Reading Group Records

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meetings, September 1, 2023 – July 31, 2024.

Notes to follow.

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meetings, September 1, 2022 – July 31, 2023.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – April 2nd, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 9, On Creation Ex Nihilo, pt. 2, on p. 119.

As we continue on in our discussion of das Ding from previous weeks, Lacan draws our attention to Heidegger’s essay, The Thing, which can be found in Poetry, Language and Thought, on p. 163.

In this essay, Heidegger explores the question of what a “thing” is. Far from something natural or obvious, the way we conceive of things has been shaped by a long philosophical history.

Taking up the example of a jug, which is sitting nearby, Heidegger compares and contrasts several competing notions of “thinghood”.

Firstly, the broadest notion, which simply refers to anything at all, sees a thing as any item which might come under consideration. In this view, both God and everyday items are equally things.

Secondly, there is the notion of a thing as something which is self-supporting and independent of us. Though a thing might become an object of our perception, the thing stands apart from any representational object which might stand in for it. While not reducible to what is outwardly present in appearance, the thing is nevertheless “what stands forth”…in the unconcealedness of what is already present” (p. 168).

This recalls a third notion of the thing as possessing dual aspects, which Kant famously articulated. On one hand, the thing-for-us is a representational object: something as it is perceived by us, mixed with our own faculties of perception. On the other hand, we can consider that aspect of things which is entirely “in-themselves”, an unknowable and inaccessible otherness which stands outside of any possible representation.

What we might call the “thingly” element of the thing, is precisely the limitation of consciousness to grasp the thing without first imposing its own structure upon it. In that sense, it is not so much a positive feature of things, but rather an excess or defect in us which is experienced as an external limitation–something lacking at the centre of the thing, a constitutive void.

Turning to Heidegger’s example of the jug: as a vessel or container, we can see that it is what it is through a constitutive lack or emptiness in itself. It can only perform its function as a vessel through this void which it contains.

Lacan uses the example of the mustard jar to illustrate the same point, on p. 120-1,

…I insisted on the fact that a mustard pot possesses as essence in our practical life the fact that it presents itself as an empty mustard pot…Go as far as your fantasy allows you in this direction. I don’t, in fact, mind if you recognize in the name of Bornibus, which is one of the most familiar and opulent forms taken by a mustard pot, a divine name, since it is Bornibus who fills those pots.

We are limited to this–we are, so to speak, bound by Bornibus.

A footnote elaborates:

Bornibus is the trade name of a well-known French manufacturer of mustard.

The pun at the end of this sentence depends on a play of words between Bornibus and “se borner,” “to limit oneself.”

From a scientific view, Heidegger says, the vessel is not really empty, of course. There is no void, but only a relative emptiness, a space filled with air.

On p. 169-170, Heidegger tells us,

Physical science assures us that the jug is filled with air and with everything that goes to make up the air’s mixture. We allowed ourselves to be misled by a semipoetic way of looking at things when we pointed to the void of the jug in order to define its acting as a container.

But as soon as we agree to study the actual jug scientifically, in regard to its reality, the facts turn out differently. When we pour wine into the jug, the air that already fills the jug is simply displaced by a liquid. Considered scientifically, to fill a jug means to exchange one filling for another.

These statements of physics are correct. By means of them, science represents something real, by which it is objectively controlled. But—is this reality the jug?

Kant, in drawing his famous distinction between “things-for-us” and “things-in-themselves”, attempts to secure scientific and ethical judgments as valid in their respective domains. By limiting natural science to knowledge of things as they appear to us, science can speak authoritatively of “things-for-us” as representational entities which reveal nothing of things as they are in themselves.

Pure reason concerns appearances and conceives the world as an expression of the laws of nature, from the perspective of a detached observer. Practical reason takes on the perspective of an active agent at work in the world, and asks questions concerning the ethical sphere of life, conceiving of the world and of others in it as operating according to the laws of freedom.

It is this unrepresentable “thingly” element of things–invisible to science and other forms of representational thinking–which Heidegger likens to the void contained by the vessel, a constitutive nothingness which lies at the centre of each thing.

To the eyes of pure reason, that is, to natural science, there is nothing at all lacking in the vase. It’s only from the perspective of practical reason, from the perspective of considering things not as objects in my representation, but as truly independent and self-standing things that we consider the vase in its “thingly” aspect as constituted by a kind of limit or gap.

This insight is key to the Kantian ethical project. For it is only through practical reason that we can achieve properly ethical conduct towards the world and the people in it. For by treating others as merely mechanical cogs who react unthinkingly according to the laws of nature–as merely representational objects rather than freely acting subjects in their own right–we demean them. In that we can’t help but view ourselves as free subjects, we fail to treat them with the same standard as we treat ourselves.

In the eyes of science, the vessel is always filled, when empty: with air, when filled: with wine. It’s only with an eye for the vessel as a signifier that the vessel can ever be seen as truly empty or truly filled.

Lacan explains on p. 120,

This nothing in particular that characterizes it in its signifying function is that which in its incarnated form characterizes the vase as such. It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier, this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the same sense.

To make reference to the registers of real, symbolic and imaginary, the empty vessel can exist only in the symbolic. The real is full.

To use an example which comes up frequently in our discussions: one can imagine a library with a computerized catalog that one can search. One might look up a book in the system and then, going to find it, discover it missing. Yet this missing book only exists with reference to the library’s computer system, within the symbolic order. In the real, all the books that are in the library are in the library. There is no missing book.

While the essence of the vessel is constituted by void, it is, of course, not literally made of void, but made of clay and shaped by a potter.

On p. 169, Heidegger says the following:

…The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel…Sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holding. But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No—he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug’s void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.

On p. 121, Lacan connects the idea of the constitutive void at the centre of the thing with the “gap or hole” in the real, opened up by the signifier.

Now if you consider the vase from the point of view I first proposed, as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole. Everyone makes jokes about macaroni, because it is a hole with something around it, or about canons. The fact that we laugh doesn’t change the situation, however: the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical.

The question Lacan is answering in the quote above is not how to get something from nothing, but how to get nothing from something. His answer: the signifier and the symbolic order allow us to signify the empty place by providing a structure of signification for that empty place to exist.

As Lear says, “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”

In ancient Greek philosophy, Parmenides and his student Zeno famously argue that change and thereby motion of any kind, is an illusion. While we observe change all around us, rational consideration of change leads to certain inescapable absurdities and contradictions which we cannot accept, and so we must deny the authority of our senses. Zeno offers four paradoxes which each aim to show the impossibility of motion and change, the most famous of which is known as the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise.

For our purposes, let’s focus on a different paradox pointed out by Parmenides: the impossible idea of “creation ex nihilo”. As it is often stated, “out of nothing comes nothing,” that is, Being must be eternal, for, if something new is to come about, it must emerge either out of what came before or out of nothing. If it is to be genuinely new it can’t simply be a rearrangement of what came before, yet for something genuinely novel to emerge it would have to emerge from nothing at all, which is impossible. Thus, we see nothing new can come into being. Being must be, therefore, singular, eternal and unchanging.

One of the goals of Aristotle’s philosophy, particularly in the Physics, may be to resolve this dilemma: to understand the change going on in the world around us in rational terms which don’t immediately lead to a contradiction and in so doing redeem the world of sense experience as rational-–in principle graspable by philosophy. In order to do this, he introduces a category of being which is neither “fully actual” nor “nothing at all” which he calls “potentiality”. Things don’t emerge from nothing, Aristotle agrees with Parmenides, but rather, he claims, out of a certain already existing potential. While Parmenides’ notion of Being as a simple binary leads him to regard the world of change as an unreal illusion, Aristotle seeks to argue for the reality of change by explaining it in terms of this middle term of potentiality. While both agree that creation ex nihilo is impossible, Parmenides’ binary notion of being as “all or nothing” means he can’t conceive of observable change as anything but the movement from non-existence to existence, and therefore must deny all change as contradictory.

