some have remarked, is not surprising, since a part of what I shall
have to explain this year about desire will show you its utility and
will simultaneously teach you how to use it.
Our first order of business is thus to understand it. This is pre­
cisely what seems to have been difficult for some here, to different
degrees, perhaps less than they let on. I would like you to note that
the term "understanding" [comprehension] I assure you that I
-

am not being ironic here - is problematic. If there are among you

some who always understand, in every situation and at all times, I 38
 26 Introduction

congratulate and envy them. Even after twenty-five years of prac­

tice, that is not the case for me.
The term "understanding" truly shows us the dangers it brings
with it. In all understanding there is a danger of illusion, to such a
degree that the point is not so much to understand what I am doing
as to know what I am doing. They are not always the same thing.
They cannot be confused, and you will see that there are internal
reasons for not confusing them. You can, in certain cases, know
what you are doing and where you are at, without always under­
standing what is at stake, at least not immediately.
To pique your interest, I will say that I think I can today, if l have
enough time, begin to show you how this graph, and this graph
alone, I believe - or something analogous, for we must not become
too attached to how it is clothed - can eminently help you distin­
guish three things that you all too frequently confuse to the point of
slipping carelessly from one to the other: the repressed, desire, and
the unconscious, to simply take up the way Freud defines them.
The graph is designed to help us map things. Before applying it,
let me reconstruct it step by step so that, at least, what is represented
by what I call the two levels will no longer be in doubt.
The difficulty for many of you has to do with the fact that these
two levels do not correspond to anything that is usually presented
to you as what I might call the architecture of the upper and lower
functions: the functions of synthesis and of automatisms. It is pre­
cisely because you do not find these architectonics therein that the
two levels confuse you. I am therefore going to try to reformulate
them for you.
It seems that what is especially difficult to some of you is the
second level [etage] of the construction, which is not necessarily a
second stage [etape] - "level" being abstractly defined because, as
this graph is a discourse, one cannot say everything at the same time.
I will thus take things up anew.

39 1

What is my goal in constructing this graph? To show the relations

between the speaking subject and the signifier, relations that are
essential to us insofar as we are psychoanalysts.
In the final analysis, the question around which these two levels
are divided is the same for the speaking subject as it is for us. This
is a good sign. I was just saying, "Do we know what we are doing?"
Does the subject himself know what he is doing when he speaks?
This means, "Can he, in fact, signify his own signifying action to
 Further Explanation 27

himself?" It is around this very question that the two levels can be
differentiated.
As this seems to have escaped some of you, I will tell you imme­
diately that we must view the two levels as functioning at the same
time in even the slightest speech act. And you will see what I mean
by "speech act" [acte de parole] and how far I take this term.
What I will tell you is something that I had the opportunity
to formulate for one of you to whom I gave a bit of additional
explanation after the last class. I am mentioning this because my
interlocutor indicated that it included something he had not per­
ceived at the time.
Namely, how to think about the processes that occur in the
subject insofar as the signifier is involved in his activity. The pro­
cesses in question begin simultaneously at four different points: ll,
A, D, and X. These points are, respectively- and you will see what
underpins my expose today- the subject's intention, the subject qua
speaking I, the act of demanding, and X, which we will give a certain
name later and which I will leave unspecified for the time being.
The processes are thus simultaneous in the four trajectories,
n�s. ll�I. A�s(A), and the trajectory of the upper line [D'�s·

"' I

<I I
I I
I
S'
D' I I
I I

- - -.f
- - �
, .,.. .,. ... , I
'' I
1 "'

'

�
s

I
Figure 2. 1: The simultaneity of the four trajectories
 28 Introduction

or possibly ($0D)--7X]. I believe that this should now be sufficiently

clear.
If these two levels exist, it is because the subject does something
that is related to the signifier's predominant action or structure.
40 Let us begin by detailing what happens at the lower level. Here
the subject receives, or is submitted to, this structure. This is espe­
cially apparent and illustrated - not uniquely, but especially - in the
context of demand.
Pay close attention to what I am saying here, for it is not in the
least bit improvised. Those who are taking notes have the right idea.
The fact that it is especially illustrated [in the context of demand]
is such that it is especially comprehensible, but at the same time it
can be such that you do not see it in all its generality, which leads to
a certain amount of incomprehension. You should get it into your
heads right away that it is dangerous to think you understand.
At the lower level of the graph we find a line that represents the
intentionality of the subject, the intentionality of what we assume
the subject to be. The subject in question has not yet become a
speaking subject; he is the subject about whom people speak. I
would even say that he is the one people have always spoken about
up until now, for I do not believe that anyone has ever truly and
41 clearly made the distinction that I am trying to make here between
the subject and the speaking subject. To put it in a nutshell, [the
former] is the subject of knowledge, a subject who is correlated
with the object and around whom the eternal question of idealism
revolves, he himself being an ideal subject.
This subject has always been problematic in some way, since after
all, as people have remarked and as his name indicates, he is merely
supposed [to exist]. This is not true of the subject who speaks, for he
forces us to take notice of him.
In the context of demand, what is involved is the first state - a
state without form, so to speak - of our subject, of he whose condi­
tions of existence we are trying to spell out by means of the graph.
Here the subject is no more than the subject of need. He expresses
need in his demand. This is my precise point of departure.
It follows that the subject's need is profoundly modified by the
fact of having to be expressed in demand, passing thus through the
defiles of the signifier. Without going any further into this point,
because I assume we all agree on it, I simply want to point out what
happens owing to the exchange that occurs between the unconsti­
tuted, primitive position of the subject of need and the structural
conditions that are imposed by the signifier.
You see in the schema that the line of demand, D--7S, is con­
tinuous [it is a solid, not a dotted, line] until it arrives at A, whereas
 Further Explanation 29

beyond A it is fragmented. Inversely, the part of the line that pre­

cedes s(A), the line that represents the subject's intentionality here
[running from Ii to A to s(A)], is fragmented, and it only becomes
continuous afterward- that is, in the segment s(A)-7!. Let us even
provisionally say- for I will have to emphasize this later on- that it
is continuous in that segment insofar as we do not have to take into
account the line A-7m-7i(a) -7s(A) [see Figure 1 .4].
Why is this so? I will tell you why briefly, because I must not talk
endlessly about the graph, and because we will have occasion to
return to it.
Let us begin by investigating what is represented by the continuity
of the line D-7S up to point A.
Capital A is, as you know, the locus of the code, the locus in
which the treasure trove of language in its synchrony resides, I mean
the sum total of the taxiematic elements without which beings who
are subject to the conditions of language have no means by which
to communicate. The continuity of the line D-7S up to point A rep-
resents the synchrony of the systematic organization of language. 42
Synchronically, it [A] is posited as a system or set in which each
element has its own value insofar as it is distinct from the other
elements of the system - that is, from the other signifiers. This is
the mainspring of everything I say about communication. What is
always forgotten in theories of communication is that what is com­
municated is not the sign of something else; it is simply the sign of
what [or: of the fact that, de ce que], in its place, another signifier is
not.
It is on the basis of the solidarity of this synchronic system,
insofar as it resides in the locus of the code, that the discourse of
demand takes on its solidity prior to arriving at the code. Stated
otherwise, we see in diachrony - in other words, in the unfolding
of this discourse - what is known as the minimum duration neces­
sary for the satisfaction of the slightest goal (even what is known as
"magical satisfaction") - namely, the time it takes to speak [le temps
de par/er].
Since the discourse of demand is composed of signifiers, the line
that represents it should appear here in the fragmented form in which
we see it subsist - namely, in the form of a succession of discrete ele­
ments, which are thus separated by intervals. If it is nevertheless
continuous here, it is owing to the synchronic solidarity of the code
from which the succession of elements is borrowed. Continuity
expresses the solidity of diachronic assertion, in the constitution of
what is called the time it takes to formulate something, the time it
takes for demand to be articulated. This is why, prior to or shy of
the code, the line of demand is presented here as continuous.
 30 Introduction

Why, then, is the line that represents the subject's intentionality

fragmented here? [Lacan is presumably pointing to the dotted line
running from /),. to A to s(A).]
Let us note that the context of demand, in and of itself, simplifies
the supposed diversity of the subject - in other words, the moments
and variations of this point [/),.], which presents itself as essentially
shifting [mouvant]. The problem of the continuity of the subject has,
as you know, been apparent to psychologists for a long time. How
can a being, who is essentially given over to what one might call
fluctuations [intermittences] not merely those of the heart, as some
-

have said, but of many other things - establish himself and assert
himself as an ego? This is the problem at hand. Now, putting a need
43 into play in demand is already something that assuredly simplifies
the subject with respect to the more or less chaotic and random
interferences of the different needs among themselves.
If, nevertheless, the first part of the line f),.�I, namely, the part up
until s(A), appears in a fragmented form, it is because it represents
the retroactive effect of the form of discourse's discrete elements on
this shifting [mouvance]; the latter is both continuous and discon­
tinuous, and assuredly confused, and we must assume it to be that
of the primitive manifestation of needs [or: of (pre)disposition, de
la tendance]. Discursivity is retroactively imposed on need, which
is thereby subjected to its form. This is why the line appears in a
fragmented form shy, not of the code, but of the message.
What happens beyond the message [s(A)]? I have underscored it
at other times, so I can cover it quickly here. It is the following: the
subject identifies with the Other to whom his demand is addressed
[l'Autre de la demande], insofar as this Other is omnipotent. I do not
think that I need to go back over the topic of omnipotence, which is
sometimes attributed by psychoanalysts to thought and sometimes
to speech. The fact remains that we see here, as I have often pointed
out, how wrongheaded it is to attribute omnipotence to the subject;
we can see here the depreciative stance that psychologists get into
the habit of adopting, inasmuch as they are always more or less
pedantic, in the original sense of the term. For the omnipotence in
question here is that of the Other, insofar as the Other quite simply
has the sum total of signifiers at his disposal.
To show you that by articulating things in this way we are not
moving away from concrete experience, I will expressly point them
out in development, and more precisely in language acquisition,
which lies at the heart of mother-child relations.
Capital I - at which the segment that begins from s(A), the signi­
fied of A, arrives - is what primary identification is based on. Edward
Glover conceptualized this as the first nucleus of the formation of
 Further Explanation 31

the ego. This process leads to the nucleus of identification because

the mother is not simply the person who offers the breast [sein]; she
is also the one who gives the seal [seing] of signifying articulation.
This is not due simply to the fact that she speaks to her child, for it is
quite clear that she speaks to him well before she can assume that he
understands what she is saying, just as he understands some of what 44
she is saying long before she thinks he does. In effect, before prop-
erly linguistic exchange occurs, all sorts of games - hiding games,
for example, that so quickly make children smile or laugh- already
involve symbolic action, strictly speaking.
While playing these games, what a mother reveals to her child is
the function of symbols qua revealing. In making something disap­
pear and reappear - his own face, for example, by covering and then
uncovering the child's face - she reveals the revealing function to
him. It is already a function raised to the second power.
It is here that the first identifications occur with what people call
the mother as omnipotent.
As you can see, this has a very different scope than the pure and
simple satisfaction of need.
Let us tum now to the second level of the graph, my presentation
of which last time seems to have created a bit of difficulty for some
of you.

At the second level of the graph, the subject is something other than
a subject who passes through the defiles of signifying articulation. It
is the subject who begins to speak- that is, the subject qua I.
I must, nevertheless, stop before providing a specific formulation
in order to add an essential proviso. After all, I would not be dwell­
ing on this /, for it is not our concern today, if I had not alluded, in
previous work, to the I in "I am thinking, therefore I am." This is
merely a parenthetical remark.
All the difficulties that have arisen regarding the / have concerned
this "I am thinking, therefore I am." But this is said to be point­
less, because the I was unjustifiably introduced into what is after all
merely a cogitatum - that is, an "it [s::a] is thinking." Why then would
I be I in that?
I believe that all the difficulties that have been pointed out here
stem from a failure to distinguish between two subjects in the way
that I first formulated the distinction between them. In the experi-
ence that philosophy invites us to consider, people refer, more or 45
less wrongly, to the fact that the subject is faced with an object, an
 32 Introduction

imaginary object, consequently; it should come as no surprise that

the I turns out to be but one object among others. If, on the con­
trary, we take up the question at the level of the subject defined as
speaking, it takes on a totally different import, as phenomenology
shows us and as I will simply indicate now. For those who would
like to read something about the I of the cogito, let me remind you
that there is an article I have already mentioned by Sartre in the
journal Recherches philosophiques.
The I involved in the cogito is not simply the I that is articulated in
discourse, the I insofar as it is pronounced in discourse, and that lin­
guists have, at least for some time now, been calling a "shifter." The
I of the cogito is a semanteme whose only articulable use depends
on the code, I mean that it purely and simply depends on the lexi­
cally articulable code. On the other hand, the shifter I, as the most
basic experience shows, is related to nothing that can be defined as
a function of other elements of the code, thus to a semanteme, but
is simply defined as a function of the messaging act. It designates he
who underpins the message - namely, someone who varies from one
moment to the next.
That's all there is to it. But let us note that the upshot is that
the shifter I is essentially distinct from what one might call the
true subject of the act of speaking as such, as I will show you quite
quickly. It is even what gives the simplest I discourse the appearance
of indirect discourse. I mean that this I could rather easily be fol­
lowed in discourse itself with a parenthesis: "I (who am speaking)"
or "I (am saying that . . .)."
This is made quite clear, as others before me have noted, by the
fact that a discourse that formulates "I am saying that . . . ," and
adds, "and I am repeating," is not saying something devoid of value
with the second clause, for it is distinguishing between the two I's
that are in question: "the one who said that . . . ," and the one who
endorses what the latter said. If you need other examples to grasp
this, I would propose the difference between the I in "I love you"
and the one in "I am here."
Owing to the structure that I am evoking, the I in question is espe-
16 cially tangible where it is fully hidden, that is, in forms of discourse
that realize what I will call the vocative function - namely, the forms
whose signifying structure brings out the fact that the addressee is
absolutely not I. It is the I of "Rise and walk" [Luke 5:23].
This same fundamental I can be found in any imperative vocative
form and in a certain number of other forms, too, that I will provision­
ally place under the heading of vocative. It is, if you will, the vocative
I about which I spoke to you already in my Seminar on Schreber
[Seminar III]. I am not sure I was able to bring it out fully at that time.
 Further Explanation 33

There is also an I that underlies the sentence "You are the one
who will follow me" [Tu es celui qui me suivras] which I emphasized
in that Seminar. It is inscribed, with the whole problem of a certain
future tense, in vocatives, strictly speaking, vocatives of vocation.
For those who were not here at that time, let me recall the difference
we find in French - it is a subtlety that not every language allows us
to bring out - between Tu es celui qui me suivras and Tu es celui qui
me suivra without an s [both mean "You are the one who will follow
me"). In this case, the difference in the performative power of the
"you" is in fact an actual difference of the I insofar as it is involved
in this act of speaking. We see clearly here that the subject always
receives his own message in an inverted form - namely, that it is the
I that must own itself here via the form it gives to the "you."
This discourse - in other words, the discourse that is formulated
at the second level - is a discourse with which we have always been
familiar. Every discourse is the Other's discourse, even when it is the
subject who speaks it. In this regard, the distinction between the two
levels is merely arbitrary.
Nevertheless, what we find at the second level is fundamentally
a call for being [un appel de l'etre], which is made with more or less
force. It always more or less contains a "So be it!" ["Soit!"], and
we have here yet another of the marvelous homophonic equivoca­
tions for which French allows. In other words, it contains a "Fiat"
which is the source and root of what, in need, comes to be inscribed
for speaking beings in the register of wanting [vouloir]. Or, stated
otherwise, it is the root of the I insofar as the latter splits into the
two terms that we are examining here: the one in the imperative
"Rise and walk" and the other in the erection by the subject of his
own /.
You can now see at what level the question that I articulated last 47
time in the form " Che vuoi?" is situated. " Che vuoi?" is, as it were,
the Other's response to the subject's act of speaking. This question
responds - indeed, I would say that questions always respond. This
response prior to the question responds to the question - that is,
to the redoubtable question mark whose very form in my schema
articulates the act of speaking.
The act of speaking goes much further than the speech of the
subject alone, since his whole life is taken up in acts of speaking.
His life as such - namely, all his actions - are symbolic actions if
only because they are recorded, because they are subject to record­
ing, and because they are often actions designed to be taken note
of. Like everything that happens before the examining magistrate,
everything the subject does can be held against him. All his actions
are imposed upon him in a language context, and his very gestures
 34 Introduction

are never anything but gestures chosen in a pre-established ritual,

namely in a linguistic articulation. To the question, "Does he know
what he is doing?" Freud answers "No." This is exactly what is
expressed by the second level of my graph. The latter takes on its
value only on the basis of the Other's question, " Che vuoi?": "What
do you want?"
Prior to the moment at which the question is asked, we are mired
in ignorance and stupidity. I am trying to show here that didacticism
does not necessarily involve stupidity. I obviously cannot demon­
strate this on the basis of those of you who are present here.
With regard to this question and in the responses given to it, the
second level of the schema spells out where the following intersect
anew: the true discourse offered up by the subject, on the one hand,
and what is manifested in the guise of wanting [vouloir] in the articu­
lation of speech, on the other hand. Where are these intersections
located? Therein lies the whole mystery of the symbol that seems
opaque to some of you.
The discourse that presents itself at this level as a call for being is
not what it seems to be, as Freud tells us. This is what the second
is level of the graph tries to show us. I can only be surprised if you did
not immediately recognize this.
What did Freud actually say? What do we, insofar as we are psy­
choanalysts, do every day? We bring out the fact that at the level
of speech acts, the code is given, not by primitive demand, but by
a certain relationship between the subject and this demand, insofar
as the subject remains marked by manifestations [avatars] of this
demand. We call these the oral, anal, and other forms of uncon­
scious articulation.
The first point of intersection [($OD)] thus does not seem to me to
raise many objections. We take quite simply as a premise that the
second level, the code of discourse, which is being's true discourse,
corresponds to the formula ($OD) - the subject, qua marked by the
signifier, in the presence of his demand as providing the material
[for it].
What can we say now regarding the message the subject receives?
I have alluded to this message several times; I have given it several
forms, all of which are more or less slippery, and this is no accident,
for the whole aim of analysis is to figure out what it is. For the time
being, at this point in my discourse, I can still leave it in a problem­
atic state and symbolize it with a presumed signifier. It is a purely
hypothetical form, an x. It is one of the Other's signifiers, of course,
since it is at the level of the Other that the question is raised; it is the
signifier of an Other who is missing a part - namely, who is missing
the problematic element in the question about this message.
 Further Explanation 35

Let me summarize. The subject's situation at the level of the

unconscious, such as Freud articulates it - and it is not me but rather
Freud who says this - is that he does not know with what he is speak­
ing. We must thus reveal to him the properly signifying elements of
his discourse. Nor does he know the message that really comes back
to him at the level of being's discourse [du discours de l'etre] - let us
say "truly," if you prefer, but I will not take back "really."
In other words, the subject does not know the message that comes
back to him from the response to his demand in the field of what he
wants. But you already know the answer, the true response. There
can only be one. Namely, the signifier, and nothing but it, that is
especially designed to designate the relations between the subject 49
and the signifier [or: signifying system as a whole, le signifiant]. This
signifier is the phallus, and I have already told you why.
I ask those who are hearing this for the first time to accept it
provisionally. This is not the point; the point is that the subject
cannot have the answer [reponse], because the only answer is the
signifier that designates his relations with the signifier. The subject
annihilates himself and disappears to the degree that he articulates
this answer. This is what makes it such that the only thing he can
sense about it is a threat directly targeting the phallus - namely,
castration, or the notion of the lack of the phallus, which is what
the termination of analysis revolves around in both sexes, as Freud
formulated it and as I am pointing out. But my goal is not to repeat
such elementary truths.
I know that it gets on some people's nerves that I have been jug­
gling being and having a little too much for a while, but they will get
over it. For it does not mean that along the way we cannot harvest
something precious, a clinical harvest - a harvest that can even
allow people who follow my work to present themselves with all the
characteristics of what I would call medical charlatanism.
What we must do now is situate what desire means.
As I have said, the second level of the graph, like the lower level,
involves a synchronic treasure trove or battery of unconscious
signifiers for each subject, and a message in which the response to
" Che vuoi?" is announced. As you may have noticed, the latter is
announced dangerously. I will mention this, too, in passing -just to
evoke in you colorful memories of what makes the story of Abelard
and Heloise the most beautiful love story.
What does desire mean? Where is it situated? In the complete form
of the graph you have a dotted line that runs from the code, at the
second level, to its message via two elements: d, which signifies the
place where the subject descends [or: gets off or dismounts, descendj,
and $ across from little a, which signifies fantasy [see Figure 1 .4].
 36 Introduction

This has a homologous layout to the line that, starting from A,

includes the ego in discourse - the m on the schema, let us call it the
"filled-out" person - and the image of the other, i( a) . Symbolization
50 of the specular relationship [between m and i(a)] is, as I told you,
fundamental to the establishing of the ego.

I
I
I
I
I
I
I
I
- - - ...rc - - �d
I

.,,. - -4C: - ... ,

'\ I

'

�
s

Figure 2.2: The homology between the two relationships

The homological relationship between the two levels warrants

fuller discussion. I will not provide it today, not because I do not
have time, for I am inclined to take my time to tell you what I have
to tell you, but because I prefer to approach things in an indirect
manner.
This is what seems to me to be most likely to get you to grasp its
scope.

You undoubtedly can now guess at the riches that stem from the
fact that an imaginary relationship is inscribed in the field of the
determinant gap between the two discourses, an imaginary relation­
ship that homologically reproduces the relationship with the other
involved in the game of bearing [between m and i(a)].
 Further Explanation 37

You may have some inkling of it, but it is altogether insufficient 51

to have such an inkling. Before articulating i t fully, I would simply
like to get you to dwell for a moment on what is implied by the term
that is situated or planted in this economy: "desire."
As you know, Freud introduced this term at the very beginning
of psychoanalysis. He introduced it regarding dreams in the form
of Wunsch. Wunsch is not, in and of itself, desire; it is a formulated
or articulated desire - in other words, it is rightfully laid out on this
line. What I would like you to ponder momentarily is the distinction
between Wunsch and what deserves to be called "desire" in what I
am introducing and establishing this year.
You have undoubtedly read The Interpretation ofDreams and we
are going to begin to talk about it now. Just as last year we began by
talking about Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, this year
we will begin by talking about dreams.
You must have noticed right from the outset, and all the way to
the end of The Interpretation of Dreams, that you do not find desire
in it in the form in which, I would say, you constantly deal with it in
your analytic experience - namely, in the form in which it gives you a
hard time owing to its excesses, deviations, and (why not say it after
all?) all-too-frequent failings. I am referring to sexual desire, the
desire that plays tricks. We should nevertheless note that, for some
time now, a quite remarkable placing of sexual desire in the shadows
has been occurring in the entire analytic field. You should thus note
the difference [between Freud's work and others'). Assuming that
you read The Interpretation ofDreams carefully, in other words, that
you do not continue to think about your own little problems while
your eyes scan its pages, you perceive that it is very difficult to grasp
the desire that we are supposed to find everywhere in every dream.
Recall the "inaugural dream," that of Irma's injection, about
which we have already spoken a number of times, about which I
have written a little and will write more, and about which we could
talk inordinately. What exactly does it mean? This remains very
unclear.
In the desire in the dream, Freud wants to make Irma give in; he
wants her to no longer, as he tells us, stubbornly reject his interpre­
tations. What does he want? Does he want to undress her? Does he
want to get her to talk? Does he want to discredit his colleagues? 52
Does he want to force his own anxiety out of hiding to so great an
extent as to see it projected onto Irma's throat? Or does he want to
calm his anxiety regarding the harm he did to Irma? But this harm
is, it seems, irremediable, as is clearly articulated in the dream. Is
this what is at stake, to prove that no crime was committed? This
would not stop us from saying that, since no crime was committed,
 38 Introduction

everything will be fine, since everything has been repaired; and,

moreover, all of this is due to the fact that certain people take
incredible liberties, that someone else is responsible, and so on and
so forth. We could go exceedingly far with all of that.
Let me point out, moreover, that Freud himself energetically
underscores in a footnote in The Interpretation ofDreams, added in
the seventh edition, that he never said that the desire at work in a
dream is always a sexual desire. He did not say the opposite of that
either, but in any case he did not say that; he writes this to respond
to those who reproached him for it.
But let us not be fooled by this. Sexuality is always involved in
dreams to some degree. But it is involved in some sense tangentially
or in some roundabout way. We want to discover why, but to dis­
cover why I want to dwell for a moment on obvious things we know
from the usage and employment of language.
What does it mean when a man says to someone - to a man or
to a woman, we have to choose, for if it is a man, that will perhaps
entail a number of contextual references - what does it mean when
a man says to a woman, "I desire you"? Does it mean, as the mor­
alizing optimism with which you see me doing battle from time to
time in psychoanalytic theory would have it, "I am ready to grant
your being as many, if not more rights than my own; I am willing to
provide for all your needs and think about your satisfaction? Lord,
thy will be done before my own"? It suffices to mention this to make
you smile, as I see people doing around the room. Moreover, when
one chooses the right words, no one is fooled by the aim of a term
like this one [i.e., "desire"], as genital as that aim may be.
53 Another possible statement is the following; let us say, to use the
crudest, most direct terms, "I want to sleep with you, I want to fuck
you." It is much truer, we must admit. But is it as true as all that? It is
true in a certain context, a social context, I would say. After all, given
the extreme difficulty we have following through on the formulation
"I desire you," we can perhaps find nothing better to prove it.
Believe me, it perhaps suffices that such speech not be linked to
the incommensurable quandaries and dish-breaking brought on by
statements that have a meaning, and that it be pronounced only in
petto [in private] for us to immediately grasp that, if "I desire you"
has a meaning, it is a meaning that is much more difficult to for­
mulate. "I desire you," articulated in one's own mind, so to speak,
concerning an object, has more or less the meaning "You are beauti­
ful," around which all those enigmatic images, whose flow is known
in my book as desire, collect and condense. In other words, "I desire
you because you are the object of my desire." Stated differently,
"You are the common denominator of my desires."
 Further Explanation 39

God only knows - if I can bring God into the picture, and why
not? - what desire stirs up in one. It is something that in reality
mobilizes and orients something quite different in one's personality
than that toward which, conventionally speaking, one's precise goal
seems to be oriented. To refer to an infinitely less poetic experience
perhaps, but it seems that one need not be an analyst to mention it,
we cannot misrecognize how quickly and front and center the struc­
ture of fantasy emerges in connection with the slightest distortion of
the personality, as they say, or of images.
The subject's involvement in desire always brings out this struc­
ture, and it is rightfully predominant. To tell someone, "I desire
you," is to tell him, "I include you in my fundamental fantasy." But
experience does not always show us this, except in the case of those
nice, instructive little perverts, little and big.
Since I have decided this year not to go beyond a certain time
limit during which I ask you to listen to me here, and I still hope
to hold myself to that, I will leave it there, at a point that falls far
short of where I thought I would stop today, and put an end to your
travails for the time being.
I will conclude by designating the key or decisive point in fantasy 54
where desire must be interpreted, assuming the term "desire" has a
different meaning than that of the wish in a dream.
This point is located here on the graph. You might say that it
is part of the dotted circle that traces out a type of little tail at
the second level. I would simply like to say, in order to whet your
appetite a bit, that elements spin around this dotted circuit. It is
constructed in this way because, once it is ftleled [or: powered up,
alimente] by the beginning, it goes around inside indefinitely. What
are these elements? They are the ones that have been repressed. In
other words, it is the locus of the unconscious as such, as located
on the graph. This and this alone is what Freud spoke about
up until 1 9 1 5, when he wrote two articles that are entitled "The
Unconscious" and "Repression."
I will pick it up there the next time, to tell you to what extent
Freud articulated the very substance of what I am trying to
convey to you regarding the signifier. What Freud himself clearly
and unambiguously formulated is that the only thing that can be
repressed are signifying elements. This is found in Freud's work.
The only thing missing there is the word "signifier." I will show you,
by re-examining the article on the unconscious, that only signifiers
can be repressed.
On the graph you see the two systems that are juxtaposed.
The dotted system, as I have said, is the locus of the unconscious,
the one where the repressed goes around and around until it makes
 40 Introduction

itself felt - in other words, until some part of the message at the
level of being's discourse [discours de l'etre] upsets the message at
the level of demand, which is the whole problem of psychoanalytic
symptoms.
There is another dotted system. It is the one that paves the way
for what I call the little landing - namely, the discovery of manifes­
tations [/'avatar]. While we were already having so much trouble
getting used to the first system [the first topography: conscious,
preconscious, and unconscious], Freud made the fatal kind deed
[bienfait] of taking the next step himself before his death by proffer­
ing the second topography [id, ego, and superego], which is the little
landing I mentioned. He discovered the register of the other system.
In other words, Freud asked himself what happens at the level of
the prediscursive subject as a function of the fact that the subject
who speaks does not know what he is doing when he speaks - that is,
55 as a function of the unconscious that Freud truly discovered. Let us
say, if you will, to schematize things, that Freud sought to figure out
at what level the ego is constituted with regard to the original place
from which it speaks, and at what moment it is constituted with
respect to an aim which is that of the endpoint of the process at I.
Freud also discovered a primitive discourse there, which is both
purely imposed and marked by a fundamental arbitrariness, which
continues to speak. It is the superego.
Nevertheless, he also left something undone. He left us something
to discover and articulate, which completes his second topography
and which allows us to resituate it in and restore it to the whole
of his discovery. It is the fundamentally metaphorical function of
language.
November 19, 1958
ON DESIRE IN DREAMS
 III 59

THE DREAM ABOUT THE

DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT
KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

Taking being literally

From associationism to psychoanalysis
Affects and signifiers
Elision = metaphor
The instance of the half-dead

I will begin by keeping my promises.

Last time I mentioned an article by Sartre that is entitled
"The Transcendence of the Ego: Outline of a Phenomenological
Description." You can find it on pages 85-123 of volume 6 of the
Recherches philosophiques [ 1 936-37], an excellent journal that the
war put an end to, as did the death of its publisher, Boivin. As for
Freud's remark [also mentioned last time], it is found on page 397
[SE VJ of his Interpretation ofDreams:

The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation,

against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in
my Interpretation ofDreams. It is not to be found in any of the
numerous editions of this book and is in obvious contradiction
to other views expressed in it.