Going back to Thales, Greek natural philosophy concerns itself with the search for a single ruling explanatory principle, called the arche, which explains a diversity of phenomena in nature. Particularly mysterious are movements which take place with no good explanation, for instance the phenomenon of magnetism which occurs in a mysterious and non-obvious way according to certain hidden or occult forces. Rather than hold a modern view of nature as a machine, in which motion is imparted from the outside and transferred through the system via things bumping into one another, the pre-Socratic view held by Thales imagines a more organicist view of nature which sees all of nature as itself ensouled, animate—motion being an innate internal property and function of the soul. This is what Thales means by the famous statement, “all things are full of gods.”

For Empedocles, the cosmos consists of four elements (earth, air, fire and water) put in motion by the forces of love and strife. This conception of motion in terms of the movement of a soul’s internal attraction towards a beloved object is taken over by Aristotle, in both his natural and ethical philosophy (where all men are motivated by the desire to know). In this view, given its ultimate expression by Dante in his Divine Comedy, all things are put in motion out of love towards the unmoved mover, i.e. God. All things are animated, brought about out of their merely potential existence and made actual by this fully actualized actualizer.

This fully actualized actualizer is conceived as a fully necessary being upon which all contingent beings are dependent. Change is understood as the drawing out of already existing potential. Matter, in Aristotle’s terms, is the potential out of which everything new is formed. Yet as the explanation for change, potential is something which must itself be eternal, since it can’t itself have come into being.

In this light it is easy to see why Aristotle argued for the eternity of nature.

From Physics I, 7:

…that substances too, and anything else that can be said ‘to be’ without qualification, come to be from some substratum, will appear on examination. For we find in every case something that underlies from which proceeds that which comes to be; for instance, animals and plants from seed…It is plain that these are all cases of coming to be from a substratum.

Thus, clearly, from what has been said, whatever comes to be is always complex.

On this view, the eternity of matter is thus necessarily coeval with the eternity of God. As Lacan warns us, this leads us into a kind of Cathar heresy.

From Wikipedia’s article on Catharism:

Cathars believed that the good God was the God of the New Testament faith, creator of the spiritual realm, whereas many Cathars identified the evil god as Satan, the master of the physical world and god of sadducean Old Testament nationalism. Cathars believed human spirits were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god, destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, a Last Rites form of Baptism performed when death is imminent, when they would return to the good God as “Perfect”.

Aristotle sought to explain change by positing an eternal substratum, which itself doesn’t change, in order to avoid the Parmenidean problem of creation ex nihilo.

This solution leads to a dangerous kind of Manichaeism, which sees the world as created through the conflict of two competing opposites, pure potentiality and pure actuality.

Neoplatonists like St Augustine sought to refute this Manichaen understanding and explain the world in terms of a single positive principle and its lack. In this view, sin is explained as privation, something with no genuine existence on its own, something which is parasitic on the Good. Yet this monism only reintroduces the mystery of creation ex nihilo and the corresponding problem of evil. If God is the highest and most perfect being, the arche and single explanatory principle of the cosmos, why is the cosmos itself so terrible much of the time? Why does the world contain untold miseries? What is the source of lack, if everything is to find its source in perfection?

Lacan asks this question with reference to the account of creation in Genesis, where he remarks that God “contemplated the whole and saw that it was good” (p. 122).

You could say the same thing of the potter when he has made his vase–it’s good, it’s right, it holds together. In other words, it’s always fine from the side of the work.

Yet everybody knows what may emerge from a vase or what can be put in one. And it is obvious that the optimism is in no way justified by the way things function in the human world, nor by what is born of its works.

Lacan asks the question of God’s work of creation ex nihilo in reference to Martin Luther’s famous declaration “that no merit should be attributed to any work” (p. 122).

Luther held that man gets to heaven, not under his own power, his own deserved reward for doing good things in life, but via the infinite mercy of God’s grace and Jesus’ intercession on their undeserving behalf. This doctrine is referred to as “justification through faith alone”, and goes against the Catholic notion that heavenly reward is earned at least in part through good works.

In Luther’s view, man’s will is wicked, corrupted by original sin and incapable of doing anything genuinely good on its own. The Catholic church sells the false notion of the “perfectibility of human nature”; its complicated processes of confession, contrition and forgiveness, corrupted by the selling of indulgences, make a mockery of the idea that those that make it to heaven truly deserve it. For Luther, it is by faith alone through the grace and mercy of Christ that people make it to heaven, not through a life of good works.

Lacan’s answer to the problem of evil is thus to project this defect in our will onto God himself in the work of creation. From the point of view of original sin, humanity has failed to live up to the hopes that God had for it. But as a mere creation, how can this defect be just our own and not also reflect upon our creator?

To sum up: by conceptualizing our desire, will, and sin itself as a lack, a privation, we move from the ethical dimension into the metaphysical, echoing the ancient views of Empedocles who sees love and strife as natural forces in addition to being human emotions. This is the oddly freeing character of Luther’s message of imperfectability, and the will as being incapable of good works. Admitting to this constitutional inadequacy frees us from having to play the ethical game wherein I believe I am capable of anything good. In going to the end and admitting to this total corruption of the will, the game of trying to reform this will’s nature through punishments and rewards loses its power.

This question of why there is anything at all, rather than nothing seems to go unsolved, at least in our reading today. However, we are reminded how nothing comes out from something, that is, the matter of the jug creates a signifier which can be either full or empty as a symbolic object. Thus something seems to always precede nothing, further confounding us on the topic of creation ex nihilo.

For Kant, morality is properly about our intentions (and whether they conform to moral law), and not the consequences of our actions. Works are not good or bad in a moral sense without reference to the intentions behind them. Thus morality is not about judging something in the world (actions or works), but rather a matter of judging the intentions of subjects.

For Kant who is worried so much about the implications of Newtonian science on our moral life, the distinction at the heart of his doctrine of transcendental idealism, between things-for-us and things-in-themselves, solves this problem by relegating each to its own domain, a scientific understanding of nature to the world of appearances and our practical reasoning about moral issues to the realm governed by noumenal freedom and spontaneity.

In the moral demand to treat others as ends-in-themselves, not mere means, we meet the demand to treat others as subjects who each transcendentally constitute their own world, who are not simply bare objects within your world. In addition to all your apparent qualities, I must assume an unknown element of spontaneity and freedom, the potential for a true creation ex nihilo, not merely the latest event in a series, or a rearrangement of existing elements, but the coming into being of something genuinely new.

In the third antinomy, we see that the laws of the understanding meet their limit. If everything is determined by causal laws, such that everything that occurs at a certain moment in time is determined by a previous moment in time according to certain laws of nature, then we introduce a certain problem of regress. For if everything that happens at one moment in time only occurs in the way it does because of a previous moment in time, that previous moment must itself be determined by a previous moment and so on, yet for this chain to have begun in the first place, it could not have done by being determined by a previous moment according to natural laws or else it would not be a true beginning, but another step in the problem of regress. Thus, for the existence of any causal chains, there must be spontaneity, for there to be natural laws, there must be laws of freedom.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – March 19th, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 8, The Object and the Thing, pt. 2, on p. 105.

In his discussion of the Kleinian school of analysis, Lacan notes their association of das Ding with the mythic body of the mother. As the forbidden object around which is constructed the taboo against incest, the subject must find an alternative channel for its incestuous desire through the process of sublimation, that is, reinvesting a new object with the frustrated desire for the old.

Lacan finds support for this idea in certain theories of artistic creation which see art as a process of sublimation. Lacan draws a connection between Klein and the work of “an American author, who isn’t at all Kleinian”. In A Theory Concerning Creation in the Free Arts, Harry Lee writes on art as a form of sublimation, and attributes to art a “restorative function”, (106).

In art, we find “more or less of an attempt at symbolic repair of the imaginary lesions that have occurred to the fundamental image of the maternal body,” (106).

According to this model, art is a way to “give the subject satisfactions, a measure of solution to his problems, a state of equilibrium,” (107).

On p. 106-7, Lacan explains how this Kleinian understanding gives us a starting point in our attempt to understand the subject’s relationship to das Ding, but he also emphasizes the need to go beyond this starting point if we hope to understand what’s going on in this process,

[While] the reduction of the notion of sublimation to a restitutive effort of the subject relative to the injured body of the mother is certainly not the best solution to the problem of sublimation…There is nevertheless there an attempt to approach the relations of the subject to…das Ding [which] allows us also to situate it, and, as far as sublimation is concerned, to reestablish a broader function than that which one necessarily arrives at if one accepts Kleinian categories.

What is neglected in this Kleinian view of art is to see in sublimation the search for social recognition, rather than merely to conceive of art as an individualistic project.

Continuing on p. 107, Lacan clarifies the problem before us,

Note that no correct evaluation of sublimation in art is possible if we overlook

the fact that all artistic production, including especially that of the fine

arts, is historically situated. You don’t paint in Picasso’s time as you painted

in Velazquez’s; you don’t write a novel in 1930 as you did in Stendhal’s time.

This is an absolutely essential fact that does not for the time being need to be

located under the rubric of the collectivity or the individual—let’s place it

under the rubric of culture. What does society find there that is so satisfying?

That’s the question we need to answer.

In that art allows us to sublimate our desire for das Ding into a socially acceptable project, we redirect our energies towards the Big Other. We attempt the impossible task of expressing what is inexpressibly private in public terms. “It creates socially recognized values,” (107).

Lacan writes on p. 105-6,

The demands of reality…present themselves…in the form of social demands. Freud cannot not consider them seriously, but one has to indicate immediately the special approach he adopts; it permits him to transcend the simple opposition between individual and society, in which the individual is straightway posited as the eventual site of disorder…I am concerned with the ethics of psychoanalysis, and I can’t at the same time discuss Hegelian ethics. But I do want to point out that they are not the same. At the end of a certain phenomenology, the opposition between the individual and the city, between the individual and the state, is obvious. In Plato, too, the disorders of the soul are also referred to the same dimension—it’s a matter of the reproduction of the disorders of the city at the level of the psyche. All of that is related to a problematic that is not at all Freudian. The sick individual whom Freud is concerned with reveals another dimension than that of the disorders of the state and of hierarchical disturbances.

Here, Lacan distinguishes between the Hegelian and psychoanalytic approach to ethics.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s discussion of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, examines the disjunction between two spheres of ethical life: family and the state, that is, between filial piety and obedience to the laws of the

A brief plot summary of the play from Wikipedia tells us,

The story follows the attempts of Antigone, the sister of…Polynices, to bury Polynices, going against the decision of her uncle Creon and placing her relationship with her brother above human laws.

In his Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel distinguishes between morality and ethical life. Morality is about an individual’s relation to abstract virtue, while ethical life refers to the commitments we have in relation to our concrete social existence. Hegel divides ethical life into three spheres: family, civil society and the state.

In the case of Antigone, her tragedy comes out of the disordered relationship of duties shared between two spheres of ethical life: the oikos and the polis (her duty to her family and to her state).

On p. 106, Lacan continues to draw the distinction between this Hegelian approach to the ethical through the political, and the Freudian approach,

Freud addresses the sick individual as such, the neurotic, the psychotic; he addresses directly the powers of life insofar as they open onto the powers of death; he addresses directly the powers that derive from the knowledge of good and evil.

Freud, in contrast to Hegel, is not interested in the way in which political problems make themselves manifest on the individual level as ethical dilemmas, but rather his focus is on that which concerns the individual at the level of each individual.

However, this approach leads Klein into neglecting to see sublimation in its social dimension, that is, of redirecting socially unacceptable and possibly taboo desires into socially acceptable ones.

Lacan’s insight is to show how this clarified view of sublimation helps us understand Kant’s notion of morality as the socially acceptable sublimation and expression of our impossible desire towards the other as noumenal object, of the other as das Ding.

Lacan sets up two scenarios in order to illustrate Kant’s belief that moral actions are done for the sake of duty, and not motivated by passion or desire.

1. A subject chooses to make love to the person of their desire, on the condition that they will be executed immediately afterward.

1. A subject chooses to tell the truth to a tyrant, committing themselves to certain death, rather than lie and become favored by the tyrant.

While the question of how moral actions are motivated remains an open question, we can see these two examples reveal a stark difference in the way we speak about actions done out of duty and actions done out of passion.

In scenario A we imagine someone who desires recklessly, or too much, in a way that isn’t properly regulated with their other desires. They are, in a sense, short sighted, we might argue, for if they saw things properly, we imagine, they’d understand that they are throwing away a whole future of pleasurable activities for a single pleasurable act.

In scenario B we imagine someone who is acting not out of reckless desire, but someone who is acting purposefully against their desire, knowingly forgoing any future desirous activity for the reason of moral belief.

Yet the question of how the action is motivated in scenario B if not by desire remains central here.

For Kant, the experience of pain which comes from acting against one’s own inclinations must accompany every genuinely moral act (or else, being pleasurable, the act could not be done for the sake of duty alone and it would not be genuinely moral).

However, if there is nothing desirable about moral actions, we would never act morally, since nothing could motivate us to act in such a way. For how can external reasons alone, separated from desire, be motivating?

If we imagine that actions which are done out of duty and accompanied by pain are not done against pleasure but for a kind of sado-masochistic pleasure-seeking, then we might see how to dissolve the distinction between scenarios A and B. In this view, duty is really pleasure seeking in disguise.

But such a view would make scenario B’s action reckless, in the same way scenario A’s action is reckless, but this seems, at least intuitively, wrong. But perhaps such a counter-intuitive view is the case?

If actions done for the sake of duty are really done out of a kind of moral sado-masochism, then moral actions which appear painful or against our inclinations are really the result of another kind of desire. In such a view, genuine moral action seems doubly impossible, at least according to the Kantian model.

We can see here how sublimation provides a kind of answer to this problem.
- Painful acts of duty, which seem to have nothing to recommend them from the perspective of desire, are motivated not by being desirous in themselves but by being open channels for the sublimation of another frustrated desire.

In that this frustrated desire is socially forbidden, the sublimated replacement object must be one that is socially acceptable, as Lacan emphasizes in the case of art above. In this sense, the sadomasochism of an action done out of duty expresses the desire for social recognition.

Here, moral duty is reduced to its barest form, that is, the desire to be in community with others like oneself. Thus, the categorical imperative expresses a desire for universality with others in a Kingdom of Ends, to treat others as oneself and oneself as another. We might think of the parallel here to the reduction of the Ten Commandments to the single Golden Rule, to act out of love for thy neighbour.

Thus, actions which appear to be done for the sake of duty alone are in fact the socially acceptable outward form and sublimation of what is in truth an action of frustrated desire which aims towards an impossible object, that is towards das Ding.

Along these lines, we might reinterpret the Kantian dictum, to never treat others as mere means to my own ends, but as ends in themselves, as a restatement of the idea that we must never treat others as mere objects in the world, but rather transcendental subjects through which the world is constituted, that is, we must treat others as both ends and things-in-themselves.

Thus, the law which regulates the interaction of neighbours, phrased as an interdiction which moderates their actions towards one another, expresses love in another guise.

In our discussion so far, we’ve spoken loosely of sublimation as the substitution of one object for another, however, we ought to be precise here and distinguish sublimation from the substitution which occurs in the case of the symptoms of neurotic repression.

In the typical neurotic symptom, a repressed aim is expressed through a signifying function in a substituted form. That is, one signifier stands in for another.

For instance, the repressed desire to masturbate might return in the form of obsessive hand-washing. In this example, the hand-washing is paradoxically both a signifier of the purity of which the act of masturbation is in violation and the activity through which the act of masturbatory repetition is expressed.

In sublimation, uniquely, the impossible object is raised “to the dignity of the Thing,” (112). That is, crucially, it’s not a matter of one signifier standing in for another, as das Ding is not a signifier and in fact stands opposed to signification altogether as its impossible limit, in the sense that Kant speaks of things-in-themselves.

The subject, through narcissistic misrecognition, identifies itself with the object which becomes the target for reinvestment by the frustrated drive. As in the example of courtly love, where the knight channels love for an idealized feminine figure into a vision of themselves as an chivalrous and courageous hero.

However, this narcissistic image of the ideal-ego can only ever be expressed in terms of socially acceptable norms and values—what appeals to and is sustained by the gaze of the ego-ideal.