Many of you attended the clinical paper presented last night on

the topic of obsessives by one of our comrades, who is an excellent
psychoanalyst. You heard him speak about desire and demand. We
are trying to highlight the difference in structure between desire and
demand here because the distinction between them is not simply
theoretical, but is linked to the crux of our practice and applies
directly to clinical work, bringing it alive and rendering it, I would
say, understandable. .
I would almost say that, if you sense that there is something
inadequate here, it is a sign of the fact that we have explored this 60
 44 On Desire in Dreams

distinction too exclusively at the level of understanding. The level of

understanding is far from exhausting the mainsprings of structure
that we are trying to penetrate, because it is on structure that we
are attempting to have an impact. The distinction between demand
and desire immediately clarifies demand. But it truly locates human
desire in its place - in other words, at its strictly enigmatic point.
The relationship between the subject and the signifier is key to
all of this. What characterizes demand is not simply that it is a
relationship between one subject and another subject; it is that this
relationship is constituted by language as an intermediary - that is,
by the signifier.
As promised, we will turn now to the topic of what desire is
insofar as it is the bedrock of dreams. It is not easy to know what
the desire that is the motor force of a dream is. At the very least you
realize that it is twofold.
First of all, it initially aims at safeguarding sleep - Freud articu­
lates this in the most explicit of terms - that is to say, at safeguarding
the state in which reality is suspended for the subject. Secondly, it
[desir] is a death wish [desir de mart]. It is a death wish by way of
contrast [d'autre part], and at the same time it is a death wish in a
perfectly compatible way, inasmuch as it is often by means of this
second desire that the first is satisfied, the death wish being that by
which the wishing subject [stefet de la Wunsch] is satisfied.
I would like to place this subject in brackets of some sort. We do
not know what the subject is and yet we would like to know who the
wishing subject in the dream is. When certain people say that he is
the ego, they are mistaken - Freud assuredly asserts the opposite.
And if we say that he is the unconscious, we are not saying anything.
Thus when I say that the wishing subject is satisfied, I am bracketing
the subject. The only thing Freud tells us is that there is a wish that
is satisfied.
Satisfied by what? I would say that "it is satisfied by being." You
should understand this in the sense of "by [coming into] being, it is
satisfied." That is all we can say, for dreams do not bring with them
any other satisfaction than satisfaction at the level of wishes - in
other words, a verbal satisfaction, so to speak. The wish in a dream
makes do with appearances. The character of this satisfaction is
thus reflected in language, in this "satisfied by being" as I expressed
myself a moment ago, in which the ambiguity of the word "being"
shows through.
51 Being is there, it slips in everywhere, and it also takes on the gram-
matical form of referring to being, "satisfied being" [/'etre satisfait].
Can this be broached from the perspective of substance? There is
nothing substantial in being other than the word itself, "it is satisfied
 The Dream about the Dead Father 45

by being." We can only broach being by taking it literally. In the

final analysis, wishes are satisfied by something like being. All in all,
it is only in dreams, at least at the level of being, that wishes can be
satisfied.
Here I would like to provide a short preamble, as I often do, and
take a look back in order to open your eyes to something that com­
prises no less than the whole history of psychological speculation.

As you know, modern psychology began with formulations involv­

ing psychological atomism.
You are all aware that we are no longer at that point, that we have
abandoned associationism, as it is called, and that we have made
considerable progress since we began taking into consideration the
demand for totality, the unity of the field, intentionality, and other
forces.
Yet the question is hardly settled, precisely because of Freudian
psychoanalysis. People fail to see how this settling of accounts,
which is not really one, actually played out. I mean that people com­
pletely overlook the essence, and simultaneously the persistence, of
what was supposedly eliminated.
It is true that associationism, which belongs to the tradition of the
British psychological school, initially involves a thorough misunder­
standing, as it were.
The problem is that of the field of the real and of our psychologi­
cal apprehension of it. What we in fact need to explain is not only
that there are men who think, but that there are men who move
around in the world while apprehending the field of objects in a
more or less suitable way. Now, where does this field of objects
get its fragmented, structured character from? From the signify- 62
ing chain, quite simply. Associationism does nothing, in fact, but
immediately provide the field of the real with the fragmented and
structured character of the signifying chain.
Once this is realized, people naturally perceive that something has
gone awry. They tell themselves that there must originally, as it were,
be relations with the real that are less structured by the signifying
chain, without even realizing that it is the signifier that is at work.
People thus go off in search of cases in which our apprehension of
the world seems to be more primitive, on the basis of a proportional­
ist notion of things. They look to animal psychology, they mention
all the visual ways in which animals manage to structure their world,
and they make this into the foundation of human apprehension of
 46 On Desire in Dreams

the real. They thereby challenge the well-known elements of asso­

ciationism for being based on a first and false conception of this
apprehension of the real, they proceed to eliminate those elements,
and they bury the whole thing in a sort of field theory in which the
real appears to be animated by the vector of a primordial desire.
They then imagine that they have solved the problem, whereas, in
fact, they have done nothing at all. They have described something
else, another psychology, one that seeks to grasp the degree to which
the subject's sensorimotor field is coapted to its Umwelt - that is, to
its surroundings. Nevertheless, the elements of associationism live
on perfectly well despite the establishment of this new psychology.
Associationism is not in the least eliminated; the field that is targeted
by psychology has simply been displaced.
The proof of this is found in the psychoanalytic field where all
the principles of associationism reign supreme. Nothing thus far has
managed to gloss over the fact that when we analysts began explor­
ing the field of the unconscious, we did so on the basis of something
that in theory is called "free association," and we continue to do
so every day. Even though the term is approximate and inexact,
the aim of free association remains valid for designating analytic
discourse.
Consider the earliest experiments with word association. Even if
they no longer have any therapeutic or practical value to us, they
still orient us in our exploration of the field of the unconscious. This
63 alone suffices to show us that we operate in a field in which words or
signifiers reign supreme.
What is associationism - and thus what comes after it related to
the same experiential ground - based on? On the observation that
elements, atoms, or ideas - as people say, no doubt approximately
and insufficiently, but not for no reason - are coordinated at a
certain level in a subject's mind. And what did the first experimental
explorations of the phenomenon show? That it is conditioned by
what people called relations of contiguity. Examine the texts to see
what they talk about and what examples they are based on, and you
will clearly see that this continuity is nothing but the discursive com­
bination on which the effect that I call metonymy is based.
There is contiguity between two things that occur to us, inasmuch
as they are evoked in memory at the level of the laws of association.
A life event was experienced in a context that we can, overall, call
a random context. One part of the event being evoked, the other
part comes to mind. An association based on contiguity is thereby
constituted, which is nothing other than an encounter. What does
this mean? It means in short that the contiguity disintegrates [elle
se brise], and that its elements are taken up in one and the same
 The Dream about the Dead Father 47

narrative text. If we speak here of contiguity, it is inasmuch as the

event evoked in memory is a narrated event, inasmuch as a narrative
forms the text thereof.
There is, by way of contrast, the kind of contiguity that we see in
an experiment involving word association, for example. One word
brings another with it. I [the experimenter] say the word "cherry"
and the subject mentions the word "table." It is a relationship based
on contiguity because on such and such a day there were cherries on
the table.
A relationship based on similarity is different from a relationship
based on contiguity, but it is also a relationship between signifi­
ers inasmuch as similarity involves the passage from one term [to
another] owing to a similarity of being. There is a similarity between
them insofar as, the one and the other being different, some existing
subject [or: extant subject, sujet d'etre] makes them similar. I am not
going to enter into the entire dialectic of the same and the other,
with everything that it brings with it that is difficult and infinitely
richer than a first glance allows us to suspect. Those who are inter-
ested in it can read Plato's Parmenides. They will see that they can 64
spend quite a lot of time on it before exhausting the topic.
What I am simply saying here, and what I am trying to get you
to sense, is that there are other usages than metonymic usages. If
I speak of lips as being like cherries, I make a metaphorical use of
the word "cherry." Someone says the word "lip" and it brings to
my mind the word "cherry" - why are they linked? Because they
are both red? Because they both have the same shape, analogically?
Because they are similar owing to some attribute? No, not just that.
Regardless of what is involved, we are immediately, and this is pal­
pable, faced with an altogether substantial effect that is known as a
metaphorical effect. When I speak of cherries with regard to lips in
a word-association experiment, there is no ambiguity whatsoever -
we are at the level of metaphor in the most substantial sense of the
term. And at the most formal level, a metaphorical effect always
comes down to an effect of substitution [of one term for another] in
the signifying chain, as I have shown you.
If cherries come to mind here, it is inasmuch as they can be
inscribed in a context, whether structural or not, in which lips figure.
To which you could object that cherries might come to mind in rela­
tion to lips owing to the function of contiguity, it being possible that
cherries disappear between the lips, or that a woman presented me
with cherries while holding them with her lips. This is of course pos­
sible. It can happen. But what sort of contiguity is involved, if not
the contiguity of the narrative I mentioned earlier?
From the vantage point of the real, we must not allow ourselves
 48 On Desire in Dreams

to be deluded by the event in which this contiguity was integrated,

which was such that a cherry was in fact momentarily in contact
with the lips. What is important here is not that a cherry touch the
lips but that it be swallowed. It is not that it be held with the lips, it
is that it be offered to us via an erotic gesture. If we stop the cherry
for an instant while it is in contact with the lips, it is as a function of
a snapshot [flash*] that is provided by the narrative. What momen­
tarily suspends the cherry between the lips is a sentence and words.
Inversely, it is because the dimension of narrative that can freeze
the frame [flash*] exists that the image created by the suspension of
the narrative in effect becomes, in this case, something that stimu-
65 !ates desire. It is the involvement of language in the act that sets the
tone here. It is after the fact that language introduces into the act a
stimulation or stimulating element that is related to the stopping of
the narrative. This suspension, which at times comes to fuel the act
itself, takes on the value of fantasy, which gives a specific meander
[detour] of the act an erotic signification.
This, I believe, suffices to show you that the instance of the signi­
fier is at the crux of the very structuring of a certain psychological
field. It is not the totality of the field. It is a part of it, assuming that
we conventionally call "psychology" a discipline constituted on the
basis of what I will call an intentional or appetitive unitary theory.
The fact remains that the presence of the signifier, as Freud never
ceases to remind us, is articulated in an infinitely more insistent,
powerful, and effective way in analytic experience.
We have an odd tendency to forget this. People would like psy­
choanalysis to go in the same direction as psychology did. They
accept the unconscious only in the realm of a clinical force field. In
this perspective, psychoanalysis is a type of well or drilling path, as
it were, that runs parallel to the general development of psychol­
ogy, which has supposedly given us access to elemental forces, to
a field of depths reduced to the life functions, whereas what we see
at the surface is thought to be the field of the conscious and the
preconscious.
This is a mistake.
And it is precisely in this context that what we say takes on its
value.

Did some of you follow my advice and reread the two articles by
Freud that came out in 1 9 1 5?
If you consult, for example, his article on the unconscious
 The Dream about the Dead Father 49

[ Unbewusste], the part that is most relevant to our topic, you will
observe that what is at work [in the unconscious] is nothing other
than signifying elements. When I speak here about the signifier,
those who understand absolutely nothing unremittingly repeat that
I am espousing an intellectualist theory, to which they naturally
oppose affective life and dynamics. I am far from contesting the
existence of the latter, since it is precisely in order to explain them 66
clearly that I am mentioning Freud's article on the Unbewusste. We
will thus turn to a consideration of unconscious feelings, inasmuch
as Freud mentions them.
In the third part of his article, Freud explains very clearly that the
only thing that can, strictly speaking, be repressed is what he calls
the Vorstellungsrepriisentanz. The German here means "representa­
tive of the representation. " Of what? Of drive impulses, which he
calls Triebregungen here, which we can even refer to more exactly as
the units [unite] of drive motion.
Freud's text leaves absolutely no ambiguity on this score: we
cannot consider the Triebregungen to be unconscious, nor can we
consider them to be conscious. What does this mean? It means that
what we call Triebregung must be taken as an objective concept. It is
an objective unit because we look at it and it is neither conscious nor
unconscious; it simply is what it is - namely, an isolated fragment of
reality that we conceptualize as having its own active impact.
It is thus, in my view, all the more remarkable that what rep­
resents the Triebregung - namely, the "representative of (the)
representation," this is the exact value of the German term, and it
is the sole representative of the drive (Trieb) - is said by Freud to
belong to the unconscious. Now, the latter implies the exact term
that I wrote on the board earlier with a question mark next to it -
namely, an unconscious subject.
You, of course, can already see not where I am heading with this,
but where we will necessarily wind up. Whereas Freud, at his time,
was at the stage at which things could be said in the form of scientific
discourse, you must clearly sense that this Vorstellungsrepriisentanz
is strictly equivalent to the notion of the signifier, to the term
"signifier. "
I am merely announcing this to you, even if its demonstration
strikes me as already quite advanced; if not, what was the point of
everything I said to you earlier today? I will, naturally, demonstrate
it to you more thoroughly, ever more thoroughly. The signifier is
precisely what is at work here.
Freud, on the other hand, articulates in the most unmistakable
way that none of what we connote with the terms sensation, feeling,
and affect, which he lumps together, can be called unconscious
 50 On Desire in Dreams

except when we express ourselves sloppily. Depending on the

67 context, such sloppiness, like all sloppiness, may or may not have
disadvantages; but when it comes to theory he categorically denies
such things any and all possibility of unconscious impact. This is
expressed and repeated by Freud in a manner that can leave no
doubt or ambiguity.
When we talk [sloppily] about an affect as being unconscious,
we are implying that the affect is perceived but misrecognized.
Misrecognized in what regard? In what it is connected with, but that
does not make it unconscious, for it has nevertheless been perceived.
It has simply, as Freud tells us, become connected to a different
representation, one that is not repressed. Stated otherwise, the affect
had to adapt to the context found in the preconscious; this allows
the affect to be taken by consciousness - which in this case is not
very exacting - to be a manifestation of this preconscious context.
This is articulated by Freud, and not just once, but a hundred times;
he reiterated it when discussing all kinds of different topics.
It is precisely here that we come upon the enigma of what is
known as the transformation of affect; affect turns out to be incred­
ibly plastic. Moreover, all psychoanalytic writers are struck by this
as soon as they take up the topic of affect - in other words, every
time their eyes alight on it, I mean insofar as they dare broach the
topic. For, what is altogether striking is that someone like me, who
apparently is developing an intellectualist form of psychoanalysis,
is going to spend a whole year talking about it, whereas you can
count on the fingers of one hand the small number of articles that
have been devoted to the topic of affect in psychoanalysis - even
though analysts talk about it constantly when they present a case,
for naturally they always resort to affect.
To the best of my knowledge, there is but one worthwhile article
on the topic of affect, an article by Glover, which is often men­
tioned in texts by Marjorie Brierley. Glover endeavors to take a
step forward regarding the discovery of the notion of affect, Freud's
discussions of the topic leaving a little something to be desired.
Glover's article is, moreover, appalling, as is the whole of Brierley's
book, which is devoted to what she calls Trends in Psycho-Analysis.
It is a rather fine illustration of all the truly absurd places in which
psychoanalysis is currently sticking its nose - morality, personol­
ogy, and other eminently practical perspectives around which our
era's blah blah blah loves to spin its wheels.
68 To return to the things that concern us, namely to serious things,
what do we read in Freud's work? We read that, as regards affect,
the problem is to figure out what becomes of it when it is discon­
nected from the repressed representation and no longer depends on
 The Dream about the Dead Father 51

anything but the substitute representation to which it has managed

to get connected. A possibility that is characteristic of it - that of
being annexed by another representation - corresponds to this being
"disconnected"; it is in this respect that affect presents itself in ana­
lytic experience as something problematic.
We see this, for example, in the hysteric's lived experience.
Psychoanalysis began with this and this is where Freud set out from
when he began to formulate analytic truths. We see affects arising
in the ordinary, comprehensible, communicable text of hysterics'
everyday lives, and the affects that are there - and that appear to
be integrated into the whole text of their lives except to those with a
more exacting gaze - are nevertheless the transformation of some­
thing else.
This something else is worth dwelling on, for it is not another
affect which would supposedly be in the unconscious. Freud rules
that out absolutely. It is absolutely nothing of the kind. There
is absolutely nothing which is really in the unconscious at that
moment. What is transformed is the purely quantitative factor of
the drive. The "something else" is the quantitative factor in a trans­
formed guise.
The point then is to figure out how such transformations are
possible - namely, for example, how an affect which is in the depths,
an affect about which we might conclude that it corresponds to such
and such in the unconscious text, can present itself in another guise
in the preconscious context.
What does Freud tell us? A first citation: "The whole difference
arises from the fact that ideas [ Vorstellungen] are cathexes - basically
of memory-traces - whilst affects and emotions correspond to pro­
cesses of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived
as feelings" [SE XIV, p. 1 78]. This is the rule of affect formation.
As I told you, affect refers to a quantitative factor. By that Freud
means that it is not simply changeable and mobile, but that it is
subjected to the variable constituted by this factor. He articulates
this precisely by saying that the vicissitude of an affect may be
threefold: "Either the affect remains, wholly or in part, as it is; or it
is transformed into a qualitatively different quota of affect, above 69
all into anxiety" - this is what he writes in 1 9 1 5, and we see here
the outlines of the position he articulates in 1 926 in Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety in the context of the second topography -
"or it is suppressed, i.e., it is prevented from developing at all" [SE
XIV, p. 1 78].
"In comparison with unconscious ideas," Freud writes, "there is
the important difference that unconscious ideas continue to exist
after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all
 52 On Desire in Dreams

that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential

beginning which is prevented from developing" [SE XIV, p. 1 78].
I could not avoid providing this preamble before beginning to
raise questions here about the interpretation of the desire in dreams.
I announced that I would borrow for this purpose a dream taken
from Freud's work, since he is, after all, the best guide for us if we
want to be sure of what he means when he talks about the desire in
a dream.

I will borrow a dream from the article entitled "Formulations on

the Two Principles of Mental Functioning," published in 1 9 1 1 just
before the case of Schreber.
I have chosen to extract a dream and Freud's analysis of it from
this particular text because in it Freud articulates in a simple, exem­
plary, significant, and unambiguous way how he intends to handle
Vorstellungsrepriisentanzen, inasmuch as in this article the formula­
tion of unconscious desire is examined.
The upshot of the whole of Freud's work as regards the relations
between the Vorstellungsrepriisentanzen and the primary process -
insofar as they are under the sway of the first principle, known as the
pleasure principle - leaves no room for doubt. There is no other way
to conceptualize the opposition between the pleasure principle and
the reality principle if it is not to realize that what we are told about
the emergence of hallucinations by which the primary process - that
is, desire at the level of the primary process - finds its satisfaction
concerns not simply an image but a signifier.
70 It is, moreover, surprising that people did not discover this in
other realms, I mean on the basis of clinical work. If people never
realized this in other realms, it is because the notion of the signifier
had not yet been developed at the moment of the great blossoming
of classical psychiatry. For in what form do hallucinations usually
present themselves in the lion's share of clinical experience? What
are the major forms that are the most problematic and insistent
in which hallucinations arise for us? They are those of verbal hal­
lucinations, or verbally structured hallucinations, when there is an
intrusion or inmixing into the field of reality, not of an image or
fantasy, not of something that a simple perceptual process would
prop up, but a signifier. If a hallucination poses its own specific
problems to us, it is because it involves signifiers, not images, things,
or perceptions, not those "false perceptions of reality," as people
put it. In Freud's work, this is unmistakable.
 The Dream about the Dead Father 53

At the end of the article, Freud mentions a dream to illustrate

what he calls a neurotische Wiihrung, a "neurotic currency" [val­
orisation, which also means "valuation"], insofar as the primary
process irrupts into it. Wiihrung is a term we should keep in mind,
as it is not very common in German. It is related to the verb wiihren
[to last], which is a durative form of the verb wahren [to look after,
keep, safeguard, or protect]. While it means duration, it is most
commonly used in the sense of value or valuation.
The dream in question was dreamt by a subject who was mourn­
ing the loss of his father whom he had, Freud tells us, nursed
throughout the long painful illness that led to his death. Here is the
dream:
·

His father was alive once more and was talking with him in his
usual way. But he felt it exceedingly painful that his father had
really died, only without knowing it. [SE XII, p. 225]

It is a short dream. And it is one that the patient had repeatedly

in the months following his father's passing. It is a dream that,
as always, Freud brings us in the form of a transcript, for what is
essential in Freudian analysis is always based on the narrative of the
dream as it is initially articulated. How does Freud broach it?
It is out of the question, of course - if only because of the distinc­
tion Freud always made between the manifest content and the latent
content - that Freud ever thought a dream could be immediately
brought into connection with what, in psychoanalysis, people have 71
no compunction about calling "wishful thinking,"* a term that has
no equivalent in French. By pronouncing it, I would almost like to
force it to make a sound like that of an alarm bell. The use of such a
term should, all by itself, put analysts on their guard or even on the
defensive, and persuade them that they have set off down the wrong
path.
Freud does not even for an instant entertain this "wishful think­
ing." He does not say that, if the subject dreams about his father it
is simply because he needs to see him and that to see him gives him
pleasure. That is not at all sufficient, for the simple reason that this
dream does not seem to bring any satisfaction whatsoever with it.
Its painful character is quite clearly indicated, and this should allow
us to avoid jumping to such inane conclusions. Nevertheless, if I am
bringing this up here, it is in order to indicate the possibility of doing
so, even though in the end I do not believe that any analyst could
go that far when it comes to a dream. And it is precisely because we
cannot go that far when it comes to dreams that psychoanalysts are
no longer interested in dreams.
 54 On Desire in Dreams

How does Freud broach things? We will stick to the level of his
text:

The only way of understanding this apparently nonsensical

dream is by adding "as the dreamer wished" or "in conse­
quence of his wish" after the words "that his father had really
died," and by further adding "that he [the dreamer] wished
it" to the last words. The dream-thought then runs: it was a
painful memory for him that he had been obliged to wish for
his father's death (as a release) while [his father] was still alive,
and how terrible it would have been if his father had had any
suspicion of it! [SE XII, p. 225]

This leads us to give its full weight to the way in which Freud
approaches the dream: via the signifier. What Freud inserts into the
text, and what he lays out for us as allowing us to understand the
dream, as delivering up the meaning of the text, are clausulae. I will
try to articulate what they are at the linguistic level.
Please pay attention to what I am saying here. I am not saying
that this is the interpretation. It may in fact be the interpreta­
tion, but I am not yet saying so. I am freezing the frame here at a
moment at which a certain signifier is designated as being produced
by the fact that it is missing. It is by resituating it in the context of
72 the dream that we can immediately accede to what we are given to
understand to be the meaning of the dream.
We find ourselves faced with a typical case here, a case in which
one's self-reproach concerning a loved one leads back to the infantile
signification of a death wish. The term transference, Ubertragung, is
used here by Freud in the way he first used it in The Interpretation of
Dreams to designate the carryover of an early situation - of an early
death wish, in this instance - into a current situation. A wish that
is analogical, homologous, parallel, or in any way similar is intro­
duced in order to revive the archaic wish in question.
Freud thus approaches the problem via the signifier. It is on that
basis that we can try to elaborate what interpretation means. But let
us begin by settling a score with the type ofinterpretation we set aside,
which refers to "wishful thinking."* One remark will suffice here.
This English term cannot be translated by pensee desireuse or
pensee desirante for a very simple reason. It has a meaning, of
course, but people use it in analysis in a context in which that
meaning is not valid. Whenever you encounter the term, in order
to put the pertinence of its usage to the test, you need but make
the following distinction. It must not signify "take one's desires for
realities," as people say nowadays [in French] - that is the meaning
 The Dream about the Dead Father 55

of thought insofar as it slip slides and gives way - but rather "take
one's dream for reality." This in and of itself makes it altogether
inapplicable to the interpretation of dreams, to this type of compre­
hension of dreams. In the case of dreams, it simply means that we
dream because we dream. An interpretation at this level is in no wise
applicable at any moment to dreams.
We must thus turn to the procedure known as the addition of
signifiers.
If we follow Freud here, this procedure assumes that there had
been a prior subtraction of a signifier - "subtraction" is the exact
meaning of the term that Freud uses to designate the operation of
repression in its pure form, in its unterdruckt effect, I would say. It
is here that we find ourselves brought up short by something that
appears to be an objection and an obstacle.
If we had not decided in advance to find everything in Freud's 73
work wonderful - in other words, if we had not decided. in advance
to believe we believe, as Prevert puts it - we would stop to consider
the following: that the pure and simple restoring of the two clausu-
lae, "nach seinem Wunsch" and "daft er [der Traumer] es wunschte"
- that is, that the son wished for his father's death - provides
nothing, strictly speaking, as regards what Freud himself designates
as the final goal of interpretation, namely, the reconstruction of the
unconscious desire in the dream.
What are we actually formulating with these additions? Nothing
but what the subject already knew perfectly well. During his father's
extremely painful illness, the subject indeed wished for his father's
death as a solution and end to his torments. Naturally, he did every­
thing possible to hide this desire or wish from his father, but it was
totally accessible to the son in this context, in his recent life experi­
ence. We need not even speak about it being preconscious in this
regard - it was a conscious memory that was part and parcel of the
continuous text of his consciousness.
It is thus the dream that subtracts from its text an element that is
not at all hidden from the subject's conscious mind. And it is thus
the phenomenon of subtraction that takes on a positive value here,
as it were. I mean that this is the problem of repression. What
is repressed here is indubitably a Vorstellungsreprasentanz, one that
is even quite t)'pical.
If something deserves to be termed a Vorstellungsreprasentanz,
it is certainly something that is, in and of itself, I would say, a
form that is devoid of meaning. Taken all by itself, isolated [from
its context], "as he wished'? means nothing. It means "in conse­
quence of the wish mentioned earlier." The meaning depends on the
sentence that came before it.
 56 On Desire in Dreams

This is the direction in which I would like to lead you in order

to get you to grasp the irreducible character of what is at stake in
any and every conception based on an imaginary elaboration - or
even on an abstraction of object-like data - whereas what is actu­
ally involved is the signifier and the originality of the field that is
established by the signifier's action in the psyche, lived experience,
and the human subject. What we have here are signifying forms that
hang together only insofar as they are linked with other signifiers.
74 I am well aware that I am raising points here that would require
far more discussion.
Psychologists from what is known as the Marburg School,
which involved a small group of people working in a closed circle,
conducted all sorts of experiments, with a great deal of persever­
ance, regarding a kind of intuition that they called thought without
images. The point was, without using images, to think up kinds of
forms that were nothing but signifying forms without any context,
in statu nascendi. Moreover, the problems that are raised here for
us by the notion of Vorstellung warrant that we recall that Freud
attended the course given by Brentano for two years, we having
unambiguous evidence thereof. It would be necessary to examine
Brentano's Psychologie and his conception of Vorstellung in order
to grasp the exact weight this term could have had in Freud's mind
and not simply in my interpretation.
What is the problem we encounter? It is that of the relationship
that exists between repression, on the one hand, insofar as it applies,
as Freud tells us, to something like Vorstellungen, and the appear­
ance, on the other hand, of a new meaning owing to something
which, to our way of thinking, at the point where we are making
headway, is different from repression - namely, the elision of the
two clausulae in the context of the preconscious. Is this elision the
same thing as repression? Is it the precise counterpart or contrary of
repression?
We must first explain this elision at the most formal level. What
effect does it have? It is clear that it has a meaning effect. I am saying
"elision" and not "allusion," for it is not a "figuration," to use
everyday language. Far from alluding to something that preceded
it - namely, the relations between the father and the son - the dream
introduces something that sounds absurd and has an entirely origi­
nal range of signification at the manifest level. What is involved is a
figura verborum, a figure of words [or trope], to employ a term that
is a counterpart to the first one. The elision creates a signified effect.
In this regard it is equivalent to the substitution of a blank or zero
for the missing terms - but a zero is not nothing. In short, the effect
involved can be qualified as a metaphorical effect.
 The Dream about the Dead Father 57

The dream is a metaphor. In this metaphor, something new

emerges that is a meaning or signified. The latter is undoubtedly
enigmatic, but it is certainly not something that we have no need to 75
take into account. It is, I would say, one of the most essential forms
of human experience, since it is this very image which, for centuries,
forced people, at one moment or another of mourning in the course
of their existence, onto the most hidden of pathways that led them
to consult necromancers.
What necromancers summoned up in the magic circle were what
are called shades [or spirits, ombres], and what took place was no
different than what takes place in this dream. A shade is a being
who is there without us knowing how he exists, and before whom
one can literally say nothing. This being speaks, of course, but that
is not important, for, up to a certain point, what he says is also what
he does not say, and the dream does not even tell us what it is. His
speech only takes on its value owing to the fact that the person who
summoned this loved one from the nether regions can literally say
nothing to him regarding his innermost truth.
This confrontation, structured scene, or scenario invites us to
wonder what it is. What is its import? Does it have the fundamental:
structured, and structuring value of what I am trying to lay out for
you this year by the name of fantasy? Is it a fantasy? Are there a
certain number of characteristics that can be required in order for us
to recognize the characteristics of fantasy in such a scenario?
Unfortunately, we cannot begin to answer these questions until
next time. But rest assured that we will answer them very precisely.
Our answers will allow us to glimpse the way in which it is in fact
a fantasy and in what regard it is a dream fantasy [un fantasme de
reve].
Let me make a first point right away. In the precise sense that
we can give the word "fantasy," a dream fantasy takes very specific
forms, and it does not have the same import as that of a waking
fantasy, whether it be unconscious or not. We will see in this regard
how we must conceptualize the function of fantasy.
A second point: we will see on this basis where what Freud called
the mechanisms of the dream-work [elaboration] are situated -
namely, in the relationship between the repressed, which is assumed
to be prior, and the signifiers about which I showed you to what
degree Freud pinpoints them and how he articulates the impact of 76
their absence in terms of pure signifying relations, by which I mean
relations that exist between signifiers.
We will try to situate the signifiers of the narrative - first, "he is
dead," second, "he did not know it," and third, "as the dreamer
wished" [see SE V, pp. 430-1] - and put them to work along the
 58 On Desire in Dreams

trajectories of the chains that I call the "chain of the subject" and the
"signifying chain," respectively, such as they are posited, repeated,
and insistently presented to you in the form of our graph of desire.
You will see what this graph can do for us, and that there is no
possible functioning of discourse except on the basis of structures
in which the topological position of elements and of their relations
are inscribed. You will also see that the notion of these structures
alone allows us to give meaning to the analysis of this dream. In
other words, up to a certain point, we can say that the two clausulae
in question are truly the content of the repressed - namely, the Real
verdriingt, as Freud puts it, what is really repressed.
But that is not enough. We must also distinguish how and why
the dream uses these elements. They are undoubtedly repressed, but
at the level of the dream they are not repressed. Whereas the earlier
immediately lived experience brought them into play as such, in the
dream, far from being repressed, they are elided as clausulae. Why?
In order to produce what sort of effect? It is not easy to say. In short,
it is a signification that is produced, there is no doubt about that;
but we will shall see that the elision of the same wish can have effects
that are altogether different in different structures.
To pique and stimulate your curiosity a bit, I would simply like
to observe that there is perhaps a relationship between the elision
of the clausula "as he wished," and what we see in other contexts,
which are not dream contexts - in psychosis, for example, where
we sometimes observe a misrecognition of death, misrecognition
by the subject of his own death. At the formal level, it suffices that
the words "he did not know it" or "he wanted to know nothing
about it" be linked otherwise with "he is dead" for the one to lead
to the other, unless we immediately distinguish the clinical con­
texts, as Verwerfung [foreclosure] is distinguished from Verneinung
[negation] .
77 In psychosis this articulation can lead to feelings of being invaded
or penetrated, or to fertile moments in which the subject thinks that
he in fact has across from him something far closer still to a dream
image than we might expect - namely, someone who is dead. The
subject lives with a dead man, but a dead man who quite simply does
not know that he is dead.
Perhaps we can go so far as to recognize a similar phenomenon
in normal life, the kind we experience every day. Perhaps it happens
to us more often than we think to have in our presence someone
who appears to behave satisfactorily, socially speaking, but who -
in terms of his being of interest to us, in terms of what allows us to
get along with a human being - is truly dead, and has been for some
time, dead and mummified, who is just waiting for the pendulum
 The Dream about the Dead Father 59

to swing - for I know not what, for [the last straw that reveals he is
mere] semblance - to be reduced to the sort of dust that must spell
his demise. I know more than one of them. Now that I have brought
this to your attention, look around among those you know.
Being half-dead is perhaps far more prevalent than we think in
relations between subjects. Isn't it true that the part of every living
being that is half-dead does not leave us a perfectly clear conscience?
Perhaps a large part of our behavior with our fellow men sets off in
us an incidental reaction that is always present and essential, which
is denoted by the precautions we must take in order not to comment
to the half-dead that where he is, where he is in the process of talking
to us, he is half-prey to death.
Perhaps this is something that we must take into account, whose
importance we must weigh, when we take it upon ourselves to listen
to the speech, revelations, and free discourse of people undergoing
analysis. Undertaking something so audacious with analysands
cannot fail to have an impact upon ourselves, which is precisely
what we defend against most strongly. [We defend against] what
there is in us that is most fictitious and most repeated - namely,
what is half-dead in us, too.
At the point at which we have arrived at the end of today's class,
I have raised more questions than I have answered.
If this dream teaches us something about the relations between 78
the subject and desire, it is because it has a value that should not
surprise us given its protagonists - namely, a father, a son, death
incarnate, and, as you will see, a relationship to desire.
It is thus no accident that I chose this example and that we will
have to explore it further next time.
November 26, 1 958
79 IV

LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

Hallucination, between pleasure and reality

The topology of signifiers
The palimpsest of repressions
The I of the statement and the I of enunciation
Repression, from the unsaid to not-knowing

I left you last time in the midst of discussing a dream, a dream that
at least superficially seems simple. I announced that, with regard to
this dream, we would strive to articulate the strict meaning we give
here to the following terms: the desire in the dream and interpreta­
tion. We will return to those. I also think that this dream is quite
valuable, theoretically speaking.
I have once again been rereading The Interpretation of Dreams,
having told you that this was the first text we would be examining
this year on desire and its interpretation.
I must admit that, up until a certain point, I allowed myself to
reproach people in the analytic community for being unfamiliar
with its twists and turns - which is indisputable - yet my reproach,
like every reproach, has another facet, which is that of an excuse.
For in fact, it does not suffice to have read this book hundreds of
times in order to remember its contents. This is a phenomenon that
we encounter quite often, but that has been brought home to me
especially clearly the last few days. Everyone knows how easily we
forget everything that has to do with the unconscious.
For example, it is quite obvious to what degree people forget
funny stories and stories that are considered to be witty. This
highly significant fact cannot be explained even one iota outside of
a Freudian perspective. Let us say that you are meeting with some
friends. Someone makes a joke, not even recounting a funny story,
but making a pun at the beginning of the get-together or at the end
80 of the lunch, and by the time the coffee comes at the end of the meal
 Little Anna's Dream 61

you ask yourself, "What was that incredibly funny thing the person
sitting to my right said earlier?" And you cannot for the life of you
recall it. This is an almost sure sign of the fact that witticisms arise
from the unconscious.
When we read or reread The Interpretation of Dreams, we have
the impression that it is what I would call a magical book, if the
word did not lend itself, in our vocabulary, to so much ambigu­
ity and even error, which is quite unfortunate. We stroll through
The Interpretation of Dreams as if we were truly in the book of the
unconscious, which is why we have so much trouble holding onto
what is so well articulated in it. We have here a phenomenon that is
worth noting.
To that we have to add the almost insane distortion introduced
by the French translation. The more closely I examine it, the more
I find truly inexcusable the crude inaccuracies it contains. Some of
you ask me for explanations and I immediately refer back to the
text. There is, for example, in Chapter VI, devoted to the dream­
work, a section entitled "Considerations of Representability," the
first page of which in the French translation is more than just a web
of inaccuracies - it has nothing whatsoever to do with the German
text, and it confuses everything and puzzles us. I will not develop
this point any further, but obviously none of this makes it especially
easy for readers of the French to get a handle on The Interpretation
of Dreams.
We began to decipher the dream we took up last time �n a way
that may not have seemed very straightforward to you, but which
was nevertheless intelligible, at least I hope it was. To clearly see
what is at stake, we will articulate it using the graph of desire.
If a dream interests us, it is in the sense in which it interests Freud
- that is, in the sense in which it fulfills [realisation] desire. Desire
is at work in the dream here insofar as the dream is its fulfillment.
How are we going to be able to articulate it? I will first bring up
another dream, one I already mentioned before [see Seminar V,
Chapter XII], and whose exemplary value you will see. It is not ter­
ribly well known - one has to go looking for it.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, whose title is "A Dream Is the
Fulfillment of a Wish," we find dreams whose existence I am sure
none of you are unaware of, children's dreams, and they are pre­
sented to us by Freud as what I will call an early stage of desire in
dreams.
The dream I will discuss was already included in the first edition of 81
the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation ofDreams]. Freud mentions it
at the moment at which he begins to spell out the nature of dreams
for his contemporaries. The fact that the Traumdeutung takes the
 62 On Desire in Dreams

form of an expository text explains many things to us, especially

the fact that things are brought out first in a sweeping sort of way,
giving us a first approximation of things, only to be unpacked later.
When we do not look very closely at this passage, we content
ourselves with what Freud says about the direct, undistorted (that
is, without Entstellung, distortion) character of children's dreams,
whereas dreams usually appear to us in a profoundly modified guise
as regards their deepest thought content. In children, it is all suppos­
edly quite simple - desire purportedly goes straight, and as directly
as possible, to what the subject desires. Freud gives us several exam­
ples of this. The first is worth recalling, because it truly illustrates his
point. Here it is:

My youngest daughter [Anna Freud] who was at that time

nineteen months old, had a fit of vomiting one fine morning
and was forced to fast. During the night that followed this day
of fasting, we heard her call out in her dream "Anna F. eud,
Er(d) beer, Hochbeer, Eier(s)peis, Papp!"

Er(d)beer is a child's way of pronouncing strawberries, Hochbeer

also means strawberries, Eier(s)peis corresponds more or less to
the word "custard," and Papp means porridge. Freud tells us the
following:

She thus used her name to express taking possession, and the
enumeration of all the prestigious dishes, or those that seemed
to her such, [to express] food worth desiring.

The appearance of strawberries in the dream (in the form of two

varieties, Erdbeer and Hochbeer - I did not manage to precisely
pin down Hochbeer, but Freud's commentary suggests that they
correspond to two varieties of strawberries) was a demonstration
or protest against the health police in the house, and was rooted
in the circumstance clearly registered by Anna that the day before
the nurse had attributed her illness to having eaten too many
82 strawberries. Because of the nurse's unwanted and annoying recom­
mendation, Anna immediately took revenge on her in her dream.
Leaving aside the dream that Freud's nephew Hermann had,
which raises other problems, I would point to a passage that is not
found in the first edition, because it was added later after discussions
of the Viennese school, the minutes of which we have. Ferenczi cor­
roborated Freud's views by reminding people of the proverb, "Pigs
dream of acorns and geese dream of corn." Freud then brought up
the proverb, "What do geese dream of? Maize," that he undoubtedly
 Little Anna's Dream 63

did not borrow so much from the German context, I think, given the
specific form of the last word. Lastly, there was the Jewish proverb,
"What do chickens dream of? They dream of millet."
Let us dwell upon this for a moment.
I will begin with a brief tangential remark.

Regarding Granofl's paper last night, I mentioned an essential

problem, which is that of the difference between the directive of
pleasure and that of desire.
Let us return for a moment to the directive of pleasure and let me
spell it out once and for all as quickly as possible.
It is obviously related to questions people ask me or that arise
about the function I attribute to Vorstellung in what Freud calls the
primary process.
To put it concisely, as this is but a parenthetical remark, when
we investigate the function of Vorstellungen in the pleasure prin­
ciple we realize that Freud gives it short shrift. To put it in a
nutshell, we could say that he needs an element with which to con­
struct what he perceives intuitively and that he finds this element
in Vorstellungen.
It is characteristic of brilliant intuition to come up with some­
thing that had absolutely never been perceived hitherto. This is the
conception of the primary process as distinct and separate from the
secondary process. We do not perceive how original this is; we think 83
that what Freud is saying is comparable to what we thought before,
whereas it is utterly and completely different. The composition or
synthesis of these two principles is highly original.
The primary process signifies the presence of desire, but not of
just any old desire. It signifies the presence of the desire that presents
itself as the most fragmented. As for the perceptual element, it is
what Freud uses to explain and get us to grasp what is at stake.
When the primary process alone is active, what happens? It leads
to hallucination. Recall the first schemas Freud gives us on this
score. Hallucination is produced by a process of regression that he
calls "topographical." The different schemas Freud drew of what
motivates and structures the primary process all have in common
the fact that they are grounded in the trajectory of the reflex arc,
with its two pathways - the afferent pathway, the afference of
something known as sensory "stimuli," and the efferent pathway,
the efference of something that is known as "motor activity" [SE V,
p. 537].
 64 On Desire in Dreams

In this perspective perception is conceptualized, in a way I would

call terribly debatable, as something that accumulates somewhere
on the side of the senses owing to a flood of excitations and stimuli
from the outside world, and it is situated at the origin of action. All
kinds of other things are assumed to happen afterward. Namely, it
is here that Freud inserts a whole series of superimposed layers that
run from the unconscious to the preconscious and so on, to arrive at
something that may or may not lead to motor activity.
Whenever Freud speaks to us about what happens in the primary
process, look closely at what is involved: a regressive movement.
When excitation's advance toward motor activity is, for some
reason, blocked, something like regression always occurs. It is here
that something appears, a Vorstellung, which turns out to give
the excitation in question a satisfaction that is, strictly speaking
hallucinatory.
This is what is new in what Freud introduced.
The schemas he uses are provided for their functional value,
I mean in order to establish, as Freud explicitly says, a series or
84 sequence, which should be considered to be temporal rather than
spatial, as he points out [SE V, p. 537]. To Freud, the hallucinatory
phenomenon is of interest, I would say, owing to its insertion in a
circuit. In short, what Freud describes to us as being the result of the
primary process is the fact that something in the circuit gets turned
on.
I will not provide a metaphor here. I will merely indicate, in sub­
stance, what is highlighted by the explanation Freud draws from
the phenomenon and the translation he gives of it, by referring here
to the functioning of a circuit with a homeostatic goal, running
through a series of relays in which the electrical activity is always
implicitly measurable by refiexometry. Under certain conditions,
the fact that something happens at the level of one of the relays
takes on, in and of itself, the value of a terminal effect, identical to
what we see occur in any kind of measuring device when, in a series
of lights, one of them goes on. What is important is not so much
what appears - namely, light - but what it indicates by way of a
certain tension (which is produced, moreover, owing to a resistance)
and state of the whole circuit at a given point in time.
Let us begin by underscoring the fact that an hallucination does
not in any wise correspond to a need, to use that word, for naturally
no need is satisfied by an hallucinatory satisfaction. Need, in order
to be satisfied, requires the intervention of the secondary process -
and even of secondary processes, for there is a wide variety of them
- and these processes exact realities, as their name indicates. They
are under the sway of the reality principle.
 Little Anna's Dream 65

If there are secondary processes that occur, they only occur

because there were primary processes. This is a truism, but the fol­
lowing remark is no less obvious, which is that the division between
the two principles makes instinct unthinkable, however it may be
conceptualized. Instinct evaporates.
Consider what all research regarding instinct - especially the
most modem, elaborate, and intelligent - is moving toward. It aims
to explain how a structure that is not purely preformed (we are no
longer at that stage, we no longer view instinct like Fabre did, to us
instinct is a structure that engenders and maintains its own sequen-
tial chain) lays down pathways in the real that lead a living being 85
toward objects that have not yet been tested by that being.
This is the problem of instinct. We are told that there is an appe­
titive stage and then a searching stage. The animal puts itself in a
certain state involving motor activity that leads to movement in all
sorts of directions. We arrive next at a stage of specialized trigger­
ing. Even if this specialized triggering gives rise to a behavior that
leads him astray - in other words, even if he grabs onto a few color­
ful bits of string, as it were - the fact remains that he detected these
bits in the real.
What I would like to indicate to you here is that an hallucinated
behavior can be radically distinguished from a self-guided behavior
based on a regressive cathexis, as it were, which is translated by the
lighting up of a light along the conducting circuits. This luminous
phenomenon can, at most, illuminate an already tested object. But
if the object just so happens to already be there, it does not in any
way show us the way to it - and still less, of course, if it shows the
very same object when the object is not there, which is what actually
happens in hallucinatory phenomena. At best, the subject can inau­
gurate on that basis the mechanism of searching, and this is what
happens in the secondary process.
In short, according to Freud the secondary process takes the place
of instinctual behavior. But, on the other hand, it is absolutely dif­
ferent from it, since, owing to the existence of the primary process,
the secondary process presents itself as behavior that tests whether
something is an hallucinatory reality or an experience (Erfahrung)
that is at first organized like the effect of a light on a circuit. The sec­
ondary process accounts for judging behavior - "judgment" being a
word that is proffered by Freud when he explains things at this level.
It should be clear that I am not endorsing all of this. I am extract­
ing the meaning of what Freud articulates in order to transmit it to
you.
In the final analysis, human reality is constructed, according
to Freud, against a backdrop of prior hallucination, which is the
 66 On Desire in Dreams

universe of pleasure in its illusory essence. The whole process is out

in the open. I am not saying that it betrays itself - not even!
What term does Freud constantly use when he needs to explain
the succession of impressions into which the process of the psychi-
86 cal apparatus breaks down, and specifically in the Traumdeutung?
The term is niederschreiben. We encounter this term every time
he postulates, in this text and in all the others too, a succession of
levels, piled on top of each other, on which elements come to be
written - niederschreiben does not mean to be stamped, it means to
be inscribed - and registered, which Freud formulates differently at
different moments in his thinking. In a first layer, what is at stake,
for example, are relations of simultaneity, which will later be organ­
ized in other layers.
This is how the schema breaks down into a succession of inscrip­
tions, of Niederschriften - a word that we cannot actually translate
- that are superimposed on each other. Everything that happened at
the outset - that is, prior to arriving at another form of articulation
which is that of the preconscious - namely, everything that is strictly
speaking in the unconscious, can only be conceptualized in a sort
of typographical space. We find here a true topology of signifiers.
This conclusion is inescapable when we follow Freud's articulation
exactly.
In letter 52 to Fliess, we see that Freud is necessarily led to
assume at the outset a kind of ideal, that cannot be taken to be a
simple Wahrnehmung, a taking of truth [prise de vraz]. If we liter­
ally translate this topology of signifiers, we arrive at a begreifen
[grasping or comprehending] of reality, a term Freud uses all the
time.
How, according to Freud, do we manage to get a handhold
on reality? Not at all through a selective triage, nor by anything
that resembles what every theory of instinct presents as the first
approximate behavior that directs an organism along the pathways
of successful instinctual behavior. What is involved is, instead, a
veritable, recurring critique of the signifiers that are evoked in the
primary process. This critique, like all critique, does not of course
eliminate what came before it, and which it concerns, but rather
complicates it. It complicates it by connoting it as what? As indices
of reality that are themselves part of the signifying order.
What I am articulating here as being what Freud conceptualizes
and presents to us as the primary process emphasizes the function of
the signifier, but there is absolutely no way to escape this emphasis.
If you peruse any of the texts he wrote at the different stages of his
87 work, you will see that he repeated this every time he broached the
problem, from its introduction in the Traumdeutung right up until
 Little Anna's Dream 67

what he formulated about it later when he proposed a second way of

laying out his topography, starting in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
What happens now to representations [Vorstellungen]?
Allow me to provide an image for a moment by playing with the
etymology, as I did for [wahrnehmung, interpreting it as the kind of]
taking of truth that would lead a sort of ideal subject to the real,
which would lead him to alternatives by which he would create the
real through his propositions [induit le reel dans ses propositions]-

breaking the word Vorstellungen down as follows: Vor-stellungen.

Vorstellungen have a signifying organization. If we wanted to
speak in Pavlovian terms, we would say that they are not part, at
the outset, of a first system of significations connected to need, but
are part of a second system of significations. They resemble the
lighting up of a light in a slot machine when the ball has fallen in
the right hole. The right hole, as Freud also says, means the same
hole in which the ball fell before. The primary process does not seek
a new object but rather an object to be found anew, and it does so
by means of a Vorstellung that is evoked anew because it was the
Vorstellung that corresponded to a first facilitation [frayage, cor­
responding to Freud's Bahnung]. The lighting up of the light pays a
bonus. That's the pleasure principle.
Except that in order for this bonus to be paid, there has to be a
certain reserve of coins in the machine. In this case, the reserve is
reserved for the second system - that is, for the secondary processes.
In other words, the switching on of the light is a satisfaction only
within the machine's overall workings, insofar as the machine is that
of a gambler from the moment at which he begins to gamble.
That said, let us return to Anna's dream.

2 88

Anna's dream is presented by Freud as a dream that manifests

desire in the naked state.
It seems quite impossible to me, in the revelation of this naked­
ness, to avoid or elide the very mechanism by which this nakedness
is revealed. In other words, the mode of revelation of this nakedness
cannot be separated from the nakedness itself.
I have the impression that this so-called naked dream is known
to us only by hearsay. When I say that, it does not at all mean what
certain people have claimed I have said, that in short, we never
know what someone has dreamt except by what he tells us of it, such
that everything related to a dream should be bracketed owing to the
 68 On Desire in Dreams

fact of his having related it. While it is certainly not insignificant that
Freud grants so much importance to the Niederschrift that consti­
tutes the dream's residue, it is clear that this Niederschrift is related
to an experience that the subject tells us about.
Freud is light years from sanctioning for so much as an instant
the obvious objection that a spoken narrative is one thing, whereas
a lived experience is something else. On the contrary, he rejects it
energetically and he even expressly grounds his entire analysis in the
narrative, going so far as to advise us to use a sort of Niederschrift
technique, based on how the dream is set down in writing. This clearly
shows what he thinks, at bottom, about lived experience - namely,
that such experience gains from being broached via the signifier. If
experience is articulated, it is not its own doing, of course, for it is
already structured as a series of Niederschriften.
We have here a kind of palimpsest writing, as it were, assuming
we could imagine a palimpsest on which the different superimposed
texts were related to each other, even if we did not know how. But
if we tried to determine how, we would see that the relationship
between them was far more to be sought out in the shape of the
letters than in the meaning of the text. I am thus not in the process
of saying that.
What I am saying in this case is that what we know of Anna's
dream is strictly speaking what we know at the very moment at
which it occurs as an articulated dream. Stated otherwise, the
89 degree of certainty we have about this dream is linked to the fact
that we would also be far more certain about what pigs and geese
dream about if they themselves told us their dreams. But in this
earliest example, we have more. The exemplary value of the dream
overheard by Freud is that it was spoken out loud while Anna was
sleeping, and this leaves no room for ambiguity whatsoever con­
cerning the presence of the signifier in its actual text.
It is impossible to cast the slightest doubt on the dream by point­
ing to the supposedly added character of the information that comes
to us about it through speech. We know that Anna Freud is dream­
ing because she pronounces the words, "Anna F. eud, Er(d)beer,
Hochbeer, Eier(s)peis, Papp!" We know nothing about the dream
images in this case, but they find in these words a symbolic "affix"
[affixe], if l may borrow a term from the theory of complex numbers,
an affix in which we in some sense see the signifier present itself in a
flocculated state - in other words, in a series of names.
These names constitute a sequence whose choice of elements is
not random. In effect, as Freud tells us, what is involved here is pre­
cisely everything that she was prohibited, inter-dieted, from having,
everything which, when she asked for it, she was told "No, you can't
 Little Anna's Dream 69

have any!" This common denominator brings unity to the diversity

of terms, even if we cannot but observe conversely that this diver­
sity reinforces the unity and even designates it. In short, this series
juxtaposes this unity to the electiveness of need satisfaction.
People attribute a desire to pigs and to geese. Well, you need
but reflect on the effect it would have if, instead of saying, as in the
proverb, that pigs dream of kukuruz, maize, we set out to enumer­
ate everything that pigs presumably dream of. You would see that
this would have a rather different effect. And even if we wanted to
claim that only an insufficient education of the glottis stops pigs and
geese from making this known to us - and even if we argued that we
could make .up for this by perceiving in both species the equivalent,
so to speak, of linguistic articulation in certain tremblings of their
mandibles - the fact remains that it would hardly be likely that these 90
animals would include their own names, as Anna Freud does, in the
sequence.
Let us even assume that our pig is named Toto and our goose is
named Bel-Azor. If something like this were to occur, it would turn
out that they would mention their names in a language which obvi­
ously - no more nor less obviously, moreover, than in human beings,
but in human beings we see this less clearly - has nothing whatso­
ever to do with the satisfaction of their needs, since they would go
by these names in the farmyard - in other words, in a context that
corresponds to the needs of men, not to their own needs.
As I said earlier, we want to dwell first of all on the fact that Anna
Freud articulates words. The mechanism of motor activity is thus
not absent from this dream, since it is thanks to motor activity that
the dream comes to our attention. But secondly, we want to dwell on
the fact that the signifying structuring of the dream sequence places
a message at the top (or beginning), as you can see illustrated if you
know how people communicate using the complicated machines
that are those of our modern era. For example, when one places a
telephone call from the head to the tail of an airplane, or from one
phone booth to another, one announces oneself, one announces
who it is that is speaking. Anna Freud, at nineteen months of age,
in her dream, announces herself; she says, "Anna Freud," and then
she provides a series. I would almost say that after having heard her
speak her dream aloud, one expects but one thing, which is that she
say at the end, "Over and out!"
This introduces us to what I call the topology of repression - the
clearest, the most formal as well, and the most articulated.
At the moments at which Freud speaks, at least twice in the
Traumdeutung, about the anderer Schauplatz ["other stage (or
scene)"; see SE IV, p. 48, and SE V, p. 536) - a term that had struck
 70 On Desire in Dreams

him when he read Fechner's work, so much so that we get the

impression that it was a kind of lightning bolt, illumination, or rev­
elation to him - he always highlights the fact that it is not another
neurological locus. I would say that this other locus must be sought
out in the structure of the signifier itself.
What I am trying to show you with this graph is the very structure
of the signifying system. As soon as the subject enters into it, with
the minimal hypotheses required by the fact that the subject enters
91 into the play of the signifier - namely, that the signifier is given and
that the subject is defined as nothing more than what is going to
enter into the signifying system - things necessarily become organ­
ized accordingly, and all sorts of consequences flow therefrom. This
necessity is based on the fact that there is a topology that we must
conceptualize; it suffices to conceptualize it as constituted by two
superimposed chains.
How do things present themselves in Anna Freud's dream? They
present themselves in a problematic and ambiguous way which, up
to a certain point, legitimates the distinction Freud makes between
a child's dream and an adult's dream.
Where is the chain of names that is found in Anna Freud's dream
situated? On the upper or the lower chain?
You may have noticed that, in the upper part of the graph, the
chain is represented as a dotted line - this emphasizes the element
of discontinuity in the signifier - whereas the lower chain is repre­
sented as a continuous line [see, for example, Figure 2.1]. I told you,
moreover, that both chains are involved in every process.
At the level at which we are posing the question, what does the
lower chain mean? It is the level of demand, and - inasmuch as I
told you that the subject qua speaking takes on solidity there that is
borrowed from the synchronic solidarity of the signifier - it is quite
obviously related to the unity of a sentence. This is what got people
talking, and in a way that spilled a lot of ink, about the function of
holophrasis, of a sentence qua whole. There is no doubt that holo­
phrasis exists.
Holophrasis has a name: interjection. To illustrate the function
of the lower chain at the level of demand, it is "[Give us] bread!"
or "Help!" These interjections reside in the dimension of universal
discourse. I am not speaking for the time being about children's dis­
course. This form of sentence exists; I would even say that in certain
cases it takes on a value that is quite pressing and exacting. Need,
which must undoubtedly pass through the defiles of the signifier qua
need, is expressed here in a way that is certainly deformed but at
least monolithic, with the proviso that it is the subject himself who
constitutes the monolith in question at this level.
 Little Anna's Dream 71

What happens on the upper line i s something else altogether.

What one can say about it is not easy to say, but for good reason
- it is because what happens on the upper line is the basis for what 92
happens on the lower line.
Even in something that is presented to us as being as primitive
as Anna's dream, something indicates to us that the subject is not
simply constituted in the sentence and by the sentence; whereas,
when an individual, crowd, or mob cries "[Give us] bread! " the
whole weight of the message bears upon the sender. The latter is the
dominant element and this cry suffices, all by itself, in the forms that
I just mentioned, to constitute this sender as a subject who is truly
unique, even if he has a hundred or a thousand mouths. He need not
announce himself - the sentence announces him adequately.
By way of contrast, when a human subject operates with lan­
guage, he counts himself, and that is even his initial position. I am
not sure if you remember a certain test Binet came up with, designed
to shed light on difficulties subjects have going beyond a certain
stage, which I personally find far more suggestive than the stages
mentioned by Piaget. I will not tell you what stage it is because I
do not want to go into detail here, but it seems to be distinctive and
consists in the fact that the subject realizes that there is something
fishy in the sentence, "I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me."
This [kind of construction] seems quite natural to the child up
until a rather advanced age, and for the best reason imaginable,
because it truly captures the human subject's involvement in the act
of speech - he counts himself therein, he names himself therein. It is
thus the most natural and the most coordinated form of expression,
so to speak. It is simply that the child has not yet found the correct
formulation, "There are three brothers in my family: Paul, Ernest,
and me." But we should certainly not feel obliged to reproach him
for this, given the ambiguities of the function of being and having.
It is clear that a step must be taken in order for a distinction to be
made between the I qua subject of the statement [l'enonce] and the I
qua subject of enunciation [or: enunciating subject], for that is what
is involved here.
When we take the next step, we say that what is articulated on
the lower line is the process of the statement [le proces de /'enonce].
In the dream we talked about last time, what is stated is that "He is
dead."
Let me observe in passing that everything that is novel about the
dimension that speech introduces into the world is already implied
in this statement. "He is dead" means absolutely nothing in any
perspective other than that of speaking. "He is dead" means "He 93
no longer exists." One need not say it since he is already no longer
 72 On Desire in Dreams

there. In order for us to say "He is dead," he must have been a being
who was underpinned by speech.
We do not expect anyone to realize that, of course; but we do
expect people to realize that the act of enunciating the statement
"He is dead" commonly requires that we have at our disposal
in discourse itself all sorts of landmarks [reperes] that are distin­
guished from landmarks derived from the statement of the process
[/'enonce du proces]. If what I am saying here were not obvious, all
of grammar would evaporate.
For the time being, I am simply getting you to note the need to
use the future perfect, inasmuch as there are two temporal land­
marks. One of them concerns the act that will be involved - for
example, in the statement "At such and such a time, I will have
become her husband"; this is the landmark of the I that will be
transformed by marriage. Nevertheless, since you express it in
the future perfect tense, there is a second temporal landmark: the
current point from which you are speaking, which situates [repere]
you as the I in the act of enunciation. There are thus two subjects
- that is, two ls.
The stage that the child must reach in Binet's test - namely, the
distinction between these two Is - seems to me to have literally
nothing to do with the well-known reduction to reciprocity that
Piaget makes into the pivotal point of the child's ability to use
personal pronouns. But let us leave this aside for the time being.

We have thus begun to grasp these two [horizontal] lines as repre­

senting what is related to the enunciation process, on the one hand,
and what is related to the process of the statement, on the other.
There are two lines, but that is not because each one represents a
specific function. We encounter a twofold structure whenever lan­
guage functions are involved.
Let us say, moreover, not only that there are two of them, but that
they will always have opposite structures, the one being discontinu­
ous while the other is continuous, and conversely.
Where is Anna Freud's articulation situated?
94 I am not developing this topology in order to simply give you the
answer. I mean, I am not going to declare right from the outset "it
is here or there" because it suits me or even because I might see a bit
more than you do, since I am the one who constructed this thing and
I know where I am going with it. If l have formulated this question,
it is because the question arises of what this articulation represents,
 Little Anna's Dream 73

which is the guise in which the reality of Anna Freud's dream pre­
sents itself to us.
This child was quite capable of perceiving the meaning of what
her nurse said. Whether true or false, Freud implies this. Freud
assumes it to be true, and rightly so, of course, because a nineteen­
month-old child very clearly understands when her nurse is about to
make life difficult for her.
What she enunciates in her dream is articulated in a form that I
called flocculated. Signifiers follow one another in a certain order,
but this order takes the form of a piling up. These signifiers are
superimposed on each other, as it were, in the form of a column.
They replace each other, like so many metaphors for each other.
What we need to bring out here is the reality of the satisfaction qua
interdicted.
We will not go any further with Anna Freud's dream. Since the
topology of repression is involved in it, we will take the next step
now by asking ourselves how what we are beginning to articulate
allows us to clarify what is at stake in an adult's dream. What is the
true difference between the form taken by the child's desire in Anna
Freud's dream and the form taken by an adult's dream? The latter
is assuredly more complicated since it is going to give us far more
trouble, at least as regards its interpretation.
What Freud says on this score is in no way ambiguous - it suffices
to read what he says. The function of what intervenes is akin to cen­
sorship. Censorship operates exactly as I illustrated it in the course
of my previous Seminars. I am not sure if you recall the well-known
story we liked so much, that of the typist caught up in the Irish
revolution who said, "If the King of England were an idiot, then all
would be permitted." I gave you a different explanation of it, based
on what we find in Freud's work regarding punishment dreams.
Specifically, we assumed the existence of a law stipulating that
"Whoever shall say that the King of England is an idiot will have his
head cut off," and I proposed we imagine that the next night I dream 95
that I have my head cut off.
There are still simpler forms that Freud also articulates. Since for
some time now people have managed to get me to read the Tintin
comic books, I will borrow an example from him. In a Tintinesque
vein, I can evade the censorship in another manner: I can articulate
out loud, "Whoever says that General Tapioca is no better than
General Alcazar will have to deal with me. " Ifl articulate something
like that, it is clear that neither General Tapioca's supporters nor
General Alcazar's supporters will be satisfied, and, what is more
surprising still, those who support both of them will be the least
satisfied.
 74 On Desire in Dreams