In this way, we can see that Kant’s notion of acting for the sake of duty can be explained through the logic of sublimation as equivalent to all three of the following: (1) the impossible and frustrated desire towards das Ding, (2) a kind of narcissistic self-love, and (3) the love of thy neighbor, the desire for recognition and social acceptance.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – March 5th, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 6, Drives and Lures, pt. 3, on p. 95.

In the psychological process of sublimation an object of desire which can’t be possessed is substituted by another object as compensation for its frustrated desire.

For example, as a baby grows too old to breastfeed, it might be given a pacifier as a replacement or substitution for the breast, which the baby can learn to desire in its stead; until of course, the child eventually grows too old for the pacifier as well, and must seek out a new object to serve as a substitute.

As we’ve discussed in past weeks, Das Ding is the original object of desire, now lost, but the desire doesn’t go away, losing its object, this frustrated desire is sublimated, that is, repressed and then channeled towards another object as a substitute.

In the play Don Carlos, by Friedrich Schiller, the eponymous Don Carlos, the young prince of Spain, falls in love with Elisabeth of Valois, princess of France, only to find out that, due to a newly signed treaty between both countries, Elisabeth is betrothed to his father, King Phillip II. Their impossible love can never be spoken of socially without terrible consequences, yet, this frustrated desire returns in a sublimated form, taking on a new object which illustrates by metaphor the feelings our hero ought not reveal. Don Carlos takes on a particular concern for the plight of Flanders which is involved in a bloody uprising against repressive Habsburg rule, and it is through his opposition to his father’s brutal oppression of the Flemish that Don Carlos is able to finally voice his frustration against his father—although in another register entirely.

Sublimation arrives as an answer to the deadlock between duty and passion which defines Don Carlos’ impossible love for Elisabeth. This conflict finds its philosophical expression in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who saw the good will as the highest good, that is a pure intention, acting against one’s inclinations for the sake of duty.

Kant is reacting against a fear that Newtonian science will destroy the possibility for morality. How can we, in a world entirely determined by natural laws, where everything that happens happens by necessity, be spontaneously free? Without freedom, Kant thinks, morality is impossible. Thus, as far as we act out of passion, we merely passively react as determined by external circumstances. It’s only by acting against our inclinations and with a “pure will”, one stripped of any particularity, that we can be free, acting out of duty to the moral law.

Don Carlos’ love for Elisabeth of Valois is a typical example of courtly love in that the object of desire is spiritualized, idealized and abstracted away from its flesh and blood existence and made into an imaginary object of reverence, held at a distance—a love never-to-be consummated. The frustrated sexual desire is first repressed and then sublimated into great deeds and brave exploits on the battlefield.

The frustrated desire is sublimated into an image of an aspirational ego, one who would bravely fight on the battlefield and brave death for their ideals.

Lacan on p. 98,

Ichlibido and Objektlibido are introduced by Freud in relation to the difference between Ich-ideal and Ideal-ich, between the mirage of the ego and the formation of an ideal. This ideal makes room for itself alone; within the subject it gives form to something which is preferred and to which it will henceforth submit. The problem of identification is linked to this psychological splitting, which places the subject in a state of dependence relative to an idealized, forced image of itself – something that Freud will emphasize subsequently.

It is through this mirage relation that the notion of an object is introduced. But this object is not the same as that which is aimed at on the horizon of the instinct. Between the object as it is structured by the narcissistic relation and das Ding, there is a difference, and it is precisely on the slope of that difference that the problem of sublimation is situated for us.

As Don Carlos sublimates his desire for Elisabeth into championing the cause of the Flemish people, he creates an aspirational image of himself as champion, an imaginary ideal-ego.

As we learn in Lacan’s work on the mirror stage, the first ideal-ego you have is your own specular image. In that moment of misrecognition, you identify yourself with your own image in the mirror. You become aware of not only how you look but of how others see you, of your own existence as an object in the world for others to look at. By playing in the mirror, making faces at yourself, waving, you become aware of your imaginary self as your own project, something in the world you determine.

Yet, this determination is always against a certain backdrop, that is, the imaginary image of the ideal-ego is created for another’s gaze. That is, for this ideal-ego to be properly aspirational, its qualities must be not only desirable for the subject, but desirable in general, that is, for an imagined third party. This imagined third party is the ego-ideal.

For Don Carlos, the figure who sustains his own aspirational ideal-ego is Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, who comes to him with the plight of the Flemish people, imploring him to help as “deputy of all mankind”, and what’s more, explaining how the last hopes of his cause lie with him and him alone. Rodrigo could be said to play the role of the ego-ideal. He is something like a figure of conscience, the externalized voice of Don Carlos’ own self-regard.

From Act 1, Scene 2 of Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos (trans. R. D. Boylan),

Pardon, dear prince, if I can only meet

With wonder these tumultuous ecstacies.

Not thus I looked to find Don Philip’s son.

A hectic red burns on your pallid cheek,

And your lips quiver with a feverish heat.

What must I think, dear prince? No more I see

The youth of lion heart, to whom I come

The envoy of a brave and suffering people.

For now I stand not here as Roderigo—

Not as the playmate of the stripling Carlos—

But, as the deputy of all mankind,

I clasp thee thus:—’tis Flanders that clings here

Around thy neck, appealing with my tears

To thee for succor in her bitter need.

This land is lost, this land so dear to thee,

If Alva, bigotry’s relentless tool,

Advance on Brussels with his Spanish laws.

This noble country’s last faint hope depends

On thee, loved scion of imperial Charles!

And, should thy noble heart forget to beat

In human nature’s cause, Flanders is lost!

Going back to p. 91, Lacan quotes Freud, on the subject of sublimation, from the Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 358, vol. XI, of the Collected Works:

Therefore, we have to take into consideration the fact that the drives [Triebe], the pulsating sexual excitements, are extraordinarily plastic. They may appear in each others’ places. One of them may accumulate the intensity of the others. When the satisfaction of one is denied by reality, the satisfaction of another may offer total compensation. They behave in relation to each other like a network, like communicating channels that are filled with water.

Lacan remarks,

We can see there the metaphor that is no doubt at the origin of that surrealist

work which is called Communicating Vases.

In an echo of Freud’s understanding of sublimation, illustrated by the image of communicating vases, the low-land country of Flanders (the liberation of which becomes the object of Don Carlos’ desire once he has sublimated his love for Elisabeth) is itself only habitable on the basis of a complex series of dikes and other feats of hydrological engineering.

At the Siege of Leiden, during the Eighty Years’ War for Dutch independence against the Spanish Habsburgs, William the Silent breached these dikes on purpose to flood the surrounding area in a successful gamble to relieve the besieged city.

From Wikipedia,

…[William] planned to breach the dykes to allow the sea to flood the low-lying land. The siege could then be lifted using the rebel fleet, and the Spaniards would be forced to retire before the incoming sea.

In this hydrological model, the repressive tension created by acting out of Kantian moral duty drives Don Carlos to greatness. The conflict at the source of this tension is described by Kant as taking place between duty and passion, between moral self-determination and determination by causes not under one’s control, between the laws of freedom and the laws of nature, that is felt in the struggle of moral deliberation.

Two figures whose famous dispute on “free will” embodies both sides of this struggle, between determination and freedom, are Martin Luther and Erasmus, who famously debated the nature of the human will, necessity of good works and our participation in salvation.

In Luther’s view, the will is corrupted by sin, and imperfectable, essentially incapable of ever doing good. He famously believed in the doctrine of “justification by faith alone,” which means God’s grace is absolute in our salvation.

On the other hand, Erasmus believed in the necessity of good works, we must perfect ourselves by attaining virtues, developing good habits, and becoming excellent in the style of Ancient ethical philosophy. These good works are the form of our co-operation in Divine salvation, preparing the way. Salvation is then a matter of co-operation between human freedom and divine grace.

This raises a key question: if Luther is correct and our will is corrupt and doing good works is impossible, why did God issue us the ten commandments? Aren’t we being set up to fail? Is this not an impossible test?