Freud explains this very precisely: what is said places us before

a highly peculiar difficulty which, at the same time, opens up very
specific possibilities. Here is what is quite simply at stake.
What a child has to deal with is an interdiction, a no-saying [or:
saying no, dit que non] - shaped by some principle of censorship
and by the entire process of education - in other words, he has to
deal with an operation on the signifier that makes it into something
unspeakable. Yet the signifier is spoken, which assumes that the
subject realizes that the no-saying remains said even if it is not
executed. The upshot is that "doing but not saying" is distinct from
"obeying and not doing."
Stated otherwise, the truth of desire is in and of itself an offense
against the authority of the law. Thus the possible outcome of
this new drama is to censure the truth of desire. But, censorship,
however it operates, is not something that can be sustained with
the stroke of a pen, because it is the enunciation process that is
targeted.
To stop a statement from being enunciated, some pre-knowledge
of the process of the statement is necessary. All discourse that is
designed to banish this statement from the enunciation process
is thus going to find itself more or less seriously at odds with its goal.
The matrix of this impossibility is presented in the upper line of our
graph - and it will provide us with plenty of other matrices. The
fact that a subject articulates his demand means that he is caught up
in a discourse in which he himself cannot help but be constructed
96 as an agent of enunciation, and this is why he cannot give up this
statement, because he would thereby efface himself as a subject who
knows what is at stake.
The relationship between these two lines that represent the enun­
ciation process and the statement process is quite simple: it is the
whole of grammar. If you like, I can tell you where and how, in
what terms and in which tables, this has been articulated within the
framework of a rational grammar. But for the time being, what we
are dealing with is the following: Repression, when it arises, is essen­
tially linked to something that appears to be absolutely necessary
- namely, that the subject be effaced and disappear at the level of
the enunciation process.
How and by what empirical pathways does the subject accede to
this possibility? It is altogether impossible even to articulate it if we
do not grasp the nature of the enunciation pro�ss.
As I have said, all speech begins from the intersection that I
situate at point A on the graph. In other words, all speech [or every
word, toute parole], insofar as the subject is implicated in it, is the
Other's discourse [discours de l'Autre]. It is for this exact reason
 Little Anna's Dream 75

that children initially believe that all of their thoughts are known to
others.
As opposed to the definition given by psychologists, thought is
not a first sketch of action. Thought is first and foremost something
that is part and parcel of the dimension of the unsaid [non-dit] that
I have just introduced by way of the distinction between the enun­
ciation process and the statement process. But, of course, in order
for something unsaid to be unsaid, one must speak. In order for the
unsaid to subsist, it must be spoken at the level of the enunciation
process - that is, qua the Other's discourse. This is why children do
not doubt for a single instant that those who represent for them the
locus in which this discourse resides - that is, their parents - know
their thoughts.
This is, in any case, their first impression. It persists as long as
something new has not been introduced, which we have not yet
articulated here, concerning the relation between the upper line and
the lower line - namely, what, apart from grammar, keeps them at a
certain distance from each other.
I have no need to tell you how grammar keeps us at a distance in
sentences like "I do not know if he is dead," "He is not dead as far
as I know," "I have not heard he was dead," and "I am afraid he is
dead" [ C'est la crainte qu'il fut mart]. All of these subtle taxemes, 97
which run the gamut from the subjunctive to a ne that Le Bidois
calls, in a way that is truly incredible for a philologist who writes for
the Le Monde newspaper, "the expletive ne" all of this is designed
-

to show us that a whole part of grammar, the essential part, the

taxemes, are designed to maintain a necessary distance between the
two lines.
Next time, I will situate the articulations at stake here on these
two lines. For a subject who has not yet learned these subtle forms
[of expression], the distinction between the two lines comes well
before. Certain conditions are required to reach this goal, which
form the basis of the investigation that I am engaging in today. I
would simply say that whenever the distinction between the two
lines is based on the difference of tense [temps], which is not simply
a temporal landmark, but a tension-related landmark, you can see
the relationship that exists between this and the topology of desire.
This is where we are at. For a while, children are, in short, entirely
caught up in the play of these two lines. What does it take here to
bring about repression? .
I hesitate to do something which, after all, I would not want to
appear as it in fact is - making concessions. This involves appealing
to notions of development. I would say that in the empirical process
at the level at which repression occurs, an intervention, accident, or
 76 On Desire in Dreams

impact of an empirical kind is certainly necessary - but the necessity

with which this empirical impact reverberates, the necessity that this
empirical impact precipitates in its form, is of another nature.
Whatever the case may be, at a certain moment a child perceives
that the adults who were supposed to know all his thoughts actually
don't. This assumes that he not take the step, at least not imme­
diately, of entering into the fundamental possibility of what I will
briefly and rapidly designate as the so-called mental form of halluci­
nation. In the latter, we see the primitive structure of what I will call
the backdrop of the enunciation process - parallel to the ongoing
statement of existence - which is known as the echo of actions, the
echo of explicit thoughts.
The fact remains that if a Verwerfung [foreclosure] has not
98 occurred, the child perceives at a certain moment that the adult
who supposedly knows all his thoughts doesn't in the slightest. The
adult actually does not know - whether in a dream "He knows he
is dead" or "He does not know he is dead." Next time, we shall see
the exemplary signification of this relationship in this case. We need
not for the time being link these two terms, knowledge and death,
for the reason that we have not yet gone far enough in formulating
what will be targeted by repression.
What is the fundamental possibility of what can but be the goal of
this repression, assuming it is successful?
It is not simply that it assigns the sign "no" to the unsaid, which
says that the unsaid is not said, all the while leaving it said. If the
unsaid involved in repression is truly such a thing, there is no doubt
that the kind of negation that is at work here is so primordial that
Freud situates Verneinung [negation] - which nevertheless appears
to be one of the most elaborate forms of repression in the subject,
since we find it in subjects with a high psychological efflorescence -
right after the earliest Bejahung [affirmation]. You will observe that
it is thus true that he proceeds, as I am doing for the time being, by
means of a possibility - and even by means of a deduction - that is
logical, rather than pointing to its genesis at a specific moment in
time [genetique].
The earliest negation is what I am in the process of talking to you
about regarding the unsaid. The next step is "He does not know," by
means of which the Other, who is the locus of my speech, becomes
the dwelling place of my thoughts; and by means of which the sub­
ject's Unbewusste [unconscious] can be established, into which the
content of repression will enter.
Do not ask me to go any further or any more quickly here than
I am already going. Although I tell you that the subject proceeds
by following the example of this Other in order for the repression
 Little Anna's Dream 77

process [processus du refou/e] to be inaugurated in him, I never said

that it was an easy example to follow. Moreover, I have already
indicated that there is more than one mode of negation, since I men­
tioned in this regard Verwerfung [foreclosure] and I also mentioned
Verneinung [negation] again. I will rearticulate the latter next time.
Verdriingung, repression, cannot be such an easy operation to
bring about, since what it involves in essence is that the subject be
effaced. As regards repression, it easily comes to the child's attention
that the others, the adults, know nothing. Naturally, a subject who
comes into existence does not know that, if the adults know nothing, 99
it is, as we all know, because they have had all kinds of experiences
involving repression. A subject knows nothing of this, and it is not
an easy task for him to imitate them. For a subject to hide himself
qua subject requires a form of sleight of hand that is rather trickier
than many others I am led to present to you here.
There are three ways in which the subject can perform this
trick: through Verwerfung [foreclosure], Verneinung [negation], and
Verdriingung [repression].
Verdriingung involves the following: in order to mark what must
be made to disappear as unsaid, in a way that is at least possible if
not durable, the subject operates by the pathway of the signifier; he
operates on the signifier. This is why, regarding the dream about the
dead father that I mentioned last time - around which we continue
to dance here even if l did not actually get back to it in today's class
- Freud articulates that repression bears essentially on the elision
of two clausulae, namely, "nach seinem Wunsch" and "dafi er [der
Triiumer] es wiinschte."
At its origin or root, repression, as it is presented in Freud's work,
cannot be articulated otherwise than as bearing on the signifier.

We did not take a major step today, but we nevertheless took an

additional step.
This step will allow us to see what sort of signifiers the operation
of repression comes to bear on, for not all signifiers can be equally
damaged, repressed, or rendered fragile.
It is of essential importance that we were already able to see that
repression bears on what I called two clausulae, for this will put us
in a good position to designate what is at stake, strictly speaking,
when we talk, first, about the desire in a dream, and then about
desire tout court.
December 3, 1958
101 v

THE DREAM ABOUT THE

DEAD FATHER: "AS HE
WISHED"

The foreclusive and the discordant

The subject's vacillation when faced with the object of desire
"To be a beautiful blonde and popular, too . . . "
The dream laid out on the graph
Death, pain, castration, and necessity

At the point at which I left you last time, you could already see that
I was tending to broach our topic, desire and its interpretation, by
means of a certain ordination of signifying structure.
I showed you that what is enunciated in the signifier involves an
internal split [duplicite] between the process of the statement and the
process of the act of enunciation.
I emphasized the difference between the I of the statement and the
I of enunciation. The former is involved in every statement insofar
as, like any other [subject], it is the subject of a stated process, for
example, which is moreover not the only mode of statement. The
latter is involved in any and every enunciation, but especially when
it announces itself as the I of enunciation.
The way in which this I announces itself is not unimportant. In
little Anna Freud's dream, it announces itself by naming itself at
the beginning of the dream's message. I indicated to you that some­
thing ambiguous remained there - is this I, qua I of enunciation,
authenticated at that moment, or not? I am hinting that it is not
yet authenticated, which is what accounts for the distinction Freud
makes between the desire in a child's dream and the desire in an
adult's dream.
In children, something has not yet been completed, precipitated
by the structure, or distinguished in the structl.).re. I showed you the
1 02 reflection and trace of this something, an undoubtedly late trace, in
a psychological test. Although the clearly defined conditions of the
experiment do not allow us to judge in advance what the situation is
 The Dream about the Dead Father 79

for the subject at his core, it appears that the difficulty distinguishing
between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement lasts a long
time, going so far as to manifest itself in a form of fumbling that
occurs during a test that chance and psychological flair made Binet
point out, "I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me," where we
see that the subject does not yet know how to "uncount" himself.
The trace that I pointed out is an index - there are others too - of
the element that is essential to the subject, which is constituted by the
difference between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement.
As I told you, we are not taking things up by way of deduction, but
by a pathway about which I cannot say that it is empirical, since it
was already traced out and constructed by Freud.
Freud tells us that the desire in an adult's dream is a borrowed
desire, which is the mark of repression, a repression he characterizes
at this level as [an instance of] censorship. What does he emphasize
when he takes up the mechanism of censorship? He emphasizes
the impossibilities of this censorship, and it is in this sense that he
shows us what censorship is. I was trying to get you to dwell for a
moment on this point by showing you the type of contradiction in
terms implicit in anything that is unsaid at the level of enunciation, I
mean the self-contradictory nature of a formulation like, "I am not
saying that . . . "
Last time, I tried to convey this to you in various funny forms:
"Anyone who says such and such about so and so whose speech
must be respected, who must not be offended, will have to deal with
me!" What does this mean, if not that in taking this obviously ironic
stand, I find myself proffering exactly what one must not say?
Freud himself often highlighted how frequently dreams adopt this
path - namely, that what they articulate as not being supposed to
be said is [est] precisely what they have to say, and is that by which
what is effectively said in the dreams transits.
As this formulation "I am not saying that . . . " brings us to some­
thing that is connected with the signifier's deepest structure, I would
like to dwell on it further before taking an additional step.

1 103

It is no accident that Freud makes Verneinung [negation], in the

article he devotes to it, into the mainspring and the very root of the
most primitive phase in which the subject is constituted as such, and
is specifically constituted as unconscious.
A question thus begins to arise for us regarding the relation
between Verneinung and the earliest Bejahung [affirmation] - that is
 80 On Desire in Dreams

to say, between Verneinung and a signifier's access to the dimension

of questions, for that is what a Bejahung is.
What is inscribed at the earliest [plus primitij] level? Is it, for
example, the coupled terms "good" and "bad"? You are aware of
the role this couple, which is clearly very early, has played in certain
psychoanalytic approaches. To choose one or another of such
primitive terms, or to refuse to do so, is already to opt for an entire
orientation of one's analytic thinking.
I am dwelling on the function of the ne [not] in the formulation "I
am not saying . . . [Je ne dis pas . . ]" because I believe that it is the
.

essential articulation. By saying that one is not saying something,

one says it. This makes clear, through a sort of reductio ad absur­
dum, what I have already pointed out to you as the most radical
property, as it were, of the signifier.
If you recall, I already tried to direct you down the pathway of an
exemplary image that showed the relationship between the signifier
and a certain type of index or sign that I called a trace, that the signi­
fier itself already bears, which is the mark of some sort of flip side of
the stamp of the real.
I spoke to you about Robinson Crusoe and the trace of Friday's
footstep [Seminar III, p. 1 67]. Is that trace already a signifier? I told
you that the signifier begins not with a trace, but with the fact that
one effaces the trace. Nevertheless, an effaced trace does not a signi­
fier make. What inaugurates the signifier is the fact that it is posited
as capable of being effaced. Stated otherwise, Robinson Crusoe
effaces the trace of Friday's footstep, but what does he put in its
place? If he wishes to remember where Friday's foot was, at the very
least he makes a cross at that spot - in other words, a bar [or: line,
barre] and another bar on top of that one. This is what specifies the
signifier.
104 The signifier presents itself both as being able to be effaced and as
being able, in the very operation of effacement, to subsist as such.
I mean that the signifier presents itself as already endowed with the
properties characteristic of the unsaid. With my bar, I cancel out
the signifier, but I also perpetuate it indefinitely, inaugurating the
dimension of the signifier as such. To make a cross is to do some­
thing that, strictly speaking, [Link] exist in any form of mapping
available to animals.
We must not believe that nonspeaking beings, such as animals,
map nothing, but they do not intentionally leave traces of traces
with something that is said [avec le dit]. When we have time, we will
turn to the mores of the hippopotamus, and we will see what he
deliberately leaves on his tracks for his fellow creatures. What man
leaves behind him is a signifier, a cross, a bar qua barred.
 The Dream about the Dead Father 81

One bar is covered over by another bar, indicating that it is, as

such, effaced. The function of the no of the no [or the no's no, non du
non], insofar as it is a signifier that cancels itself out, in and of itself
warrants a very long discussion. Logicians, who are always overly
psychological in bent, have, strangely enough, left aside the earliest
facet of negation in the formulations and classifications of it that
they have provided.
You may or may not know what the different modes of negation
are. I do not intend, after all, to tell you everything that can be artic­
ulated about this concept as regards what distinguishes the meaning
of negation from privation, and so on. We must rely on the phenom­
enon of speaking, linguistic experience, to find what is earlier than
all of that and more important to us. I will focus on that alone.
I cannot avoid turning here, at least momentarily, to research that
has an experiential value - namely, the research that was done by
Edouard Pichon, who was, as you know, one of our elder psycho­
analysts, and who died at the beginning of the war from a serious
heart condition. Pichon perceived something regarding negation
and he made a distinction of which you should at least have a little
glimpse, notion, or idea.
It was in his capacity as a logician that he made this distinction, 1 05
but he manifestly wanted to be a p sychologist and he wrote that
what he was doing was exploring the realm that runs Des Mots a la
pensee, from words to thought - like so many others, he was quite
capable of deluding himself. Luckily for us, what is weakest in his
work is the claim that he is working upward from words to thought.
But he turned out to be an admirable observer of linguistic usage. I
mean that he had a feeling for the stuff of language which was such
that he taught us a great deal more about words than about thought.
He dwelled especially on the use of negation in French, and in
this realm he could not avoid making a discovery that he formulated
with the distinction between the "foreclusive" and the "discordant."
I will immediately give you some examples of this.
Let us consider a sentence like, II n'y a personne ici [No one is
here, or There is no one here]. This is foreclusive - it is ruled out
for the time being that there is anyone here. Regarding this, Pichon
pointed out that whenever you are dealing with a pure and simple
foreclosure, French always employs two terms: a ne, and secondly
something that is represented here by the word personne, but that
can be represented by other words like pas and rien, as in Je n'ai
pas ou lager ["I have no place to stay"] and Je n'ai rien a vous dire
["I have nothing to say to you"].
Moreover, he observed that there is a very large number of uses of
ne, and they are the most indicative - they are, as usual, those that
 82 On Desire in Dreams

pose the most paradoxical problems - in which it appears all alone.

A ne all alone is never, or almost never, used to indicate pure and
simple negation, which is the kind of negation that in German is
incarnated in the word nicht and in English in the word not. By itself,
ne, when it is left to its own devices, expresses what Pichon called
discordance. Now this discordance is situated precisely in between
the enunciation process and the statement process.
I am going to discuss the example on which Pichon dwelled the
most, for it is especially illustrative. It is the use of ne that people
who understand nothing - in other words, people who want to
understand - call the "expletive ne." I mentioned this last time,
when I referred to an article in Le Monde that had struck me as
slightly scandalous as regards this so-called expletive ne.
This ne, which is altogether essential to the use of the French
language, is the one that is found in sentences like Je crains qu'il
1 06 ne vienne. Everyone knows that it means Je crains qu'il vienne [I
am afraid he is coming] and not Je crains qu'il ne vienne pas [I am
afraid he is not coming], but in French this is how you say it. In
other words, at this point in its linguistic usage, French grasps the
ne somewhere at the level of its wandering, as it were, as it descends
from the enunciation process to the statement process.
At the level of enunciation, negation concerns the very articula­
tion of the signifier, the pure and simple signifier said to be in action
[or: at work, en acte]. It is the negation in Je ne dis pas que . . - for
.

example, Je ne dis pas queje suis ta femme [I am not saying that I am

your wife]. At the level of the statement, it becomes the following
negation: Je ne suis pas ta femme [I am not your wife].
We are obviously not here to explore the genesis of language,
but something related to it is implied in psychoanalytic practice.
Freud's articulation of negation implies, in any case, that nega­
tion descends from enunciation to the statement. Why should we
be astonished by this? For, after all, every negation in statements
involves a certain paradox, since it posits something in order to
posit it at the same time as nonexistent - well, at least in a certain
number of cases.
The level at which discordances are introduced is situated some­
where between enunciation and statement. Since some aspect of
my fear precedes the fact that he is coming, since I am hoping he
will not come, can I do otherwise than articulate Je crains qu'il
ne vienne? In passing, this grabs ahold, as it were, of the discord­
ant ne that is distinguished from the foreclusive ne in the realm of
negation.
You will tell me, "This phenomenon is peculiar to the French
language alone. You yourself said so earlier when you mentioned
 The Dream about the Dead Father 83

the term nicht in German and the term not in English. " Quite so. But
that is not what is important.
In English, for example, we find traces in the articulation of the
linguistic system of something analogous. I cannot bring this out
here, as I am not here to give you a class on linguistics, but keep in
mind that, in English, negation cannot be applied purely and simply
to the verb that designates the process in statements. You do not say
"I eat not," * but rather "I do not eat."* In other words, for every­
thing involving negation, statements are led to borrow a form that is
based on the use of an auxiliary [verb], the auxiliary being typically
what introduces the dimension of the subject into a statement, as in 107
"I don't eat," * ''I won't eat," * or "I won't go."*
In French, Je n 'irai pas [I won't go] merely expresses the fact that
the subject will not go, whereas "I won't go"* implies a resolution
on the subject's part not to go.
The fact that in English all pure and simple negation brings out
something like an auxiliary dimension is the trace of something that
links negation to the earliest position of enunciation in an essential
manner.
Thus at the outset, the subject is constituted in the process of dis­
tinguishing between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement.
In our last class, I began to articulate what comes next, the second
time or stage.
That is what we will turn to now.

In order to show you by what route the subject enters into a dialectic
involving the Other [la dialectique de /'Autre], insofar as this dialec­
tic is imposed on him by the very structure of the difference between
enunciation and statement, I have led you by a path that is not the
only one possible, but that I deliberately made an empirical one - in
other words, I have introduced the subject's real history into it.
The next step in this history is, as I told you, the dimension of
"knowing nothing about it."
The subject puts it to the test against the backdrop of the idea
that the Other knows all about his thoughts, since at the outset
his thoughts are, by their very nature and structure, this Other's
discourse. The discovery that the Other knows nothing about his
thoughts, which is factually true, inaugurates the pathway by which
the subject develops the opposite requirement that lies within the
unsaid. From there, he will have to find the difficult path by which
he must implement the unsaid in his being, going so far as to become
 84 On Desire in Dreams

the sort of being with which we deal - namely, a subject who has the
dimension of the unconscious.
The essential step that psychoanalysis has us take in the experi­
ence of humanity is that - after many centuries in which philosophy
has, I would say, entered obstinately and ever further into a dis­
course in which the subject is merely the correlate of the object in
108 the knowledge relationship, where he is what is presupposed by the
knowledge of objects, where he is a sort of strange subject about
which I said somewhere, I do not recall where, he could fill up phi­
losophers' weekends, because the rest of the week (namely, during
the workweek) everyone can naturally neglect altogether this subject
who is in some sense but the shadow and underside [doublure] of
objects - we analysts realized that something about this subject had
been overlooked, namely, the fact that he speaks.
This is the case only from the moment at which we can no longer
overlook him that is, from the moment at which his domain as a
-

subject who speaks stands on its own two feet, as it were, whether
the subject is there or not. But what completely changes the nature
of his relations to the object is the crucial thing known as desire.
It is in the field of desire that we try to articulate the relations
between the subject and the object. These are relations involving
desire, for it is in the field of desire that psychoanalytic experience
teaches us that the subject must be articulated. The relationship
between the subject and the object is not based on need; it is a
complex relationship that I am trying to elucidate for you.
I will begin by quickly indicating that, inasmuch as the relation­
ship between the subject and the object is situated in the field of
desire, the object cannot be the correlate of, or something that
merely corresponds to, one of the subject's needs. The object is
something that props the subject up at the precise moment at which
the subject has to face, as it were, his existence. The object is some­
thing that props him up in his existence in the most radical sense
- namely, in the sense in which he exists in language. Otherwise
stated, the object is something that is outside of him and whose true
linguistic nature he can grasp only at the very moment at which he,
as a subject, must be effaced, vanish, or disappear behind a signi­
fier. At that moment, which is a moment of panic, so to speak, the
subject must grab hold of something, and he grabs hold of the object
qua object of desire.
Someone whom I will not name immediately today, in order not
to create confusion, someone who is quite contemporary but is now
dead, wrote somewhere: "To ascertain exactly what the miser whose
treasure was stolen lost: thus we should learn much. " This is exactly
what we must learn, I mean learn for ourselves and teach to others.
 The Dream about the Dead Father 85

Psychoanalysis is the first locus or dimension in which one can 1 09

ascertain this. Of course, in order to get you to grasp what I mean,
I will have to find another example, a more noble example, because
the miser is ridiculous - in other words, far too close to the uncon-
scious for you to be able to bear it.
If I were to articulate it to you in the same terms that I used in
speaking of existence earlier, in two minutes you would take me for
an existentialist, which is not what I want. I will take an example
from the film by Jean Renoir entitled La Regle dujeu [The Rules of
the Game].
In this film there is a character played by Marcel Dalio, who
is an old man - the kind we see in everyday life, in certain social
circles, and we must not believe that he is limited to this particular
social circle - who collects objects and especially music boxes. If
you still remember the film, recall the moment at which, in front of
quite a few people, Dalio comes across his latest find: an especially
beautiful music box. At that moment the character is literally in
a position which is one we can or rather must call shame [pudeur]
- he turns red, effaces himself, disappears, and is very ill at ease.
What he has shown, he has shown - but how could the onlookers
understand that we are faced here with the precise point of oscil­
lation that manifests itself to the highest degree in the subject's
passion for the object he collects, which is one of the forms of the
object of desire?
Is what the subject shows none other than the major point, the
most intimate point of himself? No, for what is propped up by this
object is precisely what the subject cannot reveal even to himself.
It is something that is at the cusp of the greatest secret. It is in this
direction that we must seek to figure out what the treasure chest is
for the miser. Another step is certainly required here for us to move
from the level of the collector to that of the miser. This is why misers
can only be presented in comedic registers.
But this has already introduced us to what is at stake when the
subject finds he ,has begun, starting at a certain moment, to articu­
late his wish insofar as it is secret. How does he express his wish
here? This expression varies according to different languages, and
according to the forms that are characteristic of each language to
which I alluded last time. Different modes and registers have been 1 10
invented, which all strike different chords. Do not always lend cre-
dence to what grammarians say on this score - the subjunctive is not
as subjunctive as it seems, and other verbal modes can express the
type of wish in question here just as well.
I looked around for something that could illustrate this for you
and, I do not know why, a little poem came back to me from the
 86 On Desire in Dreams

recesses of my memory, which I had some trouble reconstructing,

and even resituating.

Etre une bellefille

blonde et populaire
qui mette de lajoie dans /'air
et lorsqu'elle sourit
donne de /'appetit
aux ouvriers
de Saint-Denis.

[fo be a beautiful blonde

and popular, too,
who brings joy to all
and when she smiles
makes the workers
in Saint-Denis horny.]

This was written by a contemporary of ours, a discrete poetess.

She happens to be petite and black, and undoubtedly expresses,
in her nostalgia for making the workers in Saint-Denis horny,
something that can be rather strongly tied to some stray moment
of her ideological reveries. But we cannot say that such is her usual
occupation.
I would like to get you to dwell on this phenomenon, this poetic
phenomenon, for a moment, because we find here first of all some­
thing that is quite important as concerns temporal structure.
We have here what is perhaps the pure form, I am not saying of
a wish [voeu], but of what is wished for [souhaite] - that is to say,
of what in a wish is enunciated as wished for. As you see, what is
wished for presents itself here in the infinitive tense, and the primi­
tive subject seems to be elided here. But this does not mean anything
- in reality she is not in the least bit elided. By entering into the
structure in order to map the position of what is articulated here,
we see that this articulation is situated before the subject and deter­
mines her retroactively. We are not talking here either about a pure
and simple aspiration or a regret, but rather about an articulation
that is positioned before the subject as retroactively determining her
to be a certain type of being.
111 This doesn't mean much. The fact remains that what is wished
for is articulated in this way. We have here something that we have
reason to remember when we seek to give meaning to the sentence
with which The Interpretation ofDreams ends: "Indestructible desire
models the present on the image of the past." We immediately chalk
 The Dream about the Dead Father 87

up what this sentence, whose purring we hear, says to repetition or

ex post facto action; but is this so very clear if we examine it closely?
If indestructible desire models the present on the image of the past,
it is perhaps because, like the proverbial carrot held out in front of
the donkey, it is always in front of the subject and always retroac­
tively produces the same effects.
Once we have indicated the structural characteristics of this state­
ment, we are simultaneously confronted with its ambiguity. After
all, the gratuitous characteristic, as it were, of this enunciation does
not fail to have certain consequences, which nothing stops us from
exploring. Hence the following remark.
Having gone back to the text [of the poem], I saw that it was enti­
tled, as if by chance, Voeux secrets [Secret wishes] . This is thus what
I retrieved from my memory when, some twenty-five or thirty years
after reading it, I was looking for something that would bring us to
the secret of wishes. This secret wish is poetically expressed - that is,
it is, of course, communicated. And this is the whole problem - how
to communicate to others something that has been constituted as a
secret? Answer: through some sort of lie.
In fact, to us, and we are a bit cleverer than others are, this can
in the final analysis be translated by saying, " True as it is that I am
a beautiful blonde and popular, too, I desire to bring joy to all and
make the workers in Saint-Denis horny." Now, it is not clear or
self-evident that every being, no matter how generous or poetic or
a poetess, has such a strong desire to bring joy to all. After all, why
bring joy to all? Why if not in fantasy and in order to demonstrate
to what degree the object of fantasy is metonymic? Joy therefore
circulates here like a metonymy.
As for the workers in Saint-Denis, they take a lot. Let them divide
it up among themselves. In any case, there are enough of them that
we would not know which one of them to tum to.
In this digression, I have introduced the structure of wishes to you
by the pathway of poetry. We can now enter into it by the pathway
of serious things - I mean by locating the actual role that is played 1 12
in it by desire.

We have seen, as we should have expected, that desire has to find its
place somewhere on the graph between, on the one hand, the point
from which we began when we said that the subject is alienated there
[A], inasmuch as he must enter into the defiles of the signifier - in
other words, essentially the alienation of the appeal [to the Other],
 88 On Desire in Dreams

that related to need - and, on the other hand, the beyond in which
the dimension of the unsaid is introduced as essential.
The dream that I selected, the one involving the dead father, will
allow us to show how and where desire is articulated.
This dream is assuredly among the most problematic, insofar as
it is a dream in which a dead man appears. The appearance of dead
people in dreams is far from having revealed its secret to us, even
if Freud talked a good deal about it already - see page 433 of the
German edition [SE V, p. 43 1 ]. Throughout his analysis of dreams in
the Traumdeutung, Freud never stopped emphasizing the profound
ambivalence of feelings we have about those we love and respect,
this having been his first take on the psychology of the unconscious.
He broached this topic anew regarding the dream about the dead
father, which I selected in order to begin to try to spell out for you
the function of desire in dreams.
I remarked last time that we always forget what is in the
Traumdeutung. Having decided for various reasons to reread the
first edition of it, I realized that I had forgotten that this dream was
only added in 1 930. More precisely, it was first added as a footnote
shortly after its publication in the Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur
Neurosenlehre, 1 9 1 3, volume 3, page 271 of the second edition, and
it was moved into the text in the 1 930 edition. Since then it has thus
been in the main body of the Traumdeutung.
I will indicate once again how this dream goes. The dreamer sees
his father appear before him, a father whom he has just lost after a
long, drawn-out, and tormenting illness. The dreamer sees his father
1 13 in front of him and is "penetrated," as Freud tells us, with profound
pain at the thought that his father is dead and "did not know it."
Freud emphasizes the absurd resonance of this formulation and he
tells us that it can be understood if we add that the father was dead
"as he [i.e., the son] wished." In short, "he did not know" that it was
"as he wished" that "he was dead."
These are the elements that I must thus situate on the different
levels of the graph. We will try to verify this in detail at the experi­
ential level.
I will place "he did not know" on the lower line, insofar as it
is essentially related to the dimension of the constitution of the
subject. It is, in effect, on the basis of a useless "he did not know"
that the subject must situate himself, and it is precisely here that he
must constitute himself as not knowing, for it is the only exit offered
to him in order for what is not said to actually take on the import
of the unsaid.
"He did not know" is situated at the level of the statement, but
it is clear that no statement of this type can be made, if it is not
 The Dream about the Dead Father 89

\
I
\
I I
I I
\
f I
I '
�
� _ _ _ _ _ _ .,, , ,
.. -'lllf ...
' '
'I
� � I
I \ I

he did not know

Figure 5 . 1 : Interpretation between statement and enunciation

propped up by an underlying enunciation. Indeed, "he was dead"

means absolutely nothing to a being who does not speak. We have 1 14
proof thereof. I would go even further - this is continually shown
by the immediate indifference that most animals manifest to the
remains or cadavers of their fellow beings once they are cadavers.
An animal can, no doubt, be attached to the deceased. People
talk about dogs being so attached. But it should be pointed out that
dogs are exceptions in the sense that, although they do not have an
unconscious, they have a superego. Stated otherwise, [to be attached
to a dead being] it is necessary that something come into play that
allows for the emergence of something along the lines of signifying
articulation. But let us leave that aside.
"He was dead" already assumes that the subject has entered into
something like existence. Existence here is nothing other than the
fact that a subject, from the moment at which he is posited in the
signifier, can no longer destroy himself; he enters into this intoler­
able sequence that immediately unfolds for him in the imaginary,
and which is such that he can no longer conceive of himself except
as forever re-emerging in existence.
This is not a philosophical construction. I have been able to
observe it in those whom we call patients. It was, I remember, one
 90 On Desire in Dreams

of the turning points of the inner experience of a female patient of

mine when, in a certain dream - which did not arrive at just any
old moment in her analysis, naturally - she alighted upon some­
thing that was apprehended and experienced in a dream, which was
nothing other than a sort of pure feeling of existence. It was the
sense of existing, as it were, in an indefinite way. And from the heart
of this existence a new existence continually re-emerged for her - for
her innermost intuition, so to speak - a new existence that extended
as far as the eye could see. Existence was apprehended and felt by
her to be something that, by its very nature, is extinguished only to
re-emerge forever further on, and this was accompanied in her by
intolerable pain.
This is quite close to what the content of the dream [about the
dead father] brings us. For the person who has the dream is the
dreamer. It is always good to keep this in mind when we talk about
the characters in a dream. Here, as the dream is that of a son,
the question of what we call identification arises especially easily.
We have no need for dialectic to think that there is some identifica­
tory relationship between the subject and his own dreamlike fancies
[fantaisies de reve].
What do we see here? We have a dreamer, in pain of the most pro-
1 15 found kind, standing before his father. And we have a father who
does not know he is dead, or more precisely - for we must consider
the verb tense in which the subject apprehends and communicates it
to us - ii ne savait pas ["he did not know"].
I am emphasizing this point without being able to emphasize it
maximally for the time being. The rule that guides me here is to
proscribe half-baked formulations and to always strive not to give
you approximations. But as, on the other hand, I cannot give precise
formulations from the outset, this leads me at times to be less than
clear, and in any case naturally leaves certain doors open.
As for dreams, it is important that we remember the way in which
they are communicated to us. It is always by a statement. A dreamer
recounts what to us? Another statement, but it is not at all adequate
to say that. He presents this other statement to us as an enunciation.
Indeed, if a dreamer tells us a dream, it is for an entirely different
reason than for the statement he recounts to us. It is in order for us
to seek its key or meaning - that is to say, in order for us to figure
out what it means. From this vantage point, the fact that "he did not
know" - which is inscribed on the graph at the first level of the split
- is said in the imperfect tense takes on great importance.
For those who are interested in the relationship between a dream
and the speech by which we become cognizant of it, let us continue
and see how things break down.
 The Dream about the Dead Father 91

What d o w e find o n the side o f what i s presented i n the dream as

the subject? We find an affect: pain. Pain related to what? To the
fact "that [his father] was dead." What corresponds to this pain on
the father's side is "he did not know." He did not know what? The
same thing, "that he was dead." By way of a complement, I would
add "as he wished."

THE SUBJECT'S SIDE THE FATHER'S SIDE

pain he did not know

(owing to the fact) that he was dead that he was dead

as he wished

Figure 5.2: Distribution of the four elements between the two

characters in the dream

When Freud tells us that the meaning, and implicitly the inter- 1 16
pretation, of the dream is found in "as he wished," it all seems quite
simple. Yet I have indicated that it is not quite so simple. But what
does this mean? If we are at the level of the signifier, as Freud for-
mally indicates - not just in this passage, but also in the one about
repression that I asked you to reread - you must immediately see
that we can make more than one use of "as he wished."
Where does "he was dead as [the dreamer] wished" take us? It
seems to me that some of you at least can recall the point to which I
once led you in discussing the story of Oedipus.
Recall that, after having exhausted in every form the pathway of
desire, insofar as it is not known to the subject, and suffering the
effect of punishment - for what crime? for no other crime than that
of having existed in this desire - Oedipus finds himself led to a point
where he can proffer no other exclamation than me phUnai, "Never
to have been born," where existence, having arrived at the extinction
of his desire, ends up. Well, the pain that the dreamer feels in the
dream - let us not forget that he is someone about whom we know
nothing other than the immediately prior fact that he witnessed his
father's demise in the course of a long illness - is close, in experience,
to the pain of existence when nothing any longer inhabits it other
than existence itself, and that everything, when suffering is excessive,
tends to abolish a term that cannot be uprooted: the desire to live.
If the pain of existing after desire had dried up was experienced by
someone, it was no doubt by he who was far from being a stranger
to the dreamer - namely, his father. But what is certain, in any case,
is that the dreamer knew about this pain. We will never know if he
who felt this pain in the real knew or did not know the meaning of
 92 On Desire in Dreams

the pain, but what is clear is that the dreamer does not know what
he is taking on, which is the pain itself. He does not know it in the
dream, of course - nor, quite surely, outside of the dream - before
interpretation leads us there.
1 17 The proof thereof is that in the dream he can only articulate this
pain in a way that, in his relation to the other, is both faithful and
cynical, and takes an absurd form. What does this form correspond
to? If we tum back to the short section in the Traumdeutung that dis­
cusses absurd dreams [SE V, pp. 426--45], we see that the impression
of absurdity, which is often linked in dreams to a sort of contradic­
tion that is linked to the structure of the unconscious itself, can lead
to something laughable, but that in certain cases absurdity is intro­
duced to express a particularly violent repudiation of the designated
meaning. Freud says this quite specifically regarding this dream, and
it confirms what I was trying to articulate for you here even before
having reread the passage.
What does "he did not know" mean? It assuredly means that the
dreamer can see that his father did not know the dreamer's wish -
his wish that his father die in order to be done with his suffering. In
other words, at this level, the dreamer is cognizant of his own wish.
He can see - or not see, it all depends on what point he is at in his
analysis - that, in the past, he himself had wished his father would
die, although not for the sake of his father, but of the son, his rival.
But there is something that he cannot see at all at the point he is
at, which is that he has taken on his father's pain without knowing
it. He cannot see, moreover, that it is absolutely necessary for him to
keep situating ignorance across from him [i.e., outside of himself] -
in the father as a character in the dream, that is, in the object, in the
form "he did not know" - in order not to know that it would have
been better to have never been born. If there is nothing at the end
of existence but the pain of existing, it would be so much better to
take that pain as though it were the other's [!'assumer comme celle de
l'autre] as though it were that of the other who is there, and who
-

continues to speak, just like I, the dreamer, continue to speak.

That would be far preferable than to see the final mystery
revealed, which is the most secret content of this wish . . What is it
in the final analysis? We have no element of it in the dream itself,
we know it only through our knowledge of analytic experience. Its
secret content is the wish for the father's castration - in other words,
the wish par excellence which, at the moment of the father's death,
is reflected back onto the son because it is his tum to be castrated.
This he must not see at any cost.
Although I am not, for the time being, in the process of detail-
1 18 ing the terms and stages by which to lay out the interpretation [of
 The Dream about the Dead Father 93

this dream], it is easy to show on the graph that a first interpreta­

tion can immediately be made at the lower level, at the level of the
continuous line on which are inscribed the dreamer's words "he did
not know." This would be a remark of the type: "In your dream,
your father has no pain, since, as you wished, he did not know you
had enunciated this wish." This would be all fine and well, but on
condition that the analyst already include in this remark something
problematic that would be such as to make emerge from the uncon­
scious what had up until then been repressed and discontinuous at
the upper level - namely, that "[his father had been] dead" already
for a long time "as he wished," as in his Oedipal wish.
However, the point now is to give its full import to what, as we
saw earlier, goes well beyond this wish.
In effect, the wish to castrate the father, which is reflected back on
the dreamer, has an import that goes beyond any and all justifiable
desire. This wish here is but the mask of what is most profound in
the structure of desire as it is revealed in the dream - namely, the
structuring, signifying necessity that prohibits the dreamer from
escaping from the concatenation of existence insofar as it is deter­
mined by the nature of the signifier. This necessary sequence is not
expressed by "his wish"; it is expressed by nothing other than the
essence of selon [as, in selon son voeu, as he wished].
In the end, Verdriingung rests entirely on the problematic of the
subject's effacement, which is, in this case, his saving grace, at this
final point where the subject is doomed to a final ignorance. This is
the meaning I tried to convey to you at the very end of our last class.
The mainspring of Verdriingung is not the repression of something
full that is discovered, seen, and understood, but rather the elision
of a pure and simple signifier, that being nach or se/on the elision
-

of what serves as the signature of the agreement or discordance,

the agreement or discord between enunciation and the signifier, the
relationship between what lies in the statement and what lies in the
necessities of enunciation. Everything revolves around the elision of
a clausula - that is, of a pure and simple signifier.
In the final analysis, what is manifested in the desire in the dream
is the following: "he did not know." What does that thus mean, in
the absence of any other signification that we have within our grasp?
We will see it when we take up the dream of someone we know
better, namely Freud. Next time we will take up a dream that is quite 1 19
close to this one in the Traumdeutung the dream in which Freud
-

sees his father again in the guise of Garibaldi [SE V, pp. 427-9,
447-8, 478). We will go further with that one, and we will see what
Freud's desire truly is. Those who reproach me for not making
enough of anal eroticism will be repaid in spades.
94 On Desire in Dreams

For the time being, let us stick to the dream about the dead father.
This schematic dream figures the dreamer's confrontation with
death. But the shade who is summoned up by the dream makes his
mortal meaning fall away. What, indeed, does the appearance of a
dead man mean, if not that the dreamer is not dead, because he can
suffer in the dead man's stead?
But that is not all. Behind this suffering there lies a lure, the only
one the subject can still hold onto at this crucial moment. And what
is it? It is the lure of his rival, the lure of killing the father, the lure
of imaginary fixation.
We will pick it up there next time, for I believe that, with what I
have said today, I have sufficiently paved the way for the elucida­
tion of the constant formula of fantasy in the unconscious: barred
S, lozenge, little a ($0a).
The subject, insofar as he is barred, canceled out, and abolished
by the action of the signifier, finds his prop in the other who, for the
speaking subject, is what defines the object as such. We will try to
identify this other, who is the prevalent object of human eroticism.
In fact, we will identify him very quickly. Those who attended
the first year of this Seminar heard me talk about this for a whole
term. This other is the image of one's own body, in the broad sense
we shall give it.
In this case, it is here - in this human fantasy, which is the sub­
ject's fantasy and which is no longer anything but a shade - that the
subject maintains his existence, maintains the veil that is such that
he can continue to be a subject who speaks. _

December 10, 1958

 VI 121

INTRODUCING THE OBJECT

OF DESIRE

The three levels of interpretation

The algorithm ($0a) guides us
From castration to aphanisis
From use to exchange
From hippos to women

Last time, I mentioned Jacques Damourette and Edouard Pichon's

Des Mots a la pensee: Essai de grammaire de la langue franraise. The
details about foreclosure and discordance that I mentioned can be
found in two different places in the second volume, where we find a
whole, condensed entry on negation. There, in particular, you will
see that the foreclusive is incarnated in French by such odd words
as pas and point, as well as by personne, rien, goutte, and mie, that
bear in themselves the sign of their origin in traces. In effect, they
are all words that designate traces. It is here that the symbolic act of
foreclosure or rejection is found in French, the word ne remaining
reserved for the discordance that negation more originally is.
Last time I tried to show you that, at its origin, in its linguistic
root, negation is something that emigrates from enunciation toward
the statement.
I showed you in what respect this could be represented on the
little graph that we use here, by situating the elements of the dream
"he did not know he was dead" on it.
It was around the phrase "as he wished" that we designated the
point of desire's real impact, inasmuch as the dream both bears and
marks it.
To continue to break new ground, we must ask ourselves in
what way and why such action is possible on the part of desire in
dreams.
 96 On Desire in Dreams

122 1

I ii:[Link] at the end of the last class by what path I intend to inves­
tigate the function of desire, as it is articulated in Freud's work,
namely at the level of unconscious desire - that is, on the basis of
the formula ($0a) to which we are led by everything we have demon­
strated regarding the structure of the dream about the dead father.
What does the dream consist of? It shows us the confrontation
between the subject and an other, a small other in this case.
In the dream, the father seems to be alive again, and he turns out
to be related to the subject in ways whose ambiguities we began to
investigate. It is the father who makes it such that the subject takes
upon himself what I called the pain of existing. It is the father whose
soul the subject witnessed to be in agony. It is the father whose death
he wished for - insofar as nothing is more intolerable than existence
reduced to itself, existence beyond anything that can sustain it, exist­
ence sustained despite the abolition of desire.
I indicated what we could glimpse here by way of a distribution of
intra-subjective functions, as it were. The subject takes responsibil­
ity for the other's pain, all the while rejecting onto the other what
he does not know - namely, the subject's own ignorance. His desire
is, in effect, to stay ignorant. This is the precise desire in the dream.
The desire for death takes on its full meaning here. It is the
desire not to awaken - not to awaken to the message, the most
secret message that is borne by the dream itself, which is that the
subject, through his father's death, is now confronted with death,
having been protected from it hitherto by the father's presence.
"Confronted with death" - what does that mean? Confronted with
an x that is linked to the father's function, that is present here in the
pain of existing, and that is the pivotal point around which what
Freud discovered in the Oedipus complex revolves - namely, the
signification of castration.
Such is the function of castration.
What does "to take castration upon oneself' [assumer la castra­
tion] signify? Does one ever truly assume [one's own] castration?
What is this sort of point on which the last waves of "Analysis
123 Terminable and Interminable," as Freud calls it, crash? And up to
what point is the analyst not simply within his rights, but in a posi­
tion to be able to interpret it in this dream and regarding this dream?
At the end of what I said last time about the dream, I raised,
without answering it, a question regarding the three ways in
which the analyst can bring the subject's "as he wished" into the
interpretation.
 Introducing the Object of Desire 97

There is, first of all, the way that proceeds according to [selon]
the subject's speech, according to what he wanted, which he recalls
perfectly well, it having not been forgotten by him in the least. "He
did not know, as he wished." The phrase "as he wished" is inserted
here at the level of the statement line.
Re-established afterward at the level of the upper line - that is, at
the level of the enunciation that is hidden in unconscious memory -
it restores the traces of the Oedipus complex, which are those of the
child's desire for the father's death: "He was dead, as he wished."
Recall here what Freud tells us about the child's desire, which is,
when any dream forms, the capitalist, the latter finding his entrepre­
neur in a current desire. The current desire, which is far from always
beil)g unconscious, is the one that is expressed in the dream, and
it is strictly speaking the desire in the dream. In this case, once the
phrase "as he wished" is restored to the level of the child's desire,
isn't it clear that the latter finds itself in a position to go in the direc­
tion of the desire in the dream?
What is, in effect, the desire in this dream? It is indisputably - at
this crucial moment in the subject's life, the disappearance of his
father - to interpose the image of the object [i(a)], in order to make
it into the prop of a perpetual ignorance veiling desire. In short, "he
did not know" buttresses what was up until then desire's alibi. It
maintains and perpetuates the very function of prohibition that the
father conveyed. The latter is what gives desire here its enigmatic
and even abyssal form. It separates the subject from his desire; it
gives the subject shelter from or a defense, in the final analysis,
against this desire; it gives him a moral excuse not to confront it.
This was very clearly glimpsed by Ernest Jones, whose extraor­
dinary insights about certain points of this psychical dynamic I will
have the opportunity to show you today.
Lastly, can't we say that there is some intermediate stage of
the interpretation of the dream to which the pure and simple
interpretation of Oedipal desire is connected, like: "You wished 1 24
for your father's death at such and such a time and for such and
such a reason"? You will recognize the nature of this third stage
once I have designated it as "identification with the aggressor."
Identification with the aggressor lies somewhere in one's childhood.
Haven't you recognized that, being one of the typical forms of
defense, it is essential, and that it emerges at the very place where
"as he wished" is elided?
The meaning of "as" [selon] is undoubtedly essential if we are to
reach a full interpretation of the dream.
The fact remains that the conditions and opportunities that allow
the analyst to reach it will depend on the stage of the treatment
 98 On Desire in Dreams

and on the context of the response that the subject gives - by what
means? By his dreams - since we know that the dreams dreamt by a
subject in analysis are responses to the analyst, at least to what the
analyst has become in the transference - but essentially, I would say,
by the logical position of terms.
The fact remains, above all, that we can wonder if, to the ques­
tion "What is the wish in 'as he wished'?" we do not always risk
giving some precipitated or premature response, and thus giving the
subject an opportunity to avoid what is at stake- namely, the dead
end in which he is placed by the fundamental structure that turns the
object of any desire into the prop of an essential metonymy.
As such, in effect, the object of human desire presents itself in a
vanishing form, about which we can perhaps glimpse that castration
turns out to be what we might call the final temperament.
In order to investigate more precisely what human desire means
and signifies, we are thus led to broach the question from the other
end, an end that is not given in dreams - namely, to take up the
question via our algorithm, in which the barred S is confronted with
and placed across from little a, the object.

I introduced the algorithm ($0a) last time. Why not put it to the test
125 of the phenomenology of desire, as the latter presents itself to us as
analysts? If we allow ourselves to be guided by this algorithm, it will
lead us to investigate together our shared experience.
Let us try to see in what form the desire that is in us - that has
been there since Freud, that lies at the heart of analysis, and that
curiously enough has not been investigated as it should have been
heretofore - presents itself in the subject.
The subject is not obligatorily nor always a neurotic subject. But
if he is, it is no reason to assume that our research concerning desire
does not have to take his structure into account, for that structure
reveals a more general structure. The neurotic indubitably finds
himself situated somewhere along the continuum of an experience
that, to our way of thinking, is universal. All of Freud's theories are
constructed upon this foundation.
Before examining some of the ways in which the dialectic of
the relations between the subject and his desire have already been
broached - that is, before coming to Jones's thought, which I men­
tioned earlier - I want to discuss something I came across quite
recently in my clinical practice, which seems rather well designed to
introduce what I am seeking to illustrate.
 Introducing the Object of Desire 99

The patient in question was impotent. It is not bad to start with

impotence in order to begin to investigate what desire is. We are
sure, in any case, to be talking about human beings.
He was a young man who, of course, like many of those who are
impotent, was not at all impotent. He had made love quite nor­
mally in the course of his existence, and had had a few liaisons. He
was married and it was with his wife that things were not working
anymore. This is not to be chalked up to impotence. The term does
not seem appropriate given that the problem concerned the precise
object with whom relations were for him the most desirable, for he
loved his wife.
Now, here is more or less what, after a certain amount of ana­
lytic work, emerged from the subject's remarks. It was absolutely
not the case that he had no passion [elan] for her, but if he allowed
himself to be guided by it on any particular night, would he be able
to sustain it? This was the particular point he was at in his analysis.
Things had gone very far in the conflict ignited by the difficulty he
had been having. Did he have the right to impose on his wife some 1 26
new test, some new addition to his attempts and failures? In short,
was this desire - whose possibility of fulfillment was far from zero,
as one could sense in every regard- legitimate?
I cannot take my discussion of this particular case any further
here, and give you the whole case history, if only because it is an
ongoing analysis, and for many other reasons as well. This is one of
the disadvantages we always encounter when we allude to ongoing
analyses. I will thus borrow from other analyses a term that is
altogether decisive in certain developments, which sometimes lead
to detours, or even what we call perversions, which are of a much
greater structural importance than what, so to speak, nakedly
played itself out in this case of impotence.
Does he have a big enough phallus? In certain cases, the question
emerges in the subject's lived experience and comes to the light of
day in analysis. It may serve a decisive function, and, as in other
places, reveal a structure: the point at which the subject raises the
question. From certain angles or directions, this question can in and
of itself lead the subject to try out a whole series of solutions, which
- being superimposed, forming a series, and being added to each
other - can lead him quite far from the field of a normal execution
of what he has everything he needs to execute.
This "big enough phallus," or more exactly this phallus that is
essential to the subject, thus turns out to be foreclosed at a certain
moment of his experience. This is something that we encounter in a
thousand different forms, which naturally are not always apparent
or manifest, but which are latent. But it is precisely in the case in
 1 00 On Desire in Dreams

which this moment or stage of the subject's experience is exposed for

all the world to see [a ciel ouvert] that, as La Palice would say, we can
see and put our finger on it, and also give it its full import.
At the moment of the subject's life at which he encounters the sign
of desire, which is often situated at the moment of the awakening
of puberty, we see him more than once confronted, as it were, with
something that is similar to what I mentioned earlier - is his desire
legitimated or sanctioned by something else? We can take up what
appears here already in a flash, in the phenomenology in which the
1 27 subject expresses it, in the following form - does he have at his dis­
posal an absolute weapon? lf he does not, he will find himself drawn
into a series of identifications, alibis, and games of hide and seek
that may take him very far afield.
For the aforementioned reasons, I cannot go into the dichotomies
that are at work here. This is not too important, for the essence of
what I want to indicate does not lie there. The point is to get you to
grasp where desire finds the origin of its peripeteia.
The subject always alienates his desire in a sign, promise, or
anticipation, something that brings a possible loss with it as such.
Because of this possible loss, desire turns out to be linked to the
dialectic of a lack. It is subsumed by a stage [temps] which, as such,
is not there - no more than a sign is desire - a st�ge which, in part,
is yet to come. In other words, desire must confront the fear that it
will not stay the same over time and that, qua artifex, it perishes, if
I may put it thus.
Of course, the desire that man feels and senses as an artifex can
perish only with regard to the artifice of his own speaking. It is in
the dimension of speaking that this fear develops and stabilizes.
And it is here that we encounter a term that is so surprising and that
has so curiously been left behind by psychoanalysis, the one that
Jones makes into the mainstay of his reflections or meditations on
castration - namely, "aphanisis."
In the as-it-were modern practice of analysis, whose norms
reorient the analyst's relation to the patient in an entirely different
direction, the phenomenology of castration is ever more veiled, as
we see in recent publications. On the other hand, at the stage [in the
history] of psychoanalysis at which Jones found himself, different
tasks forced themselves on him; he was confronted with the need to
give Freud's thought a certain interpretation, exegesis, apology, and
explanation concerning what is involved in the castration complex,
in particular. It [Link] that he found a way to get his point across
- a ruse, if you will - that consists in saying that people are afraid of
being deprived·of their own desire.
The word "aphanisis" means disappearance. As you will see
 Introducing the Object of Desire 101

in Jones's text, what i s at stake i s the disappearance o f desire.

Aphanisis served him as a sensible introduction to a problematic
that gave the dear man a lot of worries, of which he never managed 1 28
to rid himself - that of the relations between women and the phallus.
From the outset, he used the term to give men and women's
relations to their desire the same common denominator. This was
tantamount to a dead end, for it completely neglected what Freud
discovered - namely, that these relations are fundamentally differ­
ent owing to the asymmetry in the different sexes with regard to
the phallus as a signifier. I believe that I have conveyed this to you
adequately enough that, for the time being, we can take this for
granted, at least provisionally.
Moreover, this use of "aphanisis," whether it was at the root of
Jones's invention or whether it only arose from its consequences,
marked a sort of inflection point that, in short, deflected its author
from the true question, which is, "What does the possibility of
aphanisis signify in the structure of the subject?" Doesn't it oblige us
to [postulate] a structuring of the human subject as such, precisely
insofar as he is a subject for whom existence is supposable and pre­
supposed beyond desire, a subject who exists and subsists outside of
his desire?
The question is not whether or not we must objectively take into
account desire in its most radical form - namely, the desire to live
or the "life instinct," as we say. What psychoanalysis shows us is
entirely different - it is that the desire to live is, as such, subjectively
put into play in the subject's lived experience. This does not merely
mean that human experience is sustained by desire - this we natu­
rally suspect to be true - but that the human subject takes desire into
account and counts on it.
When the dear old and well-known elan vital [vital impulse] - that
charming incarnation of human desire in nature that truly war­
rants the term anthropomorphism, and with which we try to make
nature, about which we do not understand much, hang together - is
at stake, the human subject sees it before him and is afraid that it
will fail him.
What is at stake here is, all the same, something other than reflec­
tions of the unconscious. In and of itself, this suggests that we would
do well to have a few structural requirements here. I mean that the
subject/object relationship, which is conceived of as immanent, as it
were, in the pure dimension of knowledge, nevertheless raises prob- 1 29
!ems for us that are a bit more complicated once desire comes into
the picture, as Freudian practice proves to us.
Since we began with impotence, we can turn now to the other
term. Human beings sometimes manage to satisfy their desire,
 1 02 On Desire in Dreams

sometimes managing to anticipate it being satisfied. But when they

are within range of satisfying it, I mean when they are not struck
with impotence, it also sometimes happens that they become afraid
of satisfying it - whereas, on this score, someone who is impotent
fears neither potency nor impotence. The very remarkable cases in
which the subject is afraid of the satisfaction of his own desire occur
more often than they should. This is because the satisfaction would
then make him dependent on the other who is going to satisfy him.
This is an everyday occurrence, phenomenologically speaking. It
happens all the time in human experience. There is no need for us to
refer to the great dramas that have taken on the role of exemplary
illustrations of this problematic in order for us to observe how
someone's life story unfolds. The subject spends his time avoiding
each and every opportunity to encounter what has always been his
most powerful desire in life. For the dependence on the other that he
is afraid of, which I just mentioned, is there too.
In fact, dependence on the other is the form in which what the
subject fears is presented in fantasy, and it makes him deviate from
the path of satisfying his desire.
The fear in question may not concern what one might simply call
the other's caprice [or whim]. I am not sure you realize that the word
"caprice" has little to do with the usual etymology, that found in the
Larousse dictionary, which relates it to goats [chevre]. The French
have in fact borrowed it from Italian, in which capriccio means
frisson [thrill, chill, or shiver]. It is the very same word that is so
cherished by Freud, sich striiuben, which signifies se herisser [i.e., to
bridle, prickle, stand up straight, or be rubbed the wrong way], and
which is, as you know, throughout his work one of the metaphorical
forms in which he incarnates in the most tangible way possible how
resistance manifests itself. He uses it in every context, when speak­
ing about his wife, when speaking about Irma, and when speaking
in general about subjects who resist.
What the subject is afraid of when he thinks about the other is
not essentially becoming dependent on his caprice [or whim], but the
fact that the other will mark this caprice with a sign [c'est que l'autre
ne marque ce caprice de signe]. This is what is veiled. There is no ade-
1 30 quate sign of the subject's goodwill if not the totality of the signs by
which he subsists. In truth, there is no other sign of the subject than
the sign of his abolishment as a subject, the sign that is written $.
This shows you, in short, that, as regards his desire, man is not
true, since - however little or much courage he puts into it - the situ­
ation radically escapes him. When he finds himself in the presence
of object a, the subject vanishes. What I wanted to convey to you
on this score last time was called, by someone who spoke with me
 Introducing the Object of Desire 1 03

afterward, "an umbilication of the subject at the level of his will,"

an image that I quite willingly accept inasmuch as it is strictly in line
with what Freud designates when he speaks about dreams.
A dream's navel is the point of final convergence of all the sig­
nifiers in which the dreamer is caught up, to such an extent that
Freud calls it the "unknown" [SE V, p. 525]. He himself did not
realize what was at stake in this Unbekannt [unknown], which is
a very strange term to flow from his pen and concerns the radical
difference of the unconscious that he discovered. As I have tried
to show you, the Freudian unconscious is not constituted and
instituted as unconscious in the simple dimension of the subject's
innocence with respect to the signifier that organizes and articu­
lates in his stead, for we find in the subject's relation to the signifier
an essential impasse. I just reformulated this by telling you that
there is no other sign of the subject than the sign of his abolition
as a subject.
As you might well suspect, things do not remain at this stage.
After all, if there were nothing but an impasse here, it would not
take us very far, as they say. The characteristic of impasses is that
they are fruitful, and this impasse is of interest to us only owing to
the ramifications that we see it develop, which are precisely those
where desire comes in.
Let us try to perceive this sort of aphanisis at the moment in your
analysis at which it must appear in a flash. However, it is not merely
an experience, there are mental modes in which you are led to con­
ceptualize it.
Regarding the Oedipus complex, people tell you that there is
a moment at which the subject flees [se derobe]. It is the so-called
moment of the inverted Oedipus in which the [male] subject glimpses
a solution to the Oedipal conflict in the possibility of purely and
simply attracting the love of the strongest party - namely, the father.
If he then flees from this love, it is, we are told, because his narcis-
sism is threatened, for to receive the father's love implies castration 131
fo r him.
People tell you this as if it were self-evident, because when they
cannot resolve a problem, they naturally consider it to be compre­
hensible, and this is what usually makes it such that it is nevertheless
not as clear as all that. This is certainly the case here.
This solution is indeed possible, all the more possible in that it
is, at least in part, the path that is usually followed, the one that
leads to the introjection of the father in the form of the ego-ideal.
In any case, that is what it looks like. But, if the so-called inverted
Oedipus is involved in the normal solution, this moment was nev­
ertheless perceived and especially brought out in the problematic
 104 On Desire in Dreams

of homosexuality in which the subject feels his father's love to be

essentially threatening. We qualify this threat as a castration threat,
not having a more suitable term at our disposal.
But this term is not all that unsuitable, after all. Psychoanalytic
terms have, in the end, fortunately retained enough meaning and
fullness, enough dense, heavy, and concrete character, to continue
to guide us.
People sense that there is some narcissism involved here, narcis­
sism being involved at this particular turning point in the Oedipus
complex. This is confirmed by later pathways of the dialectic that
lead the subject into the path of homosexuality. These later path­
ways are, as you know, far more complex than the pure and simple,
summary requirement that the object have a phallus, even if this
requirement is fundamentally hidden therein.
But that is not where I would like to head now. I will simply note
that, at the outset of the problematic of the signifier, the subject, in
order to deal with the suspension of desire, has more than one trick
up his sleeve, as it were.
These tricks naturally bear first and foremost on the manipula­
tion of the object, the manipulation of a in the formula.

1 32 3

The taking up of the object in the dialectic of the subject's relations

with the signifier must be placed at the core of the relationship to the
phallus that I have tried to articulate for you over the past few years.
The relationship to the phallus is seen all the time and every­
where. Need I recall to mind the moment in little Hans's life when,
at the age of two, he asked about every object, "Does it have a
widdler, a Wiwimacher, or not?" It suffices to observe children to see
this essential function operating right out in the open in all its forms.
Freud remarks in passing that the question raised by Hans con­
stitutes a mode of interpretation of the phallic form, which defines a
sort of analysis. This position, of course, merely translates the pres­
ence of the phallus in the dialectic, without informing us in any way
either about the nature of the process or about its stability, or even
about its goal, which I tried to show you at the time [in Seminar IV].
What I simply want to indicate is that we constantly find evidence
that we are not going astray here, and that the terms involved are
truly the following: the subject, owing in this case to his disappear­
ance, faced with an object, which sometimes turns out to be the
essential signifier around which the fate of the entire relationship
between the subject and object is played out.
 Introducing the Object of Desire 105

I will begin by rapidly mentioning in what sense, in the most

general sense, the object, I mean little a in our algorithm, impacts
what one might call the instinctual specificity of need.
When the signifier's interposition makes a relationship between
the subject and the object impossible - in other words, when the
subject cannot maintain himself in the presence of the object - we
know what happens: his object undergoes a sort of volatilization
that in our concrete practice we call the possibility of displacement.
This does not simply mean that the human subject, like all animal
subjects, sees his desire displace from one object to another, but that
displacement itself is what allows the fragile equilibrium of his desire
to be maintained.
In the final analysis, what does displacement involve? What it
involves is, I will say, the thwarting of satisfaction while nevertheless
preserving an object of desire. But, on the other hand, it is still, as it 133
were, a way of metonymically symbolizing satisfaction.
We are heading straight for the dialectic of the treasure chest
and the miser, which is far from being the most complicated, even
if people barely perceive what is at stake. Which is, namely, that in
this case, a certain retention of the object - as we say, bringing in an
anal metaphor - is the necessary condition for desire to subsist. But
this is only to the degree to which the retained object, which props
up desire, not itself be the object of any jouissance.
Legal terminology bears traces of this. When we say in French
that we give someone thejouissance [usufruct] of a piece of property,
what do we mean? We mean precisely that it is altogether humanly
conceivable to possess property that one does not enjoy but that
someone else enjoys [or benefits from, jouisse]. Here the object
reveals its function as desire's collateral [gage], so to speak, not to
say desire's hostage.
We can, if you will, try to connect this up with animal psychol­
ogy. As regards ethology, I myself am inclined to believe what one
of our colleagues said that was most exemplary and most colorful.
I realized this while reading a monograph that the publisher Plon
just brought out entitled L'Ordre des choses [The Order of Things].
I did not want to tell you the title because reading the book would
distract you from our work here; but fortunately it is a short book,
and it is by Jacques Brosse, someone who was completely unknown
up until now.
The book is a sort of brief natural history - that is how I interpret
it - fitting for our times. I mean by this that the book reminds us of
what we find so subtle and charming when we read Buffon's work,
and can never find in any contemporary scientific publication. But
what stops us from giving ourselves over to this kind of exercise,
 1 06 On Desire in Dreams

even if we know much more about the behavior of animals and

ethology than Buffon did? What we find in specialized journals is
unreadable. What is said in this short monograph is expressed, as
you will see, in a style that I must say is verily and truly remarkable.
Read, above all, the middle section, which is called "parallel lives"
and which discusses the lives of tarantulas and ants.
I thought of this short book because its author has something
in common with me, which is that the question of mammals is
resolved for him. Apart from man, who is an essentially problem-
1 34 atic mammal - it suffices to consider the role that breasts [mammes]
play in our imagination - there is but one truly serious m ammal,
which is the 'potamus. Everyone agrees here, at least those who have
some slight degree of sensitivity. T. S. Eliot, whose metaphysical
ideas are awful, but who is nevertheless a great poet, immediately
symbolized the militant Church as a hippopotamus - we will come
back to that.
What does the hippopotamus do? People highlight the difficulties
of his existence. They are great, so it seems, and one of the essential
things he does is guard his grazing ground [pacage]- because he must
nevertheless have a reserve of resources - with his excrement. This is
an essential point: he maps his territory, as it is called, by delimiting
it with a series of relays or points designed to adequately indicate to
all those whom this concerns - namely, his fellow creatures - that
this is his turf. As you see, we find a first sketch of symbolic activity
'in animals. In mammals, it is a specifically excremental symbolism.
Whereas the hippopotamus thus turns out to guard his grazing
ground with his excrement, man does not guard his grazing ground
with shit; it is his shit that he keeps as collateral for the essential
grazing ground, the grazing ground that remains to be determined.
This is the dialectic of what people call anal symbolism, which was
one of the hitherto absolutely unsuspected dimensions that Freud
revealed to us - a new revelation of the Noces chymiques, if I may
put it thus, of man with his object.
In truth, the progress made by man depends on language alone
- this singular intermediary - and we do not know where it comes
from. It seriously complicates our relationship with objects - in
other words, it leads us to have a problematic relationship with
objects.
This is, in short, the same question that Marx raises, without
resolving it, in his polemic with Proudhon - namely, how is it that
human objects shift from having use value to having exchange
value? I simply wanted to indicate to you why this happens and give
at least a brief sketch of an explanation.
You must read a piece by Marx called The Misery of Philosophy:
 Introducing the Object of Desire 107