On p. 96, Lacan characterizes Freud,

…the good as such—something that has been the eternal object of the philosophical quest in the sphere of ethics, the philosopher’s stone of all the moralists—the good is radically denied by Freud. It is rejected at the beginning of his thought in the very notion of the pleasure principle as the rule of the deepest instinct, of the realm of the drives.

By identifying the source of action with the pleasure principle, Freud rejects the possibility of an action done for any moral reason. There are no actions which do not in some way aim at das Ding. This means, our supposed good deeds are merely the expression in sublimated forms of our frustrated desire. The will cannot aim true.

Reading the Old Testament in English, the word “sin” translates the Hebrew word “khata”–—which means to miss, as in to miss the mark.

We can see how there’s no possibility for acting on a moral reason, or acting according to a moral law. There is nothing over and against pleasure, which regulates pleasure, but simply pleasures themselves seeking a kind equilibrium in a system of connected channels.

Lacan says on p. 95, “Freud was telling us the same thing as St. Paul,” by which he means, that they share the idea that the ten commandments are each an formulation or expression of a singular inner command, which is to love, ie. “to love thy neighbour as thyself”.

The command to love thy neighbour expresses the inner logic of the ten commandments, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans tells us not to act out of obedience to a law over and against us but from our own inner determination.
A too strict adherence to law is an obvious excuse for transgressive jouissance, rather, we ought act out of love. Each act done out of love is therefore an expression of this same feeling, that is, the love of our neighbour manifested in sublimated form. As Lacan says, “No ethical rule stands as a mediator between our pleasure and its real rule,” (95).

The moral law is not external to desire, but it’s very inner logic, desire purified of any particularity, and made universal.

The universal form of desire is none other than the desire for das Ding, in that all desire is a compensation for, a sublimation of, our desire for this originary lost object.

Lacan says, on p. 170,

You once heard me make a series of remarks on a passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in connection with the theme that it is the Law which causes sin. And you saw that, thanks to an artifice I could have done without, namely, the substitution of the term the Thing for what the text calls sin, I was able to achieve a very precise formulation of what I had to say at the time on the subject of the knot of the Law and desire. Well, that particular example was not chosen by chance…

The nostalgia we (moderns) feel for the life of the Ancient Greeks, is a sign of a cultural yearning for das Ding. We imagine a time when we were not reflective and left with the burden to think: about others, about cultural norms and expectations and particularly in this moral register.

In his essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, Schiller expresses this view of Greek life, as somehow more straightforward than our own.

From the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

The naïve artist names things “by their right name and in the most straightforward manner”, unconcerned with social connotations or norms. Naïveté generally, then, is characterized by purity, simplicity, directness, and ease.

Although naïveté exists in the modern world, it was much more prevalent among the ancient Greeks. This fact again relates to conceptions of nature. The naïve poet simply imitates nature. This unreflective response means the poet “can have only a single relation to his object and, in this respect, he has no choice regarding the treatment”. Modern humans, by contrast, have a more developed sense of self and are therefore keenly aware of their separation from nature. When we compare modern depictions of nature to those of the ancient Greeks, what strikes us is that the Greek poet’s portrayal “contains no more special involvement of the heart”; he “does not cling to nature with the fervor, sensitivity, and sweet melancholy that we moderns do”. The reason, Schiller says, is that in the divisiveness of the modern world, nature “has disappeared from our humanity, and we reencounter it in its genuineness only outside of humanity in the inanimate world”. The ancient poet by contrast had not lost nature and so felt no need to rediscover it. Ancient poets, Schiller concludes, “felt naturally, while we feel the natural”.

In this fantasy of ancient Greece we have a direct relationship to our objects of desire, rather than one mediated by the process of sublimation. We imagine that we can get what we want and fully enjoy it, while in everyday reality, of course, this is impossible.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – February 19th, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 6, The Moral Law, pt. 3, on p. 80.

In this section of the text, Lacan discusses the ten commandments, beginning with the injunction, “Thou shalt not lie.”

Psuedo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, in The Mystical Theology, describes Moses’ ascent of Mt. Sinai as a mystical ascent beyond language, beyond rationality,

[Bartholomew] says that the Word of God is vast and minuscule, that the Gospel is wide-ranging and yet restricted. To me it seems that in this he is extraordinarily shrewd, for he has grasped that the good cause of all is both eloquent and taciturn, indeed wordless. It has neither word nor act of understanding, since it is on a plane above all this, and it is made manifest only to those who travel through foul and fair, who pass beyond the summit of every holy ascent, who leave behind them every divine light, every voice, every word from heaven, and who plunge into the darkness where, as scripture proclaims, there dwells the One who is beyond all things. It is not for nothing that the blessed Moses is commanded to submit first to purification and then to depart from those who have not undergone this. When every purification is complete, he hears the many voiced trumpets. He sees the many lights, pure and with rays streaming abundantly. Then, standing apart from the crowds and accompanied by chosen priests, he pushes ahead to the summit of the divine ascents. And yet he does not meet God himself, but contemplates, not him who is invisible, but rather where he dwells. This means, I presume, that the holiest and highest of the things perceived with the eye of the body or the mind are but the rationale which presupposes all that lies below the Transcendent One. Through them, however, his unimaginable presence is shown, walking the heights of those holy places to which the mind at least can rise. But then he [Moses] breaks free of them, away from what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.

This mystical experience precedes the revelation of the Ten Commandments, which renders the experience into language, but in a way that necessarily falls short of the experience itself.

If we consider, from the psychoanalytic perspective, that the whole realm of signifiers—the symbolic order—is itself a kind of lie, the articulation of the commandment, “Thou shalt not lie” in language, is itself, paradoxically, a kind of lie.

There is a fundamental incapacity of the symbolic order to signify what we desire (das Ding), yet I am nonetheless obliged to try to put my desire into words. This traps me in a metonymic displacement of my desire whereby I am always substituting one thing for another. In such a state, I can’t know what it is that I desire, since I need to represent my desire to myself through something else, some third thing which stands-in for it.

On p. 82,

It is there that I can say “Thou shalt not lie”—here where I lie, where I repress, where I, the liar, speak.

Lacan references the liar’s paradox of Epimenides, who says, “All Cretans are liars.” Since Epimenides is from Crete, this means that he is also a liar, and so this statement itself must be a lie. That would mean, since the statement is false and not all Creteans are liars, then we might believe the statement to be true, but that would render it false once again for if all Cretans are liars then so is Epimenides, and so on.

From the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on the “liar paradox”,

The first sentence in this essay is a lie. There is something odd about saying so, as has been known since ancient times. To see why, remember that all lies are untrue. Is the first sentence true? If it is, then it is a lie, and so it is not true. Conversely, suppose that it is not true. We (viz., the authors) have said it, and normally things are said with the intention of being believed. Saying something that way when it is untrue is a lie. But then, given what the sentence says, it is true after all!

Lacan invokes the famous slogan, coined by the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, which says, “Property is theft!”

Proudhon writes, in What Is Property?,

If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man’s mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

Here the concept of property—the prohibition against taking what is mine—appears on the scene only as theft, a form of what it is prohibiting, i.e. taking something that isn’t yours as one’s own.

Therefore, while theft only exists in the context of people having property, property is itself already a kind of theft.

The negation is therefore prior to the thing itself—theft is stuff out of which property is made.

David Simon’s HBO series, The Wire, depicts the lives of characters on both sides of the law, in a story revolving around the drug-trade in Baltimore. We follow both police and criminal gang members and find that each side acts according to a similar logic. The police, whose job is to combat gang activity, are depicted as themselves just another gang. As Herc says in the first episode, “It’s the chain-of-command, baby, the shit always rolls downhill.”

Along the same line of thought, marriage, understood in a certain way, is a form of long-term legal prostitution.

Famously, we find this paradoxical phenomenon of a word or concept containing its own opposite in Freud’s work on The Uncanny, in his discussion of the German words heimlich and unheimlich.

He writes,

What interests us most…is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: “We call it unheimlich; you call it heimlich.”) In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.

The pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, taught just this doctrine as “the unity of opposites.” One enigmatic fragment states,

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.

On p. 76, Lacan explains his interpretation of the Golden Rule as loving the other as oneself and oneself as another, a kind of “unity of opposites” which remakes the self into other and the other into the self—a universal subject,

If at the summit of the ethical imperative something ends up being articulated in a way that is as strange or even scandalous for some people as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” this is because it is the law of the relation of the subject to himself that he make himself his own neighbor, as far as his relationship to his desire is concerned.

One can tease out just this idea of universalizability as the core of morality itself, as Kant did in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, in the form of the categorical imperative, where we are instructed to, “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”

Using the categorical imperative, Kant argues for the strict necessity to always tell the truth, and against any moral justification for telling even white lies, in his essay On the Supposed Right to Lie from Benevolent Motives. But—from the perspective we discussed above—isn’t the categorical imperative itself a lie, in its identification of self and neighbour?

Isn’t it out of this paucity of imagination that the term Penisneid first emerges in the minds of men? That is, the inability of men to conceive of women as something truly different to themselves, rather than something the same, but somehow lacking. It is, first of all, men who suppose that women feel envy for their lack of a penis, when this lack exists primarily because of a false assumption that women ought to be like men in the first place.

Lacan moves on from his discussing of lying, to discuss the last of the ten commandments (p. 82),

Since time is getting on, I will skip quickly forward to the issue that is the object of our discussion today relative to the relationship between desire and the law. It is the famous commandment that affirms the following—it makes one smile, but when one thinks about it, one doesn’t smile for long: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, neither his man servant, nor his maid servant, neither his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that belongs to thy neighbor.”

The command not the covet “anything that belongs to thy neighbor” refers to a list of items, necessarily incomplete, which themselves stand-in metonymically for the real object of the neighbour’s desire, that is das Ding.

Strangely, it’s only in its prohibition that das Ding can appear at all.

Lacan goes on (p. 83),

Is the Law the Thing? Certainly not. Yet I can only know of the Thing by means of the Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: “Thou shalt not covet it.” But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. But even without the Law, I was once alive. But when the commandment appeared, the Thing flared up, returned once again, I met my death. And for me, the commandment that was supposed to lead to life turned out to lead to death, for the Thing found a way and thanks to the commandment seduced me; through it I came to desire death.

Thus, while for Kant, things-in-themselves stand prior to and outside of our phenomenal experience as its source, for Lacan, das Ding emerges only retroactively as the very result of its prohibition.

_____________________________________________________________

Lacan Toronto Meeting – February 5th, 2023.

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 6, The Moral Law, on p. 71.

Famously, for Kant, “concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind,” (A51=B75). This means, for me to have a genuine experience of an object, I need to apply some kind of concept to my sensory intuitions in order to make sense of them, as representing an object. For instance, to perceive a chair, I must first have the concept of a chair which I then apply to a particular set of diverse intuitions, allowing me to unify them.

This means, my experience is itself determined almost entirely by the concepts I possess which give it shape; for without these concepts, my experience would be a kind of sensuous blur.

The conscious experience of a chair is mediated through an unconscious structure of concepts without which the chair wouldn’t exist for me in my experience at all.

We can think of the famously ambiguous drawing that is both a duck and a rabbit. It’s very hard for us not to perceive it as either one or the other, depending on our own preconception, but we can’t meaningfully perceive it as both simultaneously. We can even change the interpretive concept we apply and in doing so change our perception, back and forth, as many times as we like.

On p. 72,

Everything that qualifies representations in the order of the good is caught up in refraction, in the atomized system that the structure of the unconscious facilitations imposes, in the complex mechanism of a signifying system of elements. It is only in that way that the subject relates to that which presents itself on the horizon as his good. His good is already pointed out to him as the significant result of a signifying composition that is called up at the unconscious level or, in other words, at a level where he has no mastery over the system of directions and investments that regulate his behavior in depth.

For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language—that is, it is structured by the signifier and its relations to other signifiers. These signifiers stand in for one another. You might ask for the definition of a particular signifier, but what you’ll get is just more signifiers, which must themselves be defined by yet more signifiers, and so on.

We can never simply point to what it is we mean “out there” in the world, or to an unmediated mental state, for to experience something is to have already subsumed a set of intuitions under a particular concept—a particular signifier, which is defined, not immediately in relation to a referent, but by its relation to other signifiers.

Yet, outside of this structure of signifiers, which we use to construct our subjective representation of the world, lies the world itself. For Kant, things-in-themselves can never be spoken about except in a negative sense, for we can only speak about the world as it is for us, as we are limited by the form of our intuition, and as it is determined by the concepts we apply to it.

Das Ding, as analogous to the Kantian thing-in-itself, stands both as the mysterious source of our intuitions, and also, necessarily, what always necessarily escapes them.

Lacan begins ch. 6, on p. 71,

The reason is that das Ding is at the center only in the sense that it is excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent.

Das Ding is a Vorstellungrepräsentanz–that is, it represents the representative quality of representation itself.

For a ready example of a Vorstellungrepräsentanz, we might think of the famous painting by Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas.

From Wikipedia,

The painting is believed by F. J. Sánchez Cantón to depict a room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. Some of the figures look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand. In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

The subjects of the painting break the fourth wall by looking out beyond the painting, directly at us, the viewer (the artist, Velázquez, chief among them). Yet our place within the logic of the painting is elided by the reflected image of the mirror, which depicts the king and queen in our place, in some sense repairing the broken fourth wall. Of course, as viewers of a painting, we can never be caught in the reflection of a painted mirror, for obvious reasons. The king and queen of the reflected image represent us, as well as the limit of representation itself.

In this way, the viewer is “caught looking” by the painting, included on the one hand and excluded on the other. In drawing our attention to the representative quality of the painting, and its own artificiality, our subjectivity is given a kind of representation as that which exists beyond the limit of representation.

We might recall again (from our discussion on 8th) Sartre’s description of the Look, in relation to the Other as das Ding.

In our encounter with the Other, we are at first radically decentred, finding our own subjectivity reduced to nothing—we find ourselves to be a mere object for another subjectivity. Reacting against finding ourselves reduced in this way, we enter into a struggle to reduce the Other’s perspective to nothing as well, yet in that struggle—in trying to trick or out-strategize the Other—we must paradoxically take the Other’s perspective into consideration, and see that we share the same goal, though indexically opposed to one another. Therefore in the struggle to assert the Other’s subjectivity as nothing, we must recognize it. When the other tries to trick us, we see our own subjectivity recognized and in this mutual recognition, we come to find ourselves again.

The Other is both a threat and a source of longing and fulfillment.

Das Ding has this irreducible social dimension.

Subjectivity has both an interiority and an exteriority, a klein-bottle-like inside-outside, which we experience in social interactions and in the recognition we get from the Other.

Das Ding is the first object of the infant, the subject who is responsible for the gratification of desire—typically, the child’s mother.

Lacan on p. 73,

Although it must be said that at this level das Ding is not distinguished as bad. The subject makes no approach at all to the bad object, since he is already maintaining his distance in relation to the good object. He cannot stand the extreme good that das Ding may bring him, which is all the more reason why he cannot locate himself in relation to the bad. However much he groans, explodes, curses, he still does not understand; nothing is articulated here even in the form of a metaphor. He produces symptoms, so to speak, and these symptoms are at the origin of the symptoms of defense.

And how should we conceive of defense at this level? There is organic defense. Here the ego defends itself by hurting itself as the crab gives up its claw, revealing thereby the connection I developed between the motor system and pain. Yet in what way does man defend himself that is different from an animal practicing self-mutilation? The difference is introduced here by means of the signifying structuralization in the human unconscious. But the defense or the mutilation that is proper to man does not occur only at the level of substitution, displacement or metaphor – everything that structures its gravitation with relation to the good object. Human defense takes place by means of something that has a name, and which is, to be precise, lying about evil.

At the level of the unconscious, the subject lies. And this lying is his way of telling the truth of the matter.

In this prelinguistic stage, Das Ding is necessarily “too close”, too much, overwhelming. In the course of growing up, this relationship eventually threatens the child’s mature development into an individual. As we learned last year in our discussion of Seminar IV, in the case of Little Hans, if the father fails to properly intervene between mother and child, if the Name of the Father fails to properly signify the desire of the mother, the child themselves must get creative and construct of their own metaphors, their own terms, or else succumb to the devouring mother.