A Response to Proudhon's "Philosophy ofMisery" (1948). The pages 135

in which he ridicules Proudhon for having decreed that the shift
from use value to exchange value occurred by a sort of pure decree
among those who were cooperating - and we would have to figure
out why they began cooperating and with the help of what - are
rather salubrious. The way in which Marx excoriates Proudhon for
a full twenty or thirty pages, without counting the rest of the book,
provides good intellectual training.
This is thus what happens regarding objects and the meaning of
their volatilization. To value an object is also to devalue it, I mean
to rip it away from the field of pure and simple need. This is, after
all, merely a reminder of the essential phenomenology, the phenom­
enology of property [or commodities, bien], strictly speaking - and
in every sense of the word bien, imagine that! But let us leave that
merely sketched out for the time being.
Let us simply say that when the object involved is another person,
or other people [/'autruz], and especially a sexual partner, a certain
number of consequences ensue, of course, which are all the more
palpable since we were talking earlier about the social dimension.
What is at stake here is assuredly at the very root of the social con­
tract. We must, in effect, take into account the elementary structures
of kinship in which the female partner is, as Levi-Strauss demon­
strated, an object of exchange, and in a way that is not lacking in
latency or repercussions.
This exchange is not self-evident. Indeed, as an object of exchange
women are, as it were, a very bad deal for those who carry out the
operation, since all of this brings about a real mobilization, as it
were, known as the offering [prestation] of the phallus, the contrac­
tual renting out of its services. Here we situate ourselves naturally
in the perspective of social utilitarianism, which, as you know, pre­
sents several disadvantages. This was my precise point of departure
earlier.
Once women are included in this dialectic, namely as socialized
objects, they undergo a transformation that is truly disturbing. It is
amusing to see how Freud, in the innocence of his youth, spoke of it.
See pages 192-3 of the first volume of Jones's biography of Freud.
In a letter to his fiancee, Freud indicates what purpose a woman, a 1 36
good woman, serves. He does so in connection with the topic of the
emancipation of women in John Stuart Mill's work, which, as you
know, Freud translated for a while, at the insistence of Gomperz.
This is quite priceless when you think that his passion for his fiancee
was, at the time, at its height.
The letter ends with the fact that a woman must stay in her place
and render all the services that are expected of her - this at a time
 108 On Desire in Dreams

at which Freud was willingly making himself the possible mentor of

his wife - and which are no different from the famous Kinder, Kiiche,
Kirche [children, kitchen, and church]. I must read you a passage
here based on the English, since Jones's biography has never been
published in another language: "Law and custom have much to
give women that has been withheld from them, but the position
of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and
in mature years a loved wife." We have here something that is not
devoid of interest to us, for it shows us both from what experience
Freud began and the path he had to travel.
Faced with this problematic position, another solution is possible
for the subject. And it is no accident that we have broached the ques­
tion from the angle of the social dialectic, for this other solution, as
we also know from Freud's work, is identification. Identification
with what? Identification with the father.
Why identification with the father? Because, as I already indi­
cated, the father is in some way perceived as someone who has
succeeded in really overcoming the impasse in the conjugal link,
because he is supposed to have really castrated the mother. I say
"supposed to have" [cense] because, naturally, it is merely supposed.
We have here the problematic of the father. lfl am emphasizing it
again today, it is perhaps because of what was said at our scientific
meeting last night regarding the father's imaginary function, his
lordliness [seigneurialite] in certain spheres of culture.
The figure of the father does not fail to present all sorts of pos­
sibilities for slippage. In effect, we must see that the solution that
is prepared here, as it were - namely, identification with the father
- stems directly from the fact that the father is already a type, in
the strict sense of the term. There is no doubt but that this type is
subject to temporal variations, but this does not bother us because
1 37 we cannot conceive of it otherwise than in relation to an imaginary
function. It is thanks to the subject's identification with the father
ideal, which denies the reality of the subject's relationship with his
father, that we can perhaps say that, on average, wedding nights
turn out alright, and in the final analysis are a success - even if a
truly rigorous statistical study of them has never been done.
Whatever the case may be, to us, identification with the father,
which is obviously linked not only to factual data but also to
imaginary data, resolves nothing when it comes to the problem­
atic of desire - neither for us nor, of course, for our patients, and
perhaps on this point we are no different from them.
Identification with the father's image is but a specific case of
what we must now broach as being the most general solution of
the subject/object relationship, the most general solution of the
 Introducing the Object of Desire 109

confrontation between the barred subject and object a, the object as

a - namely, the introduction of the imaginary function in its most
general form, otherwise stated, the dimension of narcissism.
It is narcissism that offers the subject a prop, solution, or solu­
tion pathway to the problem of desire. Human eros gets caught up
in a relationship with a certain image that is none other than that
of one's own body. Here an exchange or reversal occurs by which
I am going to try to articulate for you the confrontation between$
and little a.
As it is already a quarter to two, and as I was unable to take
things any further today, we will begin anew on this point when we
meet on January 7th after the Christmas vacation.

We will finally have the opportunity to specify little a in its essence,

function, and essential nature.
I have already indicated at length in prior Seminars that any and
every human object is fundamentally marked by a narcissistic struc­
ture, by a profound relationship with narcissistic eros. In the most
general structure of fantasy, this human object normally ends up
receiving the lion's share of the subject's Angst - that is, neither more
nor less than his affect in the presence of desire, this fear, this feeling
of imminence that I mentioned earlier, it being what essentially
thwarts the subject when he is on the verge of realizing his desire.
The whole nature of fantasy is to transfer this fear to the object.
In studying anew a certain number of fantasies whose dialectic we 138
have hitherto developed, we will see that the subject's affect in the
presence of his desire is transferred onto the object qua narcissistic.
A single fundamental fantasy, "a child is being beaten," will suffice -
because it was one of the first that was discovered - to bring out the
most essential features of this transfer.
What then becomes of the subject? How is he structured? Why is
he structured as an ego and as an ego-ideal? We can only glimpse
this in its absolutely rigorous structural necessity as the return or
echo of the affect that the subject delegated to the object, a.
We have never yet truly spoken about a, in the sense that I have
not yet shown you that it must necessarily be posited not qua a but
qua image of a, image of the other, which is one and the same thing
as the ego. I designate this image with a capital I, for Ideal du moi
(ego-ideal), insofar as it is itself the heir of the subject's first relation­
ship, not with his own desire, but with his mother's desire. This ideal
thus takes the place of what it felt like to the subject to be a child
who was wanted.
Following this necessary development, capital I comes to be
inscribed in a certain trace. A transformation of the algorithm is
110 On Desire in Dreams

necessary here, that I can already put on the blackboard as a sort

of preannouncement. The I is inscribed in a certain relationship to
the other, a, inasmuch as the latter is affected by the subject himself,
inasmuch as the latter is affected by his desire.

i(a) a
0
$ I

Formula of the ego-ideal

We will see this next time.

December 17, 1958
 VII 139

DESIRE'S PHALLIC
MEDIATION

The symptom in the RIS knot

The imaginary interposition of the dead father
The signifying privilege of the imaginary phallus
The subject's primary masochism
Love and desire in men and women

Our practice confronts us with the need to make an essential distinc­

tion between two functions. There is in the subject what we must
call desire. And yet this desire's constitution, manifestation, and
contradictions - which, in the course of treatments, come out clearly
between the subject's discourse and his behavior - oblige us to dis­
tinguish it from the function of demand.
If there is something that psychoanalysis has brought out - not
only in its original Freudian form but also in the contradictions that
have arisen subsequently - it is certainly the role played by demand
and its problematic character.
The development of psychoanalysis since Freud's time has, in
effect, granted ever greater importance and emphasis to what, going
by various names, converges in the final analysis on the general
notion of dependency neurosis. This is where the theoretical slip­
pages, not to mention failures in terms of practice, of a certain
conception of the results [reduction] that must be obtained by
therapeutic treatment converge. What is hidden or veiled behind the
notion of dependency neurosis is the fundamental fact of demand,
whose effects impress, compress, and oppress the subject.
Have we adopted the right attitude toward this function, which
we reveal to be formative in the genesis of the subject? Have we
adopted, I mean, an attitude that allows for the elucidation of
symptoms as well as for their alleviation?
Symptoms do not result from the mere subtraction or suspen­
sion that is known as frustration, nor are they merely a sort of
 1 12 On Desire in Dreams

140 deformation of the subject - however it might be envisioned - owing

to something that is supposedly doled out as a function of a certain
relationship to the real. For an imaginary frustration is, as I have
said, always related to something real. Between what we in fact dis­
cover in psychoanalysis as the aftermath, consequences, and effects
of frustration, on the one hand - and even its long-lasting effects, for
it makes an impression on us - and symptoms, on the other hand,
there is something known as desire that is characterized by an infi­
nitely more complex dialectic.
Now, what I have tried to demonstrate is that desire does not result
from a few impressions left by the real, but rather that it cannot be
grasped or understood except in the tightest knot by which the real,
the imaginary, and its symbolic meaning are tied together for man.
This is why the relationship between desire and fantasy is inscribed
on the graph in the field that lies midway between the two structural
lines of any and every signifying enunciation [d�($0a)].
If what constitutes a symptom - namely, let us say, a metaphori­
cal phenomenon, that is, interference by a repressed signifier with a
patent signifier - is truly based on desire, we would be barking up
the wrong tree altogether were we not to seek to situate, organize,
and structure the place of this desire.
We have begun to do so this year, by taking up a dream that I
have already discussed at length.

It turns out that Freud highlighted this odd dream, the one in
which the dead father appears, on two different occasions. After
having given it an especially useful place in his 1911 article on
the two principles of mental functioning [SE XII, pp. 225-6], the
pleasure principle and the reality principle, he integrated it into the
Traumdeutung.
I have tried to situate the elements of this dream on what we
might call the graph of the inscription of the elementary biological ·

subject - that is, the subject characterized by need - in the defiles of

demand. This graph includes a chain or articulation that is funda­
mentally twofold, which corresponds to a structural distinction. I
showed you how we must view it.
Namely, we must see that demand is never purely and simply a
141 demand for something, since behind every precise demand, every
demand for satisfaction, there is, owing to language, the symboli­
zation of the Other, the Other as presence and absence, the Other
who may be a subject who provides the gift of love. What he gives is
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 13

beyond anything he can give. What he gives, he gives by his presence

and by his presence alone. What he gives is precisely that nothing
which amounts to everything in the determination of presence
versus absence.
I have articulated this dream by didactically shifting onto
the twofold nature of signs something that allows us to grasp,
in the dream's structure, the relationship that is established by
the fantasized production whose structure Freud attempted to
elucidate throughout his life, and first of all, masterfully, in the
Traumdeutung.
The son, who is in mourning for a father whom he undoubtedly
loved and whom he watched over until the very end of his death
throes, makes his father reappear under conditions that the dream
articulates with exemplary simplicity. The father appears as he
was when alive, he speaks, and before him the son remains dumb,
oppressed, and gripped by pain - pain, he says, that stems from the
thought "that his father was dead and did not know it." We must
complete this, as Freud tells us, "that he was dead as he [the dreamer]
wished. He did not know" what? That it was "as he wished."
This is the whole dream. If we try to go further into its construc­
tion and examine its structure more closely, we note that the subject
is confronted with a certain image under very specific conditions. I
would say that a distribution or dividing up is established between
this image and what the subject assumes responsibility for in his
dream, which will show us the essence of the phenomenon.
I have already tried to home in, so to speak, on the structure
of this dream by distributing the dream's characteristic signifying
themes on what we might call a signifying ladder.
"He did not know," which I have situated on the upper line of the
graph, is an essentially subjective reference, for it concerns nothing
factual as such. It concerns the deepest dimension of the subject,
going to the core of his structure, and we know that this structure is
ambiguous here. "He did not know" is attributable not only to the
person to whom it is attributed by the dreamer - in a paradoxical,
absurd, and contradictory way that even resonates nonsensically, 142
since we are, after all, talking about someone who is dead - but it
is also present in the structure of the dreamer inasmuch as he too
shares in this ignorance, and this is essential.
How does the subject position himself in the suspension, as it
were, of the dream narrative? He views himself as knowing what the
other does not know. The upshot is that the other's subjective posi­
tion is that he is found wanting [d'etre en defaut], so to speak.
The statement that he is dead obviously cannot affect him. But a
symbolic expression like etre mort ["to be dead" or "dead being"]
 1 14 On Desire in Dreams

.
I
I
I
I
I
\ I
I
\ AS HE WISHED ·, I

,, "' - - - - - - ... ... �

he was dead

, ,
I I
\
I I

.,. '-----..... ... ,

J

A
Figure 7. 1 : New distribution of the statement and enunciation

harbors within itself a paradox, for it makes the very person that
it concerns subsist, preserving him in being, whereas there is no
being here who can be dead. There can be no symbolic assertion of
someone being dead [de l'etre mort] that does not immortalize him,
in a certain manner. This is clearly what is at work in the dream
about the dead father.
The fact remains that the position of this being who is found
wanting, that this subjective minus value [mains-value], does not aim
at the fact that he is dead but that he is the one who does not know
it. This is how the subject [i.e., the dreamer] is situated in relation
143 to the other. Not only does the other not know that he is dead but
I would say that, in the end, he must not be told this. Such protect­
ing of the other is always found more or less at the root of any and
all communication between beings, where the question of what one
can and what one cannot make known to the other always arises.
This is something whose impact you should always weigh carefully
whenever you are engaged in analytic discourse.
We talked last night about those who cannot speak, those who
encounter obstacles to expressing themselves. What was at issue was
the resistance of discourse itself, strictly speaking. It is essential that
we mention this dimension if we are to relate the dream about the
dead father to another dream, one that I will borrow from a page
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 15

near the end of Trotsky's Diary in Exile. It is a dream he had shortly

after the end of his stay in France, I believe.
It is an especially poignant dream. Trotsky had it at a moment
when, perhaps for the very first time, he began to notice the first
signs of the diminishing of his life force that had been so inexhaust­
ible. In his dream he sees his companion Lenin, and Lenin conveys
to him that Trotsky is perhaps no longer at the height of his powers,
as his old companion had always known him to be. But faced
with this old companion, who emerges so significantly at a critical
moment in his own vitality, what Trotsky thinks, in a way whose
value derives from the ambiguity we always encounter in dialogue,
is that he should spare Lenin's feelings. And wishing to remind him
of a time related to the precise moment at which Lenin's own forces
failed him, Trotsky says to him, in order to designate to him the
moment at which he died, "the moment at which you were very, very
ill . . . " - as if some precise formulation of what was involved would,
by its mere utterance, have blown away the shade in the dream with
which Trotsky himself was grappling, at the same turning point in
his existence.
Well, if in the distribution between the two figures who confront
each other in the dream about the dead father, ignorance is imputed
to the other, how can we fail to see that there is also, conversely, the
subject's own ignorance? For the dreamer does not know, not simply
the signification of his dream - namely, everything that underlies it
and that Freud brings out, that is, his unconscious history, his old
wishes for his father's death - but, further still, the nature of the pain
that he (the dreamer) feels. In seeking its origin, we have realized 144
that it was the pain that he had felt and glimpsed while witnessing
his father's last moments on earth. But it is also the pain of existence
as such, at the limit at which this existence subsists in a state where
we no longer apprehend anything but its inextinguishable character
and the fundamental pain that accompanies it when all desire disap-
pears from it, when all desire has vanished from one's existence.
This is the exact pain that the subject takes on, but he explains it
absurdly since he explains it solely by the other's ignorance. In the
final analysis, if we look very closely, this ignorance is no more a
reason for his pain than the affect that emerges in an hysterical fit
is explained by the context from which it seems to arise, the affect
being in fact related to some other context.
It is precisely by taking this pain on himself that the subject blinds
himself to what has taken place in his immediate proximity - that
is, to the fact that his father's death throes and disappearance have
actually threatened him, the son. He experienced these things, and
in the dream he distances himself from them by recalling his father's
 1 16 On Desire in Dreams

image to mind. This image separates him from the sort of abyss or
vertigo that opens up before him whenever he is confronted with the
final term of his existence, and attaches him to something that calms
men down - namely, desire. What he needs to interpose between
himself and unbearable existence is, in this case, a desire.
He does not cite just any old prop for his desire, just any old
desire, but the closest and most urgent one, the best one, the desire
that had long dominated him, the one he had subdued but that he
must now bring back to life imaginarily for a while.
In the power struggle that lies at the core of his rivalry with his
father, it is the dreamer who finally wins out. If he triumphs, it is
because the other does not know, whereas he does. Here we see
the flimsy footbridge [passerelle] thanks to which the subject does
not feel directly invaded - or swallowed up by the gaping hole
that opens up before him - when he is directly confronted with
the anxiety that death provokes.
To put this more crudely, we know that the death of one's father
is always experienced as the disappearance of a sort of shield, of the
interposition or substitution that the father was with respect to the
absolute master, death.
145 We thus begin to see a sort of prefiguration of something; we see
something being sketched out. What is it, if not the formula that
I am trying to present, which is what props desire up - the funda­
mental formula of the essential intra-subjective relationship within
which all desire, as such, must be inscribed: (SOa)?

In this simplest form possible, the formula ($0a) expresses the same
relationship as the one that interposes itself in the partially uncon­
scious discourse coming from the Other with a capital 0 [grand
Autre] and going toward the subject, in the quadrilateral schema
that you already know, the one known as the L schema.
The imaginary tension a---a ' between the ego and the other - that
we could call, in certain regards, the tension between little a and the
image of a generally structures the relationship between the subject
-

and the object, whereas the formula ($0a) specifically expresses the
absence of the subject that is characteristic of the impact of desire
on the relationship between the subject and the imaginary functions.
Indeed, desire as such raises for man the question of his subjective
elision, $, with regard to any and every possible object.
To the degree to which the subject is inscribed in the dimension
of speech as a plaintiff [or: petitioner, demandeur], he approaches
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 17

(Es) S G) other

(ego ) a © other

Figure 7.2: The L schema

the most elaborate and evolved object that certain analysts more or
less·deftly conceptualize as the object of "oblativity." This notion is 146
problematic, as I have often indicated. I, too, try to conceptualize
what is involved here and endeavor to formulate it more rigorously.
Inasmuch as a subject, qua desire - that is, in the fullness of a
human destiny which is that of a speaking subject - approaches this
object, he finds himself caught in a sort of impasse. He cannot reach
this object qua object except by finding himself, as a subject of speech,
effaced in a kind of elision that leaves him in the darkness brought
on ·by trauma, and in what is, strictly speaking, beyond anxiety itself.
Or else he finds that he must take the place of the object, substitute
himself for it, and subsume himself under a certain signifier.
Which one? The phallus. For the time being, I am simply stating
this. I am not justifying it; our whole discussion will justify it. All
of psychoanalytic experience attests to it. It is owing to this that, in
every instance of assuming a fully developed [mure] position, the one
we refer to as genital, something occurs which has an impact at the
imaginary level - it is called castration.
It is from this perspective alone that one can understand the
problematic of the phallic phase that raised truly infinite questions
and contradictions from which analysts have found it impossible to
extricate themselves. The dialogue between Freud and Jones on this
topic is, I would say, singularly moving. It suffices to see the impasse
that Jones ends up in when he revolts against the conception - which
is too simple for his taste - that Freud offers of the phallic function,
as the one and only term around which all concrete and historical
development of sexuality in men and women revolves. Jones high­
lights instead what he refers to as the functions of defense linked to
the image of the phallus.
Freud and Jones end up saying the same thing, but they come at
 1 18 On Desire in Dreams

it from different angles. If they assuredly cannot agree, it is because

they do not have at their disposal the central notion according
to which the phallus must, in this case, be conceptualized as sub­
tracted, as it were, from the imaginary community, as isolated when
confronted with the variety and multiplicity of other images that
come to take on bodily functions. Its function is privileged, it con­
stituting the signifier of the subject.
1 47 Let us look at this still more closely, and distinguish the level of
the call [appe� from that of the wish [voeu].
The level of the call is first, immediate, apparent, and sponta­
neous. When we call out, "Help!" or "Give us bread!" - each of
which is, in the end, a cry - the subject is identical to his need for an
instant, and in the most total way possible. A call must, neverthe­
less, be articulated at the interrogative [quesitlj] level of demand.
It is articulated in the experience between child and mother, and
in everything he puts in her place - namely, the whole society that
speaks her [or: his, sa] language.
On the other hand, the articulation of the votive [ votlj] level is at
one remove. It is the dimension in which the subject, throughout his
life, must find himself anew - that is to say, must find what got away
from him because it was outside and beyond all that is filtered out by
language qua form. As it develops, such filtration rejects and represses
ever more thoroughly that part of the subject's need that tended to be
expressed at first. What we do in analysis is attempt to go beyond what
was filtered out, shaped, and transformed by the subject's speech.
We could say that everything that must be articulated at the inter­
rogative level resides in the Other, here at A [on the lower level of the
graph], as a predetermined code that completely pre-exists the sub­
ject's experience, it being offered up to the play of language - that
is, to the first signifying battery the subject experiences, assuming he
learns to speak.
What do we do in analysis, what do we encounter, and what do we
recognize when we say that the subject is at the oral stage or at the
anal stage, etc.? We must first of all express it in a full-fledged form,
which assumes that we do not forget the complete element - namely,
that what is always involved is the subject qua marked by speech
and in a certain relation to his demand. Next, we must see that an
interpretation by which we convey to the subject the structuring of
his demand, does not simply consist in getting him to recognize the
oral, anal, or other character [caractere] of the demand in question,
but, literally, to confront him with this characteristic [caractere].
What we interpret is not simply a characteristic that is immanent in
the subject's demand; we confront the subject with the structure of
his demand as such.
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 19

It is precisely at this point that the emphasis of our interpretation

must shift, oscillate, and vacillate. If we know how to emphasize it
in a certain way, we teach the subject to recognize at the upper level 148
of the graph - which is the votive level, the level of what he wishes
for, the level of his wishes insofar as they are unconscious - the
signifying props that are hidden and unconscious in his demand.
Interpretation must stay entirely within this register. In short, we do
nothing but teach the subject, as it were, to speak and to recognize
himself as a subject in what corresponds to D [on the graph; see
Figure 2.2], yet without giving him answers.
On the other hand, to reveal this unconscious vocabulary to the
subject without confronting him with his demand comes down
to producing a collapse in the function of the subject as such; it
comes down to asking him to efface himself and disappear. This is
clearly what happens in a type of psychoanalytic practice in which
the analysis of the unconscious is reduced to teaching the patient a
vocabulary. What disappears and escapes, what turns out to be pro­
gressively eliminated, is the requirement that the subject manifest
himself - beyond all of that - in his being. Constantly bringing him
back to the level of demand - which is known in a certain form of
technique as "analyzing the resistances" - ends up purely and simply
eliminating his desire.
It is simple and easy to see that the two levels of the graph include
the vector of a retroactive response. In the subject's relation to the
Other, this vector goes backward toward the subject in order to
confirm the meaning of his demand for him, and at times to identify
him with his own demand. Similarly, at the level at which the subject
seeks to recognize himself in what is beyond this demand, there is a
place for a response, which is schematized by the abbreviation S(A),
which is the signifier of barred A. This is a reminder that the Other
too is marked by the signifier, that he too is in a certain way abol­
ished in discourse.
This serves no other function than to indicate a theoretical point,
and we shall see the form it must take. Let us simply say that this
form is essentially the recognition of what is castrated in any living
being who attempts to approach this living being when the latter is
approached through language. Of course, it is not at this level that
we can instantly give an answer, but we must target, respect, and
explore it.
In order to do so, we can use what the subject already expresses
beyond the answer's locus - namely, the imaginary situation in 149
which he places, maintains, and suspends himself in a position that,
in certain ways, assuredly includes the artifices of defense. This is
what leads to the ambiguity of so many manifestations of desire,
 1 20 On Desire in Dreams

of perverse desire, for example. This is the most essential point at

which the subject's being attempts to express and assert itself.
This is all the more important to consider, as it is precisely here,
in this very locus, that we expect what we so blithely call optimal
genital development to occur, and the fully developed [acheve]
object to appear. Thanks to which we should note that everything
that constitutes the relations between men and women, as Jones
expresses himself biblically somewhere, remains marked by struc­
tural difficulties that stem from the fact that man is a speaking
subject and that express the relationship between$ and a. Why are
there such difficulties?
Up to a certain point in development, the vocabulary and code of
demand can pass through a certain number of relations that involve
a detachable object - namely, to limit ourselves to two, nourishment
in oral relations and excrement in anal relations. Nevertheless, when
genital relations are at stake, it is quite clear that it is only through
a type of borrowing or continuation of the subject's signifying frag­
mentation in relations involving demand that something can appear
to us - and indeed appears to us, but in a morbid way, including all
its symptomatic forms of impact - namely, the phallus. And this
is true for a good, simple reason,, which is that the phallus is not a
detachable object and that it only becomes one by shifting to the
status of a signifier.
What is involved in optimal genital development is based on the
following, that nothing that presents itself in the subject as related
to the fulfillment of his desire can, to put it as clearly as possible, be
demanded [or: asked for, se demander]. The essence of neurosis, the
essence of what we deal with when we work with those character­
ized by neurotic structure, consists very precisely in the fact that
what cannot be demanded in this realm - that is to say, everything
having to do with desire - is nevertheless inscribed and formulated
in the register of demand. This neurotic phenomenon appears, more
or less sporadically, in the development of all subjects characterized
by neurotic structure.
While rereading Jones's work recently, I re-examined every-
1 50 thing he wrote about the phallic phase. What he contributes that
stems from his most perceptive and direct experience is always very
interesting.

I could relate cases of a number of male patients whose failure

to achieve manhood - in relation to either men or women - was
strictly to be correlated with their attitude of needing first to
acquire something from women, something which of course
they never actually could acquire. [p. 461]
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 121

• "Why?" asks Jones, and when he asks why in his article and in

thiS'�ontext, it is a genuine question. He does not know why, but he

underscores it as a point on the horizon, an opening, a perspective,
and a point where he no longer has any guide.

Why should imperfect access to the nipple give a boy the sense
:of; imperfect possession of his own penis? I am quite convinced
that the two things are intimately related, although the logical
connection between them is certainly not obvious. [p. 46 1]

A't lea�t, not to him.

Even the most superficial phenomenology allows us to see at
every moment the necessary preconditions for a subject to be able
ia [Link] put his desire into action. We can reconstruct them in detail
rig)]t up to the point of finding what I would call the labyrinthine
pathways into which his desire skids. Here we see what constitutes
an·essential fact - namely, the position he took up in the structural
relation between desire and demand.
This is why people say, for example, that the continued existence
of the incestuous position in the unconscious has variously ravaging
consequences on the manifestations and fulfillment of the subject's
desire. If this proposition has any meaning, it is only inasmuch as
this so-called incestuous position, which is supposedly preserved
somewhere in the unconscious, is a position characterized by
, demand. When Jones says that the subject must, at a given moment,
choose between his incestuous object and his sexual organ [sexe], 151
and that if h e wants t o preserve the one he must give up the other,
Jiiwould say that what he has to choose between at such an early
moment is between his demand and his desire.
After these general indications, I am now going to start down a
path that is designed to show you the actual structuring of desire
at the imaginary level, and what it has in common with imaginary
elements that are inflected and taken up in the necessary play of
the signifying game, inasmuch as this game is commanded by the
twofold structure of the votive and the interrogative.