As we recall from last session ( 22nd), pain is experienced when the natural limit of our neuronal system is exceeded and its ability to discharge its excitation is not possible because of an inability to remove itself from the source of excitation.

If we reach out and touch a velvet pillow, we can feel its surface to be alternatively smooth or rough, depending on which way we run our hand along its surface, but if that same pillow was on fire, the excitations in our neuronal system would quickly exceed the threshold for perception of an object’s qualities to be possible and instead we would feel only pain as our neuronal system becomes overwhelmed.

Pain is therefore not a perception of something in the world, but rather a kind of limit experience which draws attention to the representative quality of our perceptions, just like the mirrored reflection of the king and queen in Velázquez’s painting.

Lacan, on p. 80, discusses a passage from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason to draw a surprising connection to Marquis de Sade, on the subject of pain,

We are thus faced here with a question, that is to say, the question of the

relationship to das Ding.

This relationship seems to me to be sufficiently emphasized in the third

chapter of The Critique of Practical Reason concerning the motives of practical

pure reason. In effect, Kant acknowledges after all the existence of one sendent

correlative of the moral law in its purity, and strangely enough, I ask

you to note, it is nothing other than pain itself. I will read you the passage

concerned, the second paragraph of the third part: “Consequently, we can

see a priori that the moral law as the determining principle of will, by reason

of the fact that it sets itself against our inclinations, must produce a feeling

that one could call pain. And this is the first and perhaps only case, where

we are allowed to determine, by means of a priori concepts, the relationship

between a knowledge, which comes from practical pure reason, and a feeling

of pleasure or pain.”

In brief, Kant is of the same opinion as Sade. For in order to reach das

Ding absolutely, to open the flood gates of desire, what does Sade show us on

the horizon? In essence, pain. The other’s pain as well as the pain of the

subject himself, for on occasions they are simply one and the same thing. To

the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing, the outer extremity

of pleasure is unbearable to us. It is this that explains the absurd or, to use a

popular expression, maniacal side of Sade that strikes us in his fictional constructions.

Kant’s motivating worry is that Newtonian physics leaves no room for moral decision-making and responsibility, for, in a world of scientific laws, how can we meaningfully do otherwise than we do? For morality to be meaningful, we must be free to act against our inclinations, to rise above external determination, to be self-determining, self-legislating subjects.

Yet this leaves the source of this self-determination outside the phenomenal world of experience, for no causal chain can exist without a first cause which is not itself caused.

To the extent we use empirical reasoning as the judge of our actions, freedom can never come onto the scene. We always appear to be being passively determined by our inclinations. In the experience of pain, we come into contact with the very limit of our sensitive faculty, and into an awareness of the representative realm as merely representative and thus we gain the possibility for genuine action—not merely passive reactions to a deterministic empirical realm—but the possibility of noumenal freedom.

Pain is thus, for Kant, an accompaniment to moral action, which places him in strange company indeed, as the comparison with Sade shows above. Our moral self-relation becomes a kind of sado-masochism.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – January 22nd, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 4, Das Ding, pt. 3, on p. 59.

Lacan continues his reference to Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, which we discussed in some detail on December 18th .

To recap: Freud distinguishes two neuronal systems:

The φ system refers to a system of neurons that is outward facing, responsive to excitation from the external world.

The ψ system is responsive to endogenous or internal stimulations.

The ψ and φ systems receive stimulation in a certain quantity (Qή), and seek to discharge this excitation by the most immediate route. In the case of φ system dealing with external stimulation, it is often easy to remove itself from the source, but when the ψ system receives internal stimulation, removing itself from the source can be more difficult or even impossible.

Going back to p. 58,

The admission of quantity is regulated by the width of the channels that do the conducting, by the individual diameters that a given organism can support—the thing is expressed metaphorically by Freud, but it is almost as if we were to take it literally. What happens once the limit is exceeded?

When the level of excitation within these limited systems becomes too great, I experience pain.

For example, if I put my hand on a hot pot handle on the stove I can tolerate it for a moment before I have the urge to pull back my hand. It’s only if I let it linger on the handle against this urge that I experience pain.

All well and good for the φ system, the ψ system is in no such luck. Since it receives its stimulation internally rather than externally, it can’t remove itself from the source of its pain, and must instead look for an external remedy of some kind to resolve the problem.

For example, if I have a headache, I find it is impossible to remove myself from my own head, the source of my pain, and must instead look for a Tylenol in the hope that it will quiet my internal excitations.

Lacan says on p. 59,

I would have you note that it is avoidance, flight, movement, which…normally intervenes in order to regulate the invasion of quantity in accordance with the pleasure principle. And it is to the motor system that the function of regulating the bearable or homeostatic level of tension for the organism is handed over in the end…Freud tells us, in effect, that in the majority of cases, the reaction of pain derives from the fact that the motor reaction, the flight reaction, is impossible. And the reason for this is that the stimulation, the excitation, comes from within.

Lacan notes the close relation between pain and motion, still on p. 59,

I hope you will not find it absurd—in the organization of the spinal marrow, the neurons and axons of pain coexist at the same level and at the same spot as certain neurons and axons of the tonic motor system.

If everything is working well, the motor system should respond to the overstimulation of the φ system before it becomes painful by removing it from the source of its overstimulation, however this is not always possible.

This inability to take flight is, for Lacan, dramatized in the myth of Daphne and Apollo.

On p. 60,

We should perhaps conceive of pain as a field which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.

Isn’t something of this suggested to us by the insight of the poets in that myth of Daphne transformed into a tree under the pressure of a pain from which she cannot flee? Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain?

In cases of chronic pain or depression, the suffering party must learn to live with unavoidable, inescapable pain, from which taking flight is not an option.

While not a sense, “pain is a signal”, which tells us to “get out of there”. It activates a response in our motor system which, if we can’t escape the pain, we must work to suppress.

We might use pain medication to help, but while immediately effective, it can throw our whole “ecosystem” out of balance.

This means that compared to acute pain, chronic pain is felt in a disproportionate way by a system already overloaded and under stress.

The over-excitation of their neuronal system leads to the development of hyper-sensitivity in the same system, where it becomes even more susceptible to getting overwhelmed.

Pain is not a sense; it doesn’t refer to an external object, even if the source of excitation happens to be external.

The sense of touch reveals an object’s qualities, receiving and discharging stimulation in the normal way, but when that quantity of neuronal excitation grows too great, the system is overwhelmed. The qualities of the object fade away as we experience pain.

Pain doesn’t require any external source at all. Consider the pain of phantom limbs.

We read on. The subject of discussion turns away from Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology and towards Lacan’s use of the term Vorstellung, which has a long philosophical history.

Kant uses the term Vorstellung to mean what John Locke calls an “idea”.

From the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

The term ‘idea’, Locke tells us “…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks” (I.1.8, N: 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these—sensation—tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other—reflection—tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

Vor means before, and Stellen means “place”. It means “place before”, and is commonly translated as presentation or representation.

James Strachey translates Vorstellungsreprasentanz as “ideational representation”.

Drive is the ideational representation of our bodily needs.

But Strachey points out a problem in Freud, that though he says here that the drive is an ideational representation of bodily need, in other places he talks of the drive as bodily, something which itself seeks to find mental representation.

This part of the text involves Lacan’s argument with Laplanche about the nature of the unconscious. Laplanche takes thing-presentations (Sachvorstellungen) to be preverbal, preconceptual, in contrast to word-presentations (Wortvortstellungen). Lacan wants to show that thing-presentations are themselves already linguistic, in support of his claim that the unconscious is structured like language, by drawing a distinction between two words in German for “thing”, Sache and Ding.

Lacan explains how these two words for have different connotations on p. 62-3,

…in ordinary German usage there is a linguistic difference between Ding and Sache.

It is clear that in every case they cannot be used interchangeably. And that even if there are cases where one can use either one, to choose one or the other in German gives a particular emphasis to the discourse. I ask those who know German to refer to the examples in the dictionary. One does not use Sache for religious matters, but one nevertheless says that faith is not jedermanns Ding—it is not for everybody. Master Eckhart uses Ding to refer to the soul, and heaven knows that for Master Eckhart the soul was a Grossding, the biggest of things. He certainly would not use the term Sache.