Let us consider the most banal or common fantasy, the one Freud
paid special attention to: "A child is being beaten" [SE XVII,
pp. 1 79-204].
Let us re-examine it from the perspective I am developing in order
to see in what respect fantasy is desire's necessary prop.
 122 On Desire in Dreams

Freud encountered the Schlagephantasie [beating fantasy], in his

own era, in a certain number of predominantly female subjects.
When the first phase of the fantasy is remembered, whether in fan­
tasies or in the subject's memories, it is described, Freud tells us,
by the following sentence: Der Vater sch/[Link] das Kind [The father
is beating the child]. Freud underscores the fact that, in this case,
the child who is being beaten is, in relation to the subject, in a posi­
tion that is expressed by the more complete sentence: "The father is
beating the child that I hate."
Freud thus brings us from the initial point to the very heart of
being, where the most intense degree of love and hate is situated. In
effect, the other child is represented here as being subjected, by the
father's violence and whim [caprice], to a maximal fall from grace
[decheance] or symbolic devaluing, as being absolutely frustrated
and deprived of love. Hatred targets him in his very being, target­
ing in him what is demanded beyond all demand - namely, lov0
The so-called narcissistic injury done to the hated child is utter ar
complete here.
The child's subjective fall from grace, which is linked for him to
his first encounter with corporal punishment, leaves various traces
depending on the modalities of its repetition. In the times in which
1 52 we live, children are mostly spared such punishment. Nevertheless,
as everyone can observe, if it happens that a child who has never
been beaten is, late in the game, the object of physical chastisement,
however justified it may be, this experience has prostrating conse­
quences for him, at least momentarily, that one cannot imagine in
advance .
Be that as it may, assuming we agree that the earliest stage of the
beating fantasy is as Freud presents it to us, "Profound transforma­
tions [take] place between this first phase and the next" [SE XVII,
p. 1 85]. Freud describes the second phase as follows:

The person beating remains the same (that is, the father); but
the child who is beaten has been changed into another one and
is now invariably the child producing the fantasy. The fantasy
is accompanied by a high degree of pleasure, and has now
acquired a significant content, with the origin of which we shall
be concerned later. Now, therefore, the wording runs: "I am
being beaten by my father." [p. 1 85]

But Freud adds the following:

This second phase is the most important and the most momen­
tous of all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 123

never had [any] real existence. It is never remembered, it has

never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of
analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account. [p. 1 8 5]

My sense is that no one gives enough weight to the consequences

of Ereud's assertion here. In the final analysis, we never encounter
the most significant phase. Nevertheless, it has to exist since it leads
to a third phase.
�ow, the formulation of the second phase is of great interest
tq us. It is tantamount, in effect, to the formulation of primary
masochism. The latter comes in at the precise moment at which the
subject gets closest to realizing himself as a subject in the signifying
qialectic.
' Freud rightly says that something essential happens between the
first and the second phase: the subject sees the other being cast down
froin his dignity as an elevated subject, as a little rival. The opening
that ensues makes him perceive that his whole being, qua existing
being, resides in the very possibility of subjective cancellation. It is
in .coming as close as possible to being abolished that he weighs the
dimension in which he subsists as a being who is subject to will, a 153
being who can formulate a wish.
·We must seek out the phenomenology of masochism in maso­
chistic literature, whether we like it or not, and whether it is
pornographic or not. What is the essence of the masochist's fantasy,
in the end, whether we look at a classic novel or a recent novel
brought out by a semi-clandestine publisher? The subject imagines
a' series of experiences that go in a direction whose flank, border,
or limit is based essentially on the fact that he is purely and simply
treated like a thing, like something that, at its most extreme, is nego­
tiated, sold, mistreated, and removed from any and every votive
possibility of viewing himself as autonomous. He is treated like a
dog, I would say, and not just any old dog - a dog that is mistreated
and especially like a dog who has already been mistreated.
This is the turning or pivotal point of the second phase that we
can only assume to exist. It is also the transformational base start­
ing from which the subject will seek to enter into the final phase, in
order to find therein the swivel or balance [or: tipping] point of his
position - namely, $. For once he has entered into the dialectic of
speech, assuming he enters into it, he must formulate himself as a
subject somewhere.
Nevertheless, in the end, the neurotic subject is like Picasso.
Picasso once came out with the following truly sovereign formu­
lation: "I do not seek, I find." In effect, there is a certain type of
person who seeks, and another type that finds. Believe me, neurotics
 124 On Desire in Dreams

- namely, everything man's struggle with speech spontaneously pro­

duces in subjects - find.
I would point out in this connection that trouver [to find] comes
from the Latin word tropus [trope]. This refers quite explicitly to
what I always talk about, the difficulties of rhetoric. It is curious
that in the Romance languages the word that designates the fact of
finding is borrowed from the language of rhetoric, whereas in the
Germanic languages it is a different root that serves this purpose.
Let us stop for a moment at this third phase at which the subject
thus gains his balance. It is immediately known to us, but perhaps
1 54 worth dwelling on nevertheless. What do we see right off the bat in
the fantasy On bat un enfant ["A child is being beaten"]?
Who is doing the beating? It is On [the impersonal pronoun One].
When Freud would insistently ask his patient who was doing the
beating, this person or that, there was nothing doing, he remained
evasive. It was only after a certain amount of interpretive work that
the subject could refind a certain paternal figure or image in his
fantasy, insofar as the latter served as a prop for his desire when
masturbating. But at the outset, the subject of the sentence was com­
pletely neutralized: it was On.
As for who is beaten, it is not difficult to grasp. It is multiple -
many children, boys when the fantasizer is a girl. But there is no
necessary connection between the sex of the child who fantasizes
and the sex of the image fantasized about.
The greatest variations and uncertainties center, too, on the posi­
tion of the child whose fantasy it is. We know that, up to a certain
point, the child - in some way, whether it is a or a', i( a) or a - is
involved in this fantasy since he is the one who has it. But the child
does not situate himself anywhere in a precise, unequivocal manner;
his position swivels indefinitely.
I would now like to highlight something that is closely related to
what I earlier called the distribution of the intra-subjective elements
of the dream. Where is affect emphasized? In the dream about the
dead father, this affect is pain and it targets the dreaming subject.
Similarly, in the fantasy "a child is being beaten," which is indis­
putably a sadistic fantasy - and, moreover, in virtually all sadistic
fantasies that we can observe, taken in their broadest extension
- affect targets the fantasized image of the partner, not so much
insofar as he is beaten but insofar as he is going to be beaten or does
not know how he will be beaten.
I will come back to this extraordinary element when we talk about
the phenomenology of anxiety. But I am already pointing out to you
a nuanced distinction found in Freud's text, and which no one natu­
rally has ever brought out regarding anxiety. We must not confuse
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 125

the pure and simple loss of the subject in the darkness of subjective
'indetermination with something that is completely different from
it: the fact that the subject becomes alert or erect, as it were, when
faced with danger.
In. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud introduces a still 155
more astonishing phenomenological distinction that is so subtle that
it is not easy to translate into French. It is the distinction between
abwarten, which I will endeavor to translate by subir [to undergo),
n"en pouvoir mais [to be unable to do anything about it], or tendre
/e•dos [brace oneself], and erwarten, which is s'attendre a [to expect].
The affect that is emphasized and attached to the other or partner
1. attached to he who is across from one, little a - is situated in this
register or range in the sadist's fantasy.
t .Where, in the final analysis, is this subject - this subject who, in

this case, is prey to something that he does not have [and that he
\VDUld have to have] in order to know where he is? It would be easy
to say that he is between the two [the beater and the beaten]. I would
go further still - I would say that he is so truly between the two that
he plays, in an exemplary manner, the role of the instrument with
which the one hits the other. The subject is identical here to the
instrument.
Indeed, the instrument is very frequently the essential personage
in the imaginary structure of desire that we are trying to formulate
here. We are always flabbergasted to see this, and we always have
the best of reasons to be astonished by this, unless we do not want to
see it. What is most paradoxical and the biggest warning for us is, in
short, that the subject abolishes himself behind this signifier, which
is altogether unveiled here in its nature as a signifier, insofar as he
recognizes his essential being in it, if it is true that we can say with
Spinoza that this essential being is his desire.
It is, in effect, to this same crossroads that we are led whenever a
sexual problematic is brought up. The crux of the sexual problem­
atic in women is the phallic phase. We began with this two years ago
and Jones returns to it constantly in order to dispute and develop it.
Jones's text manifests the kind of working over of a topic that we see
in the course of a psychoanalysis.
The central focus of the phallic phase in girls is the relationship
between hatred for the mother and desire for the phallus. It is on this
very point that Freud bases the requirement [or: demand, exigence]
that everyone have a phallus, a requirement that plays a role in the
resolution of the Oedipus complex in boys, and a role in the entry
into the Oedipus complex for girls. This requirement has a truly
fundamental, generative [or: developmental, genetique] character.
The link between hatred for the mother and desire for the phallus
 1 26 On Desire in Dreams

is the strict meaning of Penisneid [penis envy]. Jones rightly under­

scores the ambiguities encountered every time we use this term. If
1 56 the desire to have a penis is inscribed in a rivalry with another, it
presents itself in an ambiguous guise that clearly shows us that its
meaning must be sought out beyond this. "Desire for the phallus"
means desire mediated by the phallus. The mediating phallus plays
an essential role in the mediation of desire.
This leads me to formulate the problem in terms that already
introduce what I will later have to develop in my analysis of the
construction of fantasy. We will have to figure out how to situate the
place of the phallus as a signifier in imaginary experience. The latter,
as we know, is profoundly structured by narcissistic forms that
govern the relations between the subject and his semblable - that is
to say, between the speaking subject, $, and little a, the other that
the subject bears within himself.
Today, we have identified it with a. This means that the imaginary
other is what the subject has inside himself as a "drive" - I put it in
quotes, for what we have here is a drive that is not yet developed,
a drive before it is taken up in the signifying dialectic, a drive in its
primitive nature where it represents one or another manifestation
of the subject's need. Nevertheless, if the subject, through the inter­
mediary of specular reflection, must situate his needs in the image
of the other, we see on the horizon what I initially referred to as
the first identification with the Other in the radical sense - namely,
identification with the Other's insignias. This is, in other words, the
signifier capital I over little a.

I
a

I am going to put on the board a schema that will be recognized

by those who were here for the first year of my Seminar, when we
spoke about narcissism. It is the schema of the parabolic mirror
thanks to which we can make the image of a hidden flower appear
in a vase sitting on a tray, whether it is lit from below or on the tray;
owing to the property of spherical rays, this image is projected as
a real image. This means that it momentarily produces the illusion
that the flower is in the vase.
1 57 To conjure up this image in space, we must have a little screen over
here [Lacan points to a part of the schema]. This might seem mys­
terious, but it is not. In effect, the illusion - namely the sight of this
real image in the air - can only be perceived within a certain spatial
field which is precisely determined by the diameter of the spherical
mirror and mapped out in relation to the center of the mirror. The
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 1 27

Figure 7.3: The inverted bouquet illusion

upsiiot being that, if the mirror is narrow, in order to see the image
one must place oneself in a field where the rays reflected from the
mirror cross anew its center, which assumes a certain lighting up [or:
blossoming, epanouissement] of the spatial zone.
'What was important in my little explanation back then was the
foilowing: if someone wanted to see this fantasized image get pro­
duced somewhere in space - inside the vase, or a little to the side of
it, 'it makes no difference - where there is already a real object, and
if this observer is situated at S I he could rotate the plane mirror in
'
order to occupy the symmetrical and virtual position S2, which is

i'(a)-180°

Figure 7.4: Rotation of the plane mirror

 128 On Desire in Dreams

inside the cone of visibility of the image, and he would see the image
of the flower in the plane mirror at the symmetrical point.
158 In other words, the ray of light that is reflected toward the
observer is strictly symmetrical to what occurs on the other side,
insofar as this observer has virtually come to occupy the place from
which he will see the vase in the plane mirror - which he can expect
since he is there - and, on the other hand, the real image which is
produced in a place where he cannot see it directly.
This optical device is thus apt for representing the relationship or
interplay between the subject's imaginary elements and his symbolic
identificatory elements. I do not think that the way in which it does
so betrays the psychoanalytic tradition, since, in the Traumdeutung,
Freud offers up a schema of successive lenses in which the progres­
sive passage from the unconscious to the preconscious is refracted.
He was thus looking for analogous references in optics, as he says
precisely [SE V, pp. 536, 6 1 1].
This is but a metaphor, one that represents the specular pathway
py whicq the subject tries in fantasy to return to his place in the sym­
bolic. Consequently, the $ is something other than an eye. The
spherical mirror, which helps him return to his place in the sym­
bolic, represents capital A here - it is a symbolic mirror. It is not the
mirror in front of which the small child plays. What we have here is
in fact a certain reflection that is constructed with the help of words,
1 59 in the course of the first learning of language, and thanks to which
the subject learns to situate at the right distance the insignias with
which he identifies.
These symbolic insignias correspond to what, on the other side,
are the first imaginary ego identifications. We thus already find
something preformed and open to symbolic fragmentation at the
imaginary level, but which only enters into the play of fragmenta­
tion inasmuch as the symbolic exists and opens up its field to him.
It is inside this field that, owing to the symbolic, a transformation
of the imaginary relation occurs which is such, as I am already indi­
cating to you, that there will always be, in erotic relations with the
other, however advanced or fully developed we assume them to be,
a reduction point that you can grasp as extrapolations of the erotic
blueprint [epure] between subjects.
What is the transformation that is undergone by the first, fun­
damentally specular relationship between a and a' or i( a) , which
regulates the relations between the subject and the other? The imagi­
nary set of fragmented bodily elements must be distributed across
the puppet with which we deal in the symbolic, inasmuch as we are
puppets and our partners are too. But these puppets are missing
something: the phallus.
 Desire's Phallic Mediation 129

The phallus is busy elsewhere, in the signifying function. When

faced with the other, the subject identifies with the phallus, but he
fragments qua himself when he is in the presence of the phallus. To
spell this out as clearly as possible, I will ask you to dwell on what
happens in relationships between men and women, even the most
loving.
In men, desire is found outside the love relationship. The fully
developed form of this relationship assumes, in effect, that the
subject gives what he does not have, which is the very definition of
love. On the other hand, the ideal form of desire, as it were, is real­
ized in him inasmuch as he finds anew the complement of his being
in a woman, insofar as she symbolizes the phallus.
In love, man truly becomes a slave of [s'aliene a] the object of his
desire, a slave to the phallus. But in the erotic act this same phallus
-nevertheless reduces the woman to being an imaginary object. This
.is why we find in men a splitting of the object [of love from that of
desire], even at the very heart of the deepest, most intimate love
relationships. I have often emphasized this when I have criticized
the so-called genital relationship.
When we tum, on the other hand, to women's relationships to 1 60
men, which people like to believe are more monogamous, we see
that they present the same ambiguity - except that women find the
real phallus in men. They are thus in a position to in fact obtain
from such relationships a jouissance that satisfies their desire.
But, to the degree to which their desire is satisfied at the level of
the real, their love, not their desire, concerns beings who are beyond
the encounter with desire - namely, men insofar as they are deprived
of the phallus, men insofar as, by their nature as fully developed
beings, speaking beings, are castrated.
January 7, 1 959
A DREAM ANALYZED
BY ELLA SHARPE
 VIII 163

THE LITTLE COUGH

AS A MESSAGE

The enigma of enunciation

The subject's being lies in fantasy
The positional affects of being
Text and context of the dream
The brilliant Ella Sharpe

Since we spoke about desire quite a lot in the last few classes, we are
now going to begin to broach the topic of interpretation. The graph
of desire will serve us here, in the following form:

- - ..
, ...
, '
, '

</ �
I

Figure 8.1: Simplified graph

I will talk today about the interpretation of a dream that I will

take as an example. I would like to introduce it by making a few
 1 34 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

remarks about what results from the indications Freud gives us on

the topic of the interpretation of dreams.

164 1.

In Chapter 6 of the Traumdeutung, Freud discusses the subject's

mental impressions at the moment at which he recounts a dream.
We find that he has the impression that there is something
missing in his narrative, which he has forgotten, or something that
is ambiguous, doubtful, or uncertain. He underscores this uncer­
tainty, doubtfulness, or ambiguity by saying things like, "It's not
clear," "It was either this or that," "I don't remember now," or "I
can no longer say." He even calls into question the degree of reality
of what he saw in the dream - whether the fact that something was
asserted in it with such realism that he took notice of it or that the
dream struck him, on the contrary, as absurd. All of this, Freud tells
us, in every case, must be taken to enunciate what he calls one of
the "latent dream-thoughts."
In short, everything regarding the dream-text that is said by the
subject as an aside - as if in the form of annotations accompanying a
musical score to provide accents of tonality, like allegro, crescendo,
or decrescendo - is part and parcel of the dream-text. This is truly
fundamental.
I believe that for most of you, whom I assume to be already
familiar with the Traumdeutung and the technique of dream interpre­
tation, this is not new. I am thus merely recalling it to mind, for I do
not have time here to go into the specific examples of this that we find
in Freud's work. We see there, for instance, how the feeling of doubt
the subject experiences at the moment at which he recounts a dream
is integrated by Freud as -0ne of the elements of the dream - indeed,
as an element without which the dream cannot be interpreted.
Many of Freud's disciples took this rule of thumb regarding
dream interpretation as an article of faith, without looking any
further, lending credence, in some sense, to the unconscious. We,
on the other hand, cannot simply accept it as it is. We do not
take Freud's approach to interpretation as our point of departure
without raising questions about what it implies.
Freud tells us that when your memory of a dream begins to fade,
or on the contrary is called into question or stressed, this is not due
solely to the unconscious tension that is at work there, but is con-
1 65 nected to the latent dream-thoughts themselves. What does this
imply? What we have agreed to call the graph of desire allows us to
indicate and articulate it more clearly and surely.
 The Little Cough as a Message 1 35

What do we do when we communicate a dream, whether it be in

or outside of analysis? What, among all the possible enunciations,
specifies the enunciation of a dream? Statements [enonces] have, in
effect, a certain structure with respect to the subject, and people did
not wait for psychoanalysis to formulate it.
Among a discourse's event-related statements - I mean the state­
ments that report events - we can legitimately distinguish, with
regard to the signifying register, statements that we can group under
the general heading of indirect speech [discours indirect]. These are
statements that relate the enunciations of other subjects - that is,
the signifying articulations of other people. Many things are intro­
duced thereby, including statements involving hearsay: "I was told
. . .," "So-and-so said . . .," and "Someone told me that this is what
happened. . . . " Indirect speech is the most fundamental, or one of
the most fundamental, forms of everyday speech [discours univer­
se�, for most of the things that we report stem from what we have
gleaned from others.
Let us say that, generally speaking, a statement involves the
reporting of a pure, simple, factual statement that we take as our
own, on the one hand, and the dimension of enunciation that is
latent, that is not necessarily made clear, but that becomes so as
soon as we report someone else's statement, on the other hand. But
we can also relate one of our own statements: we can say that we
said such and such, that we bore witness to something to someone,
and we can even enunciate that a statement we made [at a certain
time and place] was completely false - in other words, we can admit
that we lied.
One of these possibilities will hold our attention for a moment.
What do we do when we enunciate a dream? We do something that
is not entirely unique, at least not in the way I am going to define it
now.
How did people view dreams before we psychoanalysts weighed
in on the age-old debate? People objected to Freud that dreams
have no signification and that they are simply the product of 1 66
unfocused [decomposition] mental activity. This so-called scientific
position was, as it turned out, maintained for only·a short time in
history, whereas Freud underscored the fact that he was merely
aligning himself with the longer-standing tradition. It is already
quite important to know, as I just indicated, that the longer-
standing tradition never failed to wonder about the signification of
dreams.
In other words, as soon as a subject recounts his dream to
someone else, the very form of enunciation in which he states the
dream involves a question mark that is not just any old question
 136 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

mark, for it assumes that behind the dream there is something of

which the dream is the signifier. We can write this, in our way of
formalizing things, as follows: E(e) . It involves the enunciation [.E]
of a statement [e for enonce] that is itself marked by enunciation - in
other words, that is itself assumed to take on a value which, natu­
rally, is not factual or event-related.
In order to remain in the purely descriptive dimension, we must
add a supplemental point here.
A small child who begins to tell you his dreams, says, "Last
night, I had a dream." His spontaneous attitude is the same as the
traditional attitude, but it is highly ambiguous here. If we observe
closely, it is as if, at some moment, it had been revealed to the child
that he had the possibility to express such things. And it goes so far
that quite frequently one cannot truly know, at the age at which the
child begins to tell you such matters in confidence, whether what
he tells you is truly what he dreamt or something he brings you
because he knows that people dream and that people can recount
their dreams.
As we observe when we have contact with children, their
dreams often seem to verge on fabrication. But if children have
and tell dreams in such ways, it is with the lowercase e, marked
by enunciation. There is something beyond the statement with
which they play a game with you, making you wonder or become
fascinated.
In short, every type of statement that recounts a dream, whether
it be in or outside of analysis, corresponds to the formula E(e) . This
formula is not specific to dreams alone. I would say that it is the
general formula of enigmas.
What then is signified by what Freud means? Let us look at it
1 67 on our little graph, which in this case takes the form you see on the
blackboard [Figure 8. 1]. How are we going to project the different
elements of this formalization onto it? We can do so in several dif­
ferent ways.
This graph is of interest to us because it is structural. It is a struc­
ture that allows us to map the relationship between the subject and
the signifier. In effect, from the very moment at which the subject is
caught up in the signifier - and it is essential that he be caught up
in it, for that is what defines him, the subject being the relationship
between the individual and the signifier, between the individual
and the signifier's structure - a network is necessarily imposed that
forever remains fundamental. Let us thus try to see here how we
can distribute the various functions involved in the enunciation of a
dream on the graph.
A dream, which is a spontaneous creation, presents itself at first
 The Little Cough as a Message 137

glance as being relatively total or monolithic - it is, I would say, a

total statement. In French we say, "J'ai fait un reve" [literally: "I
made a dream," instead of "I had a dream" as in English], and we
distinguish the dream from the one that followed it, which was not
the same. A dream has the character of a discourse. At the moment
at which we have/make a dream, nothing reveals the fragmentation
or decomposition of the signifier in it. We have all sorts of retroac­
tive indications that the fragmentation is there, having an impact on
the function of all discourse, but at the moment at which the subject
generates a discourse, and inasmuch as he cleaves to it, the choice
he makes at each moment among signifiers remains in abeyance
and unnoticed - otherwise it would be far more arduous for him to
communicate it.
Insofar as it is given to us as a whole, a dream is the statement
or signifying chain that is produced at the lower level of the graph,
and that presents itself in the usual form of language, a form that is
all the more global since it is closed. Nevertheless, the subject must
make his report, must produce an enunciation about this statement;
he must situate himself in relation to it, and stress certain portions
Of it to you in accordance with the greater or lesser degree of convic­
tion he has about them. All of that, which accompanies the dream
and which, in some sense, comments on it from a position for which
the subject assumes more or less responsibility, is inscribed at the
level of discourse for the Other, which is also the discourse in which
the subject assumes responsibility for his dream.
In other words, when he tells you his dream, the subject himself
is already present within the statement. And it is in the discourse in
which the subject assumes responsibility for the dream vis-a-vis the
person to whom he tells it that, as we see, he stresses certain things 1 68
and downplays others, expressing his greater or lesser assumption
of responsibility for the narrative. He says, "It seemed to me, it
appeared to me, that this was what happened at that moment." "At
that moment, it was as if the person in the dream were at the same
time someone else or turned into someone else."
These are what I am calling "stresses" [accents]; they are the dif­
ferent modes of enunciation according to which the subject assumes
more or less responsibility for the lived experience of his dream, of
this psychical event. These modes are situated on our graph on the
line of the I of enunciation, a line that is fragmented and discon­
tinuous. The graph indicates to you that this fragmentation is a
feature of what is articulated at the level of enunciation, insofar as
it involves the signifier.
I placed at the lower level the retroactive effect of the code [C]
on the message [M], which, at every moment, gives meaning to a
 138 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

sentence. Let us note that phrasal units come in different sizes. At

the end of a long lecture [discours], at the end of one of my classes
here, for example, or at the end of one of my year-long Seminars,
there is something that retroactively closes [bouc/e] the meaning of
what I enunciated to you previously. But, up to a certain point, a
similar loop [bouc/e] forms after each of the parts of my lecture, after
each of the paragraphs.
We might want to know what the smallest unit is in which we find
the effect that I call a "signification effect" - which must, in order
to deserve its name, be a new creation, something made of language
that goes beyond the usual ways of using the signifier. The smallest
unit is obviously a sentence.
Let us ask now how this unit presents itself when a dream is
reported to us. It is altogether clear here that what the subject does
or does not assume responsibility for, believes or does not believe,
or calls into question is not necessarily the whole of what he tells us.
The subject's enunciative grip [prise] may be of a smaller scope: he
may take responsibility for or challenge but one single sentence or
even just fragments of a sentence.
In other words, the retroactive loop introduces the possibility of
a much smaller degree of fragmentation at the upper level than at
the lower level.
This remark puts us on the scent of what Freud implies when he
1 69 says that when the dreamer stresses the fact that he does or does
not assume responsibility [for certain details], it is connected to the
latent dream-thoughts.
Which tells us that this stress is situated at the level of enun­
ciation, inasmuch as it is there that the importance of the signifier
implied by free association is highlighted.

The signifying chain has two facets.

The first is the unity of a sentence's meaning, its phrasal significa­
tion or monolithic nature - in short, its "holophrastic" character.
More accurately put, a sentence can be taken to have a meaning
that is unique, to be something that forms a [single] signifier, even if
it is transitory, but which stands on its own two feet, as it were, for
as long as it exists.
The other facet of the signifier is what we call "free association."
The latter is such that, for each of the elements of a sentence - no
matter how minutely we break it down, stopping only when we
reach its phonetic elements - something can intervene that makes
 The Little Cough as a Message 1 39

one of its signifiers disappear and puts another signifier in its place.
Therein lies the essential property of the signifier.
This is related to the aspect of the subject's will [vouloir] that is
indicated by the retroactive loop. Without the subject knowing it, in
a way of which he is unconscious and which is beyond his intention,
his speech is at every moment affected by some parenthetical clause
[incidente] that intervenes in the choice of elements in the signifying
chain. We see the effects of this emerge at the surface, for example in
the form of a phonemic slip of the tongue - this is the most elemen­
tary form. The simple change of a syllable in a word suffices to show
that another signifying chain is present and active there, this second
signifying chain having interrupted the first one in order to implant
another meaning in it.
At the level of the assuming of responsibility for the statement
by the subject, which is apparently the most developed level, the
interpretive rule proposed by Freud implies that the I is posited
as conscious. Nevertheless, we shall not say that the statement is
produced by this /, since the enigma here remains complete: whose
statement is it that we talk about at the level of enunciation? The
subject does not come down on any one side; but if he says "I
dreamt," it is with a characteristic connotation and stress that shows 170
that he who has dreamt nevertheless presents himself to the subject
as problematic.
Who is the subject of enunciation contained in the statement in
question? Thus far, we are still at the stage of wondering about this.
This subject was long considered to be a god, before becoming,
more or less with Aristotle, the "himself' of the subject.
As for what lies beyond the subject - that is to say, the Freudian
unconscious - the question of its alterity is no less perennial. An
entire oscillation or vacillation is produced around it. What the
subject then takes up from this beyond is of the same fragmenting
nature and has the same value as a signifying element, as what is
produced in the spontaneous phenomenon of substitution or mal­
functioning of the signifier, which is what Freud shows us to be the
normal pathway for deciphering the meaning of a dream.
In other words, the fragmentation that occurs at the level of enun­
ciation, insofar as the latter implies assumption of responsibility for
the dream by the subject, is situated for Freud at the same level and
is of the same nature as the pathway of the dream's interpretation
- namely, the maximal breaking down [decomposition] or spelling
out of signifying elements. This spelling out highlights the dream's
possibilities, which appear only inasmuch as the signifying chain is
intersected by all the other chains that can cross it and interweave
with it, at each of its elements and at each of the gaps that it leaves.
 140 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

When does interpretation most nearly approach what Freud con­

siders to be unconscious? When, in the subject's discourse, we make
the current signification vacillate in order to allow the signifiers
that are involved in the enunciation to become detached from each
other. This is true of dreams in a still more exemplary fashion than
of any other sort of discourse.
What are we on the trail of in psychoanalysis? What are we
analysts seeking? We are looking for something essential that hap­
pened in the subject that keeps certain signifiers repressed. Well, this
unconscious lies precisely in the gaps where the signifier is involved.
The signifier also puts us on a path toward the subject's desire.
Desire is the x in the subject that is caught up in the signifying
171 network, in the links in the signifying system, that is subjected to the
filtering and sifting ofthe signifier. Our goal is to reveal and restore it in
his discourse. Howcan wedo so?What doesitimply thatwe can do so?
According to Freudian theory and practice, as I have told you,
the status of desire is to be excluded and enigmatic. With respect to
the subject, it is essentially tied to the existence of repressed signifiers
as such, and restoring desire involves the return of these signifiers.
But this is not to say that restoring these signifiers purely and simply
enunciates desire.
What is articulated in repressed signifiers, which is always a
demand, is one thing; desire - inasmuch as desire is that by which
the subject situates himself, owing to the existence of discourse, with
respect to this demand - is another. It is not so much a matter of
what he demands but of what he is as a function of this demand.
To the degree to which his demand is repressed or masked, the
subject's being is expressed in a closed way in his desire's fantasy.
There would be no question of the subject's being if there were no
demand or discourse. It is fundamentally language that introduces
the dimension of being for the subject and at the same time robs him
of it.
The restoring of the meaning of the fantasy - that is, of something
that is imaginary - is inscribed on the graph [see Figure 2.2] between
the two lines: between the statement of the subject's intention, on
the one hand, and the enunciation in which the subject reads his
intention in a profoundly decomposed, fragmented, and refracted
form through spoken language [langue], on the other. Fantasy - in
which the subject usually suspends his relationship to being - is
always enigmatic, more enigmatic than anything else. And what
does the subject want? That we interpret it.
To interpret desire is to restore something to which the subject
cannot gain access by himself - namely, the affect that designates
his being and that is located at the level of the desire that is truly
 The Little Cough as a Message 141

his. I am referring here to the precise desire that intervenes in one

or another of his life events - whether masochistic desire, suicidal
desire, or even selfless [oblatif] desire. What must happen is that
something that occurred in a way that was closed off to the subject
take on anew its meaning in relation to the masked discourse that is
involved in this desire, take on anew its meaning in relation to being,
aonfronting the subject with being.
This true meaning is, for example, meaning that is defined by
what I would call "positional affects related to being." These are 1 72
the affects that we refer to with essential terms - "love," "hate," and
'fignorance" - but there are many others as well which we should
catalogue and examine.
What people refer to as affect is not something that is purely
and simply opaque and closed off, not something that is somehow
beyond discourse or a nucleus of lived experience that comes to us
out of the blue. Affect is something that is always and very precisely
connoted by a certain stance the subject adopts with respect to
being. I mean, with respect to being insofar as what is proposed to
him is, in its fundamental dimension, symbolic. But it also happens
that, on the contrary, affect constitutes, within the symbolic, an
eruption of the real that is highly disturbing.
It is hard not to see that a fundamental affect like anger is nothing
but the following: the real that intervenes at the very moment at
which we have woven a fine symbolic web, where everything is going
well, order, law, our merit, and our pleasure [bon vouloir]. We realize
suddenly that the square pegs do not fit into the round holes. That
is the origin of anger as an affect. All is well on the bridge formed by
the ships on the Bosphorus, but a tempest blows in that whips up the
sea. All anger involves whipping up the waters.
Affect can also be related to the intrusion of desire itself. This
intrusion gives rise to a form of affect to which we will return.
But when it comes to a whole category of fundamental affects at
least, affect is essentially the connotation that is characteristic of a
stance adopted by a subject - a stance that involves, among other
possible stances, putting himself into play or putting himself to
work in relation to the necessary lines that are imposed on him by
his envelopment in the signifier.

Let us now turn to an example.

I have selected this example from someone posterior to Freud. It
allows us to clearly articulate what we mean in psychoanalysis by
 142 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

the desire in a dream. And in order to proceed in a way that leaves

no room for an overly arbitrary choice, I selected Chapter 5 of the
1 73 book entitled Dream Analysis by Ella Sharpe, in which she proceeds
to analyze a single, simple dream, one whose analysis she takes as
far as possible, as far as is possible for her, that is.
In the preceding chapters, she discusses a certain number of
perspectives, laws, and mechanisms, examining, for example, the
impact of dreams in psychoanalytic practice, and - going further
still - the problems posed by the analysis of dreams or of what
happens in the dreams of people who are in analysis. But Chapter 5
is the crux of the book, for in it she provides a singularly exemplary
dream. She uses it to bring in and illustrate everything she has to say
regarding the way in which analytic practice shows us that we must
in fact be guided when we analyze dreams.
What this practitioner contributes that is new - in other words,
that is not already included in Freud's Traumdeutung - is essen­
tially the idea that a dream is not simply something that turns out
to be significant, but that it plays a role in the ongoing analytic
dialogue, which is not the same at one moment in the analysis as
it is at another. In short, dreams accompany analytic discourse
in an active, determined way that clarifies and extends the work
accomplished. Briefly stated, dreams are dreamt not only for the
analysis but often for the analyst, and they bear a message within
the analysis.
Ella Sharpe, like a number of other authors, should be credited
for not shying away from dream analysis, whereas certain analysts
believe they have no need to concern themselves with dreams - I
drew this to your attention in the talk I gave at Royaumont on the
direction of the treatment - because they believe they involve some
sort of intellectual activity.
The status of thought with regard to dreams is no inconsiderable
question. It is all a matter of how we stress it. If dreams present
themselves as the subject matter of discourse or discursive elabo­
ration, this fact is in itself important as regards the nature of the
unconscious. The unconscious is not located in some sort of psy­
chical pouch [besace] in which it is found in some unconstituted
state, but is rather located in the latencies of discourse. Is it shy of
or is it immanent in what the subject formulates, with respect to
his discourse or his enunciation? That is another question. The fact
174 remains that it is legitimate to take dreams as they have always been
taken - that is, as "the royal road to the unconscious" [SE V, p. 608].
To come now to the dream that Sharpe presents us, I will begin by
reading it to you, before showing you the problems that it poses. I
will highlight a brief warning she provides about the topic, and will,
 The Little Cough as a Message 143

in fact, highlight the whole chapter. Our coordinates apply, as you

will see, better than any others, to what she enunciates, while allow­
ing us to better orient ourselves in it.
The patient in question arrives at his session one day - I will
mention various circumstances that help us contextualize the dream
later, for he only recalls them after having certain very important
associations [- and eventually proffers the following]:

I do not know why I should now think of my dream last night.

It was a tremendous dream. It went on for ages and ages. It
would take me the rest of the hour to relate it all. But don't
worry; I shall not bore you with it all for the simple reason that
!·cannot recall it. But it was an exciting dream, full of incident,
full of interest. I woke hot and perspiring. It must have been the
longest dream I ever had. [p. 1 32]

He says that he does not remember the infinity or flood of elements

in the dream he had, but brings up a rather short scene instead.
"I dreamt I was taking ajourney with my wife around the world. . . "
.

There is a subtle nuance here that is perhaps not sufficiently empha­

sized. The order in which the circumstantial complements appear
is worth noting, for it is not, it seems to me, the normal order in
French, which would be: "I was taking a journey around the world
with my wife." I do not believe that I am mistaken in saying that the
patient's wording might be striking even to an English ear.

I dreamt I was taking a journey with my wife around the world,

and we arrived in Czechoslovakia where all kinds of things were
happening. I met a woman on a road, a road that now reminds me
of the road I described to you in the two other dreams lately in
which I was having sexual play with a woman in front of another
woman. [p. 1 32]

I;Iere, Sharpe switches from italics to Roman type to indicate that 1 75

the patient is making a tangential remark about the dream.

So it happened in this dream. [Then back to the dream itself in

italics, interspersed with associations in Roman type:] This time
my wife was there while the sexual event occurred. The woman I
met was very passionate looking and I am reminded of a woman
I saw in a restaurant yesterday. She was dark and had very full
lips, very red and passionate looking . . .

The patient thus describes them both as passionate looking.

 144 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

. . . and it was obvious that had I given her any encourage­

ment she would have responded. She must have stimulated the
dream, I expect. In the dream the woman wanted intercourse
with me and she took the initiative which as you know is a course
which helps me a great deal. If the woman will do this I am
greatly helped. In the dream the woman actually lay on top
of me; that has only just come to my mind. She was evidently
intending to put my penis in her body. I could tell that by the
manoeuvers she was making. I disagreed with this, but she was so
disappointed I thought that I would masturbate her.

Here again the patient editorializes: "It sounds quite wrong to

use that verb transitively. One can say 'I masturbated' and that is
correct, but it is all wrong to use the word transitively" [pp. 1 32-3].
In effect, the English verb "masturbate" does not take on the
reflexive form as in French. The English "I masturbate" means "Je
me masturbe" in French [the latter is a reflexive construction]. The
analyst immediately picks up on this remark. The patient then adds
a few confirmatory remarks, beginning to associate to his own mas­
turbatory activities. He goes further into things later, too.
So there we have the statement of the dream. It gives you an
inkling of why it will be of interest to us here.
I am, I must say, adopting a thoroughly arbitrary mode of expo­
sition here, and I could just as easily approach things differently.
Don't think that the pathway by which I am proceeding here is one
that I am recommending you follow systematically when you inter-
176 pret dreams. I am doing so here simply in order to provide a quick
sketch of what we are trying to see and demonstrate.
In the dream about the dead father, I was able to designate -
following Freud, and in such a way that you could see my approach
was not devoid of artifice - the signifiers "as he wished," "he" refer­
ring here to the son. Similarly, we shall see in the dream reported by
Sharpe's patient with what signifier the fantasy in the dream [fan­
tasme du reve] culminates. This fantasy is expressed in the following
words: "I disagreed with this, but she was so disappointed I thought
that I would masturbate her." The subject immediately remarks that
it is altogether incorrect to use the verb "to masturbate" transitively.
The entire analysis of the. dream will show us that the true meaning
of what is at stake here can be found by re-establishing the intransi­
tivity of the verb.
She is "so disappointed" by what? The whole text of the dream
indicates it well enough: she is disappointed by the fact that our
subject is barely participating, even though, according to what he
says, everything in the scene in the dream is designed to incite him to
 The Little Cough as a Message 145

do so, such that he would normally be greatly aided by the position

she assumes. This is no doubt what is at work here, and I will say
that the second part of the sentence ["I thought that I would mas­
turbate her"] presents itself as having an understandable content, a
feature that closely corresponds to what Freud articulates as being
one of the characteristics of dream formation - namely, secondary
revision.
Nevertheless, the subject himself observes that this is not as
straightforward as it seems because his use of the verb does not
sound quite right. It suffices for us to follow the rule of thumb given
by Freud to realize that this observation puts us on the trail of the
dream-thought. And therein lies the desire.
In effect, the subject tells us that one would usually say, 'I thought
she could masturbate,' which is the normal form in which the wish
would present itself: 'She can just go ahead and masturbate if she
isn't happy!' The subject indicates rather energetically that mastur­
bation is an activity that is not transitive, in the sense that it is not
carried out by one subject on another, but rather intransitive, which
means in this case something done by the subject to himself, since "I
masturbated" means "Je me suis masturbe." It is important not to
ccme down on any particular side here; we must simply note that the
first indication given by the subject immediately goes in the direc­
tion of rectifying a signifying articulation.
We are now going to tum to an earlier part of the chapter - prior 1 77
to the narrative of the dream, before the arrival center stage of this
scene, and before the account of this particular session - where we
find a short preamble by the author regarding the patient's psychical
constellation. What she puts into her premises are found anew in her
results. And we will find reasons to critique these results.
Let us turn immediately to what will allow us to move forward
here. Ella Sharpe comments that the patient is obviously very
bright. We will get a better and better sense of his behavior as we
focus in on things.
He is a man of a certain age who is married and works as a lawyer.
What she tells us is worth being highlighted word for word. "When
the time came for him to practise at the bar he developed severe
phobias. Put briefly this" - this is all she tells us about the mecha­
nism of his phobia, but we lend credence to what she says because
she is one of the best analysts, one of the most intuitive and penetrat­
ing who ever lived - "meant that he dare not work successfully but
that he must stop working in reality because he would be only too
successful" [p. 127). The comment the analyst makes here - that it
was not that he had an affinity to failure, but rather that he stopped
short, as it were, when the immediate P?Ssibility of throwing his
 146 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

ample gifts into relief presented itself - is worth keeping in mind.

You will see how we shall make use of it in what follows.
Let us leave aside what the analyst tells us right from the outset
about how this might connect up with his father - we will return to it
later. We simply need to know that his father died when the patient
was three years old and that he had said nothing about him in his
analysis for a very long time other than that he "is dead" [p. 1 26].
This rightly draws the analyst's attention. She hears - and it seems
hardly possible to dispute this - that he does not wish to recall that
his father ever lived. When he recalls that his father was alive, it is,
she tells us, an altogether "startling"* event for him that frightens
him [p. 1 26].
The subject's stance in the analysis is immediately taken to imply
that the death wish he had toward his father is the mainspring both
of this forgetting of his living father and of any and every articula­
tion of his desire, inasmuch as the dream reveals it. Nevertheless,
nothing indicates to us in any way that this aggressive intention is at
1 78 the origin of a fear of reprisal. An attentive study of the dream will
allow us to show this in detail.
What else does the analyst tell us about this patient? She tells
us that that day, like other days, she did not hear him arrive at
her office, and on this score she provides a short paragraph that is
truly brilliant on the topic of the patient's nonverbal presentation.
Her description corresponds to the recent trendy practice of noting
in patients all the little behavioral details that an attentive analyst
knows how to detect. She tells us that she can never hear this one
amve.
The reader grasps from the context that people reach her office by
climbing a flight of stairs. She can easily detect a patient of hers who
climbs the stairs two at a time, because he makes an "extra thud"*
[p. 129]. The English term here has no equivalent in French, desig­
nating as it does a flat, dull sound, the sound that might be made by
a foot on a stair covered with carpet, a sound that gets a bit louder
when one goes up the stairs two at a time. "Another [patient] hurries
and I detect the hustle. . . . " The whole paragraph runs on in this
vein and is quite delectable, literarily speaking. It is nevertheless but
a tangent, for what is important is what this particular patient does.
The patient is perfectly polite, a bit uptight, and always does
things in the exact same way:

He never varies. He always gets on the couch one way. He

always gives a conventional greeting with the same smile,
a pleasant smile, not forced or manifestly covering hostile
impulses. There is never anything as revealing as that would
 The Little Cough as a Message 147

be. [p. 1 30]

The analyst's sensibility keeps her well oriented here: "There is no

sign of hurry, nothing haphazard, no clothes awry; no marks of
a· quick toilet; no hair out of place. [ . . .] He lies down and makes
himself easy" [p. 1 30].
' And he never immediately mentions any sort of upsetting event,
for example, that his maid did something that made him late for
his: session - if she did, it will only be mentioned after quite a while,
at the end of the session or even at the next session. "He talks the
whole hour, clearly, fluently, in good diction, without hesitation
and with many pauses. He speaks in a distinct and even voice for it
expresses thinking and never feeling" [p. 1 30].
As for what should be made of the distinction between thought
and feeling, we will all naturally agree [that it is spurious]. What is
important here is obviously to know what is signified by the specific
mode of communication adopted by the subject. We see here a sort 1 79
of sterilization of the text of the session that makes the analyst wish
that something more deeply felt would come out. Nevertheless, the
fact that the subject expresses himself in this way must naturally
have a meaning. Any analyst would think that the patient must be
afraid of something. The absence of feelings, as the analyst puts it,
does not necessarily imply that there is absolutely nothing to include
under the heading of feeling.
I spoke earlier about affect as concerning and revealing the sub­
ject's relation to being. We must wonder what, in this case, can be
c;ommunicated by the pathway of affect. It is all the more germane
to wonder about this as the session that day opens with a communi­
cation regarding affect.
' The discordance that exists between the analyst's silence when
faced with something she had already noted a few days earlier, and
the surprise she experiences, as she herself notes, the day the patient
begins talking about it to her of his own accord, clearly shows what
additional step must be taken with respect to the analyst's ordinary
stance in order to gauge what is at stake in this particular case. For
what begins to open up here, is going to open up more and more,
as we shall see, right up until the analyst's final interpretation and
its astonishing effect. What is truly astonishing is not the simple fact
that this interpretation was made, but that it is classified by Sharpe
as a satisfying and even exemplary interpretation owing to its fruit­
ful nature.
What happens? In this context, which is characterized by the
subject's perfect politeness - he keeps his nose completely clean -
something has been happening for the last few days. He has been
 148 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

arriving at his analyst's door, and just before entering he has been
going "Uh, hum!" That is even saying too much, for it is, as Sharpe
tells us, the "discreetest of coughs" [p. 1 30].
Ella Sharpe was a brilliant woman, as every aspect of her style
indicates. She was some sort of elementary school teacher before
becoming an analyst, which is very fine training for being able to see
deeply into people's psychology. She was certainly a very talented
woman. She hears this "little cough" as though it were the arrival of
the dove at Noah's Ark. The cough announces that, hidden some­
where, there is a place where feelings live. Oh, she tells herself, I
1 80 would never speak to him about that, because if I did he would tuck
it all away again.
This is the classic analytic stance in such cases. The rule is to
never make comments to a patient about his physical comportment
at a certain stage of his analysis, when it is important to simply
observe it. I mean, his way of coughing, lying down, buttoning or
unbuttoning his jacket, everything that his ingrained motor bearing
says about him - inasmuch as this attitude can take on the value of
. a signal and inasmuch as all of that goes right to the quick of his
narcissism.
Yet, this rule in no wise applies to something like this little cough.
Here we see the symbolic power and dimension insofar as it extends
to everything in the vocal register. Regardless of the fact that a
cough may give the impression of being a purely somatic event, it is
situated in the same dimension as sounds like "Uh, huh" and "Yes
. . . " that certain analysts sometimes make, quite authoritatively,
and that clearly have the effect of encouraging the patient to say
more.
The best proof of this is that, to the analyst's great surprise, the
cough is the first thing the patient speaks to her about that day. In
his "customary even and deliberate voice," he tells her:

I have been considering that little cough that I give just before
I enter the room. The last few days I have coughed I have
become aware of it, I don't know whether you have. To-day
when the maid called me to come upstairs I made up my mind
I would not cough. To my annoyance, however, I realized I
had coughed just as I had finished. It is most annoying to do a
thing like that, most annoying that something goes on in you or
by you that you cannot control, or do not control. One would
think some purpose is served by it, but what possible purpose
can be served by a little cough of that description it is hard to
think. [p. 1 3 1]
 The Little Cough as a Message 149

The analyst advances with snakelike stealth, and asks, well,

''What purpose could be served" by it?
He replies, "Well, it is the kind of thing that one would do if
one were going into a room where two lovers were together." He
recounts that he once did something like that when he was a child 181
before entering a room where his brother was with his girlfriend
, he coughed just before entering because he thought they were
perhaps kissing and that it would be better if they stopped before
he came in, for they would then feel less embarrassed than if he
surprised them.
The analyst then asks, "And why cough before coming in here?"
He replies:

That is absurd, because naturally I should not be asked to come

up if someone were here [. . . ]. There is no need for a cough at
all that I can see. It has, however, reminded me of a phantasy
I had of being in a room where I ought not to be, and thinking
someone might think I was there, and then I thought to prevent
anyone from coming in and finding me there I would bark like
a dog. That would disguise my presence. The "someone" would
then say, "Oh, it's only a dog in there." [pp. 1 3 1-2]

'�A dog?" the analyst cautiously inquires. The patient continues:

That reminds me of a dog rubbing himself against my leg, really

masturbating himself. I'm ashamed to tell you because I did
not stop him. I let him go on and someone might have come
in. [p. 1 32]

Then he coughs lightly and recounts the dream I mentioned

earlier.
We will come back to this in detail next time, but can't we already
note that the dream comes to his mind right after the coughing
episode? In all probability, the little cough is a message. Sharpe
herself suspects as much, moreover, since she brings it into the
analysis of the dream and even places it in the spotlight. The little
cough is a message, but we want to know about what.
Secondly, we can observe that it is a message twice over [or: to the
second power, au second degre], insofar as the patient speaks about
it explicitly and not unconsciously, and it is by this very pathway
that he introduces the dream. Were he simply to say, "I coughed,"
it would already be a message, but he does not simply say that he
coughed, he says, 'I coughed, and that means something.' And
immediately afterward, he begins telling stories that are singularly
 1 50 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

1 82 suggestive. The cough obviously means 'I am here. If you're doing

something fun but that you would rather not have somebody else
see, it's time to cut it short.'
But we will fail to see what is at stake in this cough if we do not
take into account the narrative that is provided at the same time. He
tells us that he thought of dissimulating his presence in a room - his
presence as such, I would say - by doing the very thing that would
obviously attract attention, namely, barking. This presents itself
with all the trappings of fantasy.
First of all, it is the subject himself who presents this as a fantasy,
one he had in his childhood. Moreover, nothing shows better than
this fantasy in what way the subject fills out his empty form -

namely, that he must adorn himself [or: invest or protect himself, se

parer] with a signifier, that he finds himself adorned by the effect of
the signifier. Indeed, we find anew here all the characteristics of the
use made by children of what present themselves as natural signi­
fiers, when they use them as attributes to signify something - a dog,
for example, which children sometimes call a bowwow. But here,
where the subject is included in a fantasized activity, he attributes
the bowwow to himself.
In this fantasy, in short - a fantasy that is altogether unrealizable
[inapplicable] if he signals his presence it is insofar as he makes
-

himself into something other than what he is. He is supposed to

manifest himself as other than he is; he makes himself absent; he
even banishes himself from the realm of speech, making himself
into an animal, literally naturalizing himself. No one will go check
to see if he is there because he will have presented and articulated
himself in the most elementary signifier [barking]. They will not
think "There's nothing there," but literally that "There is no one
there [II y a personne]." This is truly what the subject announces to
us in his fantasy: Inasmuch as I am in the presence of the Other, I
am no one. This is Odysseus' response, "oifru;" [meaning nobody or
no one] when asked his name by the Cyclops.
These are no more than the subject's associations to his dream.
We will have to take the analysis further in order to see in what
sense and how the subject is no one [personne]. There is of course
something correlated to this on the side of the other who must be
warned and who turns out to be, in this case as in the dream, a
woman. His relation to women in general certainly plays a role in
the situation.
To articulate the something that the subject is not, and that he
183 cannot be, will direct us, as you shall see, toward the most funda­
mental of symbols involved in the subject's identification.
If the subject absolutely wants, and everything points to this, his
 The Little Cough as a Message 151

female partner to masturbate, to take care of herself, it is assuredly

so that she will not take care of him. Why doesn't he want her to
take care of him? In what way doesn't he want it?
The usual time granted to us for this class does not allow us to
articulate it today, so we shall put it off till next time.
January 14, 1 959
185 IX

THE FANTASY ABOUT THE

BARKING DOG

The cough, a signifier of the Other

Analyzing the fantasy without understanding it
Dogs go meow, cats go bowwow
Darwin and the duck's quack
Masturbating dog = ego-ideal

When we ended last time, we were in the middle of analyzing a

dream that Ella Sharpe calls "single" - that is, singular or unique.
She devotes an entire chapter to it; it is a chapter on which the whole
earlier part of her book converges, and she [then goes on to] add to
it in various ways.
Her book, which is made up of lectures given to analysts­
in-training and based on some thirty years of wide-ranging
psychoanalytic experience, is original in that it is explicitly devoted
to the analysis of dreams, which is why it is important to us.
This extremely interesting dream was the main topic of one
session she had with a patient. Her discussion of it - along with the
connections she establishes, not merely among the dream associa­
tions and her interpretations, but also among all the messages of the
session taken as a whole - demonstrates that she has considerable
sensitivity regarding the direction and meaning of the analysis.
She interprets the dream line by line, as one should. As we shall
see in detail, she interprets it as though it were a desire linked to
her patient's wish for omnipotence. Whether this is justified or not,
you should already realize that, if this dream can be of interest to
us, it is with respect to the angle by which I tried to show you what
is ambiguous and misleading in the one-sided notion according
to which - in the wish for omnipotence, this wish for the possibility
or perspective of potency that one might call the neurotic wish - it is
always the subject's omnipotence that is at issue.
For it is quite obvious that the omnipotence at issue is the
 The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 1 53

omnipotence of discourse. This does not imply in the least that the
subject feels himself to be the mainstay or guardian of discourse. If 1 86
what he is dealing with is the omnipotence of discourse, it is via the
Other that he proffers it.
" This is especially forgotten in the way Ella Sharpe orients her
interpretation of the dream.

I will begin by indicating to you what we will see at the end, because
we will probably not manage to finish our discussion of the dream
in today's class. Such an elaborate piece of work brings up a host of
things - and a still greater host of things when we realize that, in the
final analysis, almost nothing has been said on the topic [of dreams],
even though we operate in this realm every day.
Ella Sharpe thus argues with her patient about his wish for
omnipotence, and as she puts it, his aggressive omnipotence [p. 145].
To begin with, this patient, about whom she absolutely does not
give us all the background information, has in his profession - he is
a lawyer - major difficulties whose neurotic character is so obvious
that she goes into them in detail. Indeed, she indicates that it is not
so much that he is afraid of failure but rather of success, of having
too much success. It is by modulating the very definition of his
symptom that she highlights a split and introduces into the analysis
� nuance that warrants our attention owing to its obviously subtle
nature.
She mentions that the patient has other difficulties as well that
go beyond his professional activities, extending to the whole of his
relations with other people. They manifest themselves especially
in games - in tennis, for instance. The sorts of difficulties he has
concern, for example, the fact that he has a hard time doing what is
necessary to win a game or a set - namely, to corner his adversary
at one end of the tennis court and, as people often do, hit the ball
to the opposite end of the court where his opponent cannot reach it.
The highlighting of such symptoms by the analyst is quite helpful in
confirming that the patient suffers from a problem manifesting his
potency, or more accurately stated, his power.
This leads her to intervene in a certain way, which elicits in the
patient a certain number of reactions in which she clearly rejoices, 1 87
in a word. This is the crowning moment at which she indicates where
his desire lies, and it is truly in the sense in which we define desire
here. One might almost say that she aims at desire in its relation to
demand - as you will see, this is truly what she does.
 1 54 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

The problem is that she interprets this desire as if it were an

aggressive conflict, situating it at the level of an imaginary conflict.
She thinks essentially and primarily in terms of dyadic relations. I
will show you what justifies her in broaching things in this way, but
I want to immediately raise the question here whether the appropri­
ateness of this type of interpretation is truly legitimated by the two
reactions with which she justifies it.
The first reaction comes three days after the session in which the
patient related to her the lovely dream we discussed, which was a
crucial moment in the analysis and one in which she delivered the
first sketch of her dyadic-type interpretation that his aggressiveness
was grounded in a [feared] repercussion or transference of his wjsh
for omnipotence. The patient tells her what resulted from this - for
the first time in ages, since childhood, he wet his bed! This is strik­
ing and astonishing in an adult patient. We will come back to this in
detail in order to indicate the problem that is raised by it.
The second reaction occurs in the course of the week that fol­
lowed the session in which he recounted the dream, on the occasion
of a game of tennis that he lost. He happened to have one of those
difficulties welr known to tennis players who have the opportunity
to glimpse the way they put their abilities to work, who are some­
times unable to garner the reward for their obvious superiority,
for they are unable to manifest it. One of his usual partners teased
him regarding the lost game, with a sensitivity to his unconscious
impasses that in the end constitute the fabric of this game, and that
are reflected in the skirmishing dialogue between the players, joking
and teasing each other about which one got the upper hand. At that
point, the patient became so furious he grabbed his opponent by
the neck and cornered him in the back of the court, ordering him to
never tease him like that again [pp. 1 47-8].
I am not saying that the general direction of and order in which
Ella Sharpe made her interpretations have no foundation whatso­
ever. We shall see that she employed elements that ring true on the
1 88 basis of the minutest dissection of the material. But she also has
preconceived ideas. The latter are, after all, often founded - for an
error is never generated except through a lack of truth - but they are
grounded in another register that she knows neither how to articu­
late nor how to handle, even if she provides us with the necessary
elements, which is what makes this case study precious to us.
The point on which her interpretation bears is at a lower degree
of complexity, since she situates everything at the level of imaginary
rivalry and power struggles. Yet if we carefully sift the material
included in her text, we will see - and in a striking manner, I believe
- what she leaves out. What is at work in the session she analyzes,
 The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 155

and the dream that lies center-stage in that session, manifests itself
with so much coherence that it incites us to see if we cannot center
things better with the help of the categories that I have been propos­
ing for a long time, and whose map I have tried to give you in the
form of the topological schema, the graph, that we use.
Let me remind you that in the dream the patient takes a journey
with his wife around the world. He arrives in Czechoslovakia,
"where all kinds of things were happening" [p. 1 32). He underscores
the fact that there were plenty of things that took place before that
moment in the dream, but that he has forgotten them, such that the
dream does not take very long to recount.
He meets a woman on a road, and the road reminds him of
another road he has dreamt about, which he already described to his
analyst in two recent dreams. On this road, there had been "sexual
play with a woman," and this had occurred "in front of another
woman" [p. 1 32). The same thing happens in this dream, as he tells
us in a digression.

This time my wife was there while the sexual event occurred. The
woman I met was very passionate looking and I am reminded
of a woman I saw in a restaurant yesterday. She was dark and
had very full lips, very red and passionate looking, and it was
obvious that had I given her any encouragement she would
have responded. She must have stimulated the dream, I expect.
In the dream the woman wanted intercourse with me and she
took the initiative which as you know is a course which helps me
a great deal. If the woman will do this I am greatly helped. In
the dream the woman actually lay on top ofme; that has onlyjust 1 89
come to my mind. She was evidently intending to put my penis in
her body. I could tell that by the manoeuvers she was making. I
disagreed with this, but she was so disappointed I thought that I
would masturbate her. [pp. 1 32-3)

Immediately thereafter comes the remark that only makes sense

in English: "It sounds quite wrong to use that verb transitively. One
can say 'I masturbated' and that is correct" [p. 1 33). We shall see
in what follows in the text another example that clearly shows that
when you employ "to masturbate" in English, in French it means
"se masturber." The originally reflexive nature of the verb is so
strong that the patient makes on this score what is, strictly speaking,
a philological remark, and it is obviously no accident that he does so
at that very moment.
As I said last time, if we proceed as we did in the previous dream,
we can complete this sentence by restoring the avoided signifiers,
 1 56 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe
-

as follows: "she was so disappointed" to not have my penis, or to

not have a penis, that I thought 'she should masturbate,' and not
"I would masturbate her." She can just go ahead and masturbate!
You will see in what follows what allows us to complete things in
this way.
After that, we hflve a series of associations and a dialogue between
the analyst and the patient. They do not go very far, but neverthe­
less give us quite enough food for thought. As there are almost three
pages of them in all, I will pick up on them later so as not to tire you.
Ella Sharpe wrote this chapter for pedagogical purposes. Finding
herself in a didactic role, she summarizes what we read in the session
and establishes a catalogue of what the patient brought her, in order
to show to those she is teaching exactly what the material is from
which she makes a choice in order to ground both the interpretation
that she has in mind and her selection of a part of the interpretation
to convey to the patient. She emphasizes the fact that the two are far
from coinciding, since what should be said to the patient is probably
not all of what there is to say about the patient. In what the patient
brought her, there are things that are worth saying and others that
should not be said.
The first thing he brought up was the cough, the little cough that
190 the patient gave that day before entering the consulting room, and
that she had already hearct him give at the same moment for the past
few days.
Given the way the patient behaves, which is so contained and
uptight, so obviously indicative of defense - Sharpe senses this very
clearly and she is far from reducing it to a defense like "defense
against his own feelings" - she sees in this cough a manifestation,
that she considers spontaneous, of a more immediate presence
than his attitude in which everything is reflected upon and in which
nothing is reflected. This "little cough,'' as the patient calls it, might
have given no pause for thought to others, whereas for her, however
miniscule it may be, it is literally like an olive branch. In this cough
she hears the announcement that some sort of drop in the level of
the floodwaters has begun. Thus it is as if she says to herself, "Let's
respect that,'' and refrains from pointing it out to him.
Then the unexpected happens: the patient himself begins talking
at great length about the little cough. I discussed this with you last
time, and we will return to it and to the way in which Ella Sharpe
understands it - and to the way in which we should, in my view,
understand it.
In this crucial session, the patient does not bring up the dream
he had right away. He begins by recounting the series of associa­
tions that came to him after having noticed the cough he was giving
 The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 1 57

before entering the consulting room, whereas he had always climbed

the flight of stairs so discreetly that the analyst did not hear him He
.

had resolved not to cough again this time, but a cough came out all
the same. It bothers him a lot that there is something in him that he
cannot control, and he wonders what it might mean.
We are now going to return to what he says by following the
way in which Ella Sharpe registers it in her own perspective. She
establishes a catalogue of what she calls the "ideas concerning the
purpose of a cough" [p. 1 36].
First of all, this cough brings with it "thoughts of lovers being
together." What did the patient say? After having spoken about his
cough and wondered what purpose it might have served, he said the
following:

Well, it is the kind of thing that one would do if one were

going into a room where two lovers were together. If one were
approaching such a place one might cough a little discreetly and
so let them know they were going to be disturbed. I have done 191
that myself when, fo r example, I was a lad of fifteen and my
brother was with his girl in the drawing-room I would cough
before I went in so that if they were embracing they could stop
before I got in. They would not then feel as embarrassed as if I
had caught them·doing it. [p. 1 3 1]

It is not insignificant to underscore in this regard that the cough

is a message. The patient indicated this, and we suspect as much
anyway because everything that followed corroborated it. Let me
immediately comment on this.
Even if this seems a bit persnickety, consider nevertheless that
the order of the remarks that I am going to make now will show
you that starting from here, everything else follows - namely, what
I called the drop in level that characterizes Sharpe's interpretation.
Given the way she analyzes things, she does not grasp, or at least
does not highlight, what it is important to bring out. Which is that
the subject did not simply cough but that he in some sense came to
tell the analyst - to her great surprise, even she mentions this - that
it was a message. She leaves this out.
We need but look at the catalogue she establishes of her total
number of kills [or: of hits, tableau de chasse] we are not yet at the
-

stage of examining what she chooses to put in that catalogue, which

depends on what she at first recognized - to observe that she takes
note of the cough, but that she elides the fact, which she herself
nevertheless underscores, that the subject wonders what its purpose
is, what it announces. Yet this is the important point regarding this
 1 58 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

message-bearing cough, assuming it is a message: the subject liter­

ally begins by saying that the cough is a message; he marks it as a
message. Moreover, in the dimension in which he announces that it
is a message, he wonders what the purpose of the message is.
What happens in analysis, according to the definition and articu­
lation that we are trying to give of it? An analysis is first and
foremost a discourse. We cannot forget its structural framework.
Our requirement that this discourse be dissected [desarticuler] does
not proceed from any particular persnicketiness, but merely reflects
our interest in analyzing it, strictly speaking.
We are going to see what its importance is. Up to a certain point,
192 we can already begin to get our bearings thanks to our graph. When
the patient wonders what his cough is about, it is a question raised
to the second power [au second degre] regarding the event. He raises
this question using the Other as his starting point [a partir de l'Autre;
see Figure 9 . 1 ], since it is insofar as he is in analysis that he raises
the question.
I would say that, in this case, the patient shows himself to be
further advanced than Sharpe imagines he is, as is witnessed by
her surprise. This reminds us of how parents are always behind the
curve regarding what their children do and do not understand. Here
the analyst is behind the curve, for the patient had long since figured
out that it was important to wonder about symptoms that arose in
connection with the analysis, and that the slightest hitch gave rise to
a question.
In short, the question regarding the cough as a message is clearly
presented in the form of a question mark in the upper part of the
graph [Figure 9. 1). In order to allow you to locate the point we are
at, I am also including the lower part of the graph, which I defined
in another context by telling you that it was the level of the Other's
discourse.

Figure 9 . 1 : It is a message
 The Fantasy about the Barking Dog 1 59

It is quite clear here that the subject has entered into analytic dis­
course and that he literally raises a question concerning the Other
that is in him - namely, his unconscious. This level of articulation
is insistently present in every subject inasmuch as he asks himself,
"But what does this Other want?"
This is not an innocent statement that is supposedly made within
the analysis. There is absolutely no doubt but that this question is 1 93
enunciated at a level that is distinguished from the first verbal level,
that of innocent statements, and that it clearly indicates the locus
where we situate what must in the end be the shibboleth of analysis -
namely, the signifier of the Other [or: the Other's signifier, le signifiant
de /'Autre]. This signifier is precisely what is hidden from the neurotic,
inasmuch as he does not know its impact and he wonders about it. In
this case, he recognizes it but he is far from having an answer. Hence
the question, "What is this signifier of the Other doing in me?"
Let us say, in short, in terms that are suitable here at the begin­
ning of my expose, that the subject is, and for good reason, far
from being able to recognize that the Other is castrated, but no
further than he is from being able to recognize that he himself is.
For the time being, from this position of innocence or educated
ignorance [ignorance docte], which is constituted by the fact of
being in analysis, he simply wonders what this signifier is insofar
as it signifies something in his unconscious which is the signifier of
the Other.
This is what is elided in Sharpe's way of proceeding.
She enumerates his "ideas concerning the purpose of a cough"
- this is her way of approaching things. Naturally, they are ideas
concerning the cough, but they already give us a great deal more
than a simple linear chain of ideas.
Something is already sketched out, which is mapped, here in par­
ticular [Lacan is undoubtedly pointing to part of the graph], on our
graph.

Sharpe tells us that the cough first brings with it "thoughts of lovers
being together" [p. 1 36].
I read you what the patient said, and in my view it can in no wise
be summarized in that way.
If we listen to him, he imagines someone who arrives as a third
party, interrupting lovers who are together. He arrives as a third
party, but not in just any old way, since he orchestrates things so as
not to arrive as a third party in an overly embarrassing way.
 1 60 A Dream Analyzed by Ella Sharpe

In other words, it is very important, right from the outset, to

point out that if there are three people involved, the being together
194 [of the two lovers] involves variations over time, coherent variations
- namely, they are together as long as the third party is outside.
Once the third party has entered, they are no longer together - that
is plain to see.
It should be clear to you that if it took us a week of meditation
to get to the bottom of what the patient tells us - as it is going to
take us two classes to cover the material this dream brings with it
and its interpretation - the analysis of it might appear to be some­
thing insurmountable, especially because things could only expand
still further and we would be quickly overwhelmed. But .in reality,
this is not a valid objection at all, for the very good reason that, to
a certain extent, what is essential is in the schema that has already
been traced out. That is to say that, when the third party is outside,
the two are together; when the third party is inside, the two are no
longer together.
I am not saying that everything we are going to see regarding the
dream is already contained in this, for that would be a bit simplistic.
But we are going to see the following develop, extend and, in short,
become involute like a leitmo