…It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of effects – in the sense that one can say meine Sache. That suggests all my kit and caboodle, and is something very different from das Ding—that thing to which we must now return.

…You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness.

Sache refers to the subject matter under discussion and is thus already linguistic, whereas Ding names just what is lost when we enter into language, some evasive other to consciousness.

Things-in-themselves lie behind and are necessarily excluded from the already-linguistic matter of experience.

Question: How is something which never enters my experience relevant?

Answer: When we encounter the infinite negativity of freedom in the other, their abyssal gaze which catches me looking, I “encounter” das Ding, not just as a theoretical object I can never perceive, but as another consciousness.

To treat the other as a thing-in-itself, capable of freedom and spontaneous action is, for Kant, an expression of the categorical imperative, our ethical duty.

Recall the famous exchange between Polonius and Hamlet (2.2.1294-2307),

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words.

POLONIUS: What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET: Between who?

POLONIUS: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

HAMLET: Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled; their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum; and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams. All which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.

POLONIUS [aside]: Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – January 8th, 2023

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 4, Das Ding, pt. 3, on p. 55.

From, p. 56, “Just one more thing. I have spoken today of the Other as a Ding.”

Descartes grounds his philosophy in certain and immediate self-knowledge: “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am.” In this kind of knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knower (the subject) are the same.

When it comes to ordinary objects of our experience (like tables and chairs), there is a non-identity between subject and object. The knower and the known are different.

While, for Descartes, we can’t immediately know whether we are being tricked by a demon or whether we are having a real experience (which would require stepping outside the bounds of our mind), we can be immediately sure that we exist, that we are having an experience, due to the immediacy of our own mental life to us.

I can be self-certain in my own immediate self-experience, so this thinking goes, however, I can know external objects only mediately, as they appear within my mental life. Descartes eventually justifies his beliefs about the external world with reference to the perfection of God.

But what happens when I meet another self-certain individual? They appear to close scientific investigation exactly like any other complex system operating according to natural laws, a well-behaved object of my experience. Their subjectivity is invisible, nowhere to be found, as is our own, when considered as an object of empirical study.

Though subjectivity can never be an object of experience, the existence of my subjectivity is nonetheless clear and distinct, immediately certain. When I encounter another subject, empirically speaking I am never really encountering them, but only their objective guise. The other subject is an inaccessible beyond, something I have an inkling at only by analogy to my own experience.

In this way, they are a gap in my knowledge of the world, and an attack on my self-conception as a self-certain knower. Not only do they raise the question of my ignorance about them, by taking another viewpoint on the world, and most importantly, taking a view of me, they raise the question of what I don’t know about myself..

For Hegel, the master/slave dialectic emerges from the struggle to maintain the viewpoint of self-certainty as it becomes threatened by the existence of another self- certain subject.

This takes the form of a struggle to subjugate the Other, to assert our own subjectivity over theirs. Yet this has a contradictory outcome: in practice in order to engage effectively in a struggle against someone else, we need to recognize them as subjects, pursuing their goals the same thing way we are pursuing our goals, in a struggle to subjugate us just as we are in a struggle to subjugate them. Paradoxically, what begins as an attempt to preserve the singularity of our own viewpoint requires us to adopt this alternative perspective, diametrically opposed to our own, in order to set up and execute the traps, tricks, and tactical maneuvers necessary for a struggle for subjugation to be successful.

Just as we’ve ruined what we set out to do, and lost the very thing we meant to protect, that is, the singular self-certain view we initially held, in our struggle with the Other we see in their actions towards us a recognition of our own subjectivity and intentions towards them, and at the same time we are forced to recognize their intentions towards us.

This is how chess openings develop over time.

In the film The Princess Bride (1987), there is a contest of wits between two characters to see who will drink from a poisoned cup. In order to trick the other person, each must take into account what the other thinks, and what the other thinks about what they think, and on and on. A clip is available on YouTube.
Lacan discusses such calculations in his essay, Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism, available here.

Just at the moment our self-certainty is undermined by the presence of the Other, in this opposed indexical relationship we find ourselves again, in their apprehension of us as another subject.

This means we are constituted in and through the Other, just as the Other is constituted in and through us. The master is a master only in and through the recognition he gets from his slaves, as a master, and vice versa. However, in winning the struggle for subjugation, the master denies the perspective of the very Other which defines him.

In finding ourselves in the eyes of another, we define ourselves through their reaction to us, but how much of this reaction is really a response to us and how much is a projected feeling about themselves generalized and reversed in indexicality?

When we speak to the Other, we give to it what we want from it. My feelings towards the Other are in some sense my own feelings about myself.

A child might say to a parent, in response to unsolicited advice, “Do you want to live my life, or do you want me to live my life?”

The Other is both non-identical with myself, as something radically external to me, and, as another subject opposed to me in a struggle for subjugation, something identical, with which I share the same but opposite intentional content (i.e. the intention to subjugate the Other).

Treating others as I would want to be treated is a minimal expression of Kant’s categorical imperative. But this implies treating others as ends-in-themselves, rather than as a mere means to my own ends,unlike we see in the struggle for subjugation.. I must, as a noumenal agent with a sense of my own freedom, treat others as the same.

According to the truth of scientific laws, we are inevitably determined to do what we do. Kant’s question is how to explain free ethical decision making in such a world.

Drawing the distinction between noumena and phenomena, we are able to preserve freedom in a world of scientific law. Since scientific laws explain phenomenal experience, but cannot speak about things-in–themselves, this maintains at least the noumenal possibility for freedom.

Causal determinism in accordance with natural law means that any event n is causally determined by a prior event n-1. For any event n to happen, a prior event n-1 must also happen. Of course, this is also true of event n-1, such that for event n-1 to take place, so too must event n-2, and so on, creating a series. Yet, if the series goes back forever and has no initial cause, it can never have gotten going in the first place. Therefore there must be a first event. But if that event was caused by a prior event, it wouldn’t be the first event, and so this first cause couldn’t have been caused by natural law.

Kant’s solution to this antinomy is to say both sides are correct: the laws of nature apply to appearance, while the law of freedom applies to things-in-themselves.

This is all illustrated beautifully in Sartre’s famous passage on the Look, in Being and Nothingness (p. 347).

Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them. They are in no way known; I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their whole justification. I am a pure consciousness of things, and things, caught up in the circuit of my selfness, offer to me their potentialities as the proof of my non-thetic consciousness (of) my own possibilities. This means that behind that door a spectacle is presented as “to be seen,” a conversation as “to be heard.”

…But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me. What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure – modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito.

…First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me—as it is usually expressed.

…Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other.

The struggle of the master/slave dialectic out of which recognition emerges, itself begins as an attempt to achieve the truth of self-certainty, to overcome the gap between subject and object by subjugating the Other. What emerges is a radical de-centring of the subject in its world by finding itself, not as an invisible and purely passive subject, not as any object in the world, but in the recognition of the gaze of another.

Following Kant, the noumenal Other is not an object in the phenomenal world, but a subject. It appears as another gaze which looks out onto the world as I do—a gaze which is potentially traumatic, in that it sees me and my world from a viewpoint I can never take up.

Lacan draws the connection between the Other, Das Ding, and the child’s mother, the the prohibited object of the incest taboo. In the paternal metaphor, the Name of the Father comes to stand in for the mother’s desire, her look, her subjectivity. It is in relation to this that the neurotic subject comes to position themselves, and to this relation that it looks to find recognition.

In cases of the “devouring mother”, where a child isn’t allowed to grow into their own individual, the mother is subjugating the child just as the master did to the slave (above), attempting to ensure their own sense of self by diminishing the viewpoint of their Other, yet in doing so, they diminish the very Other whose recognition they need to justify their identity as mothers of children—the very identity they feel is under attack.

Das Ding, as the Other, becomes an object of repetitive compulsion, a lost object to which we are always trying to return.

As a noumenal entity, another subject—the Other—can never enter into the realm of my phenomenal experience, which sees only the appearances of things as they are for-me. The Other, as thing-in-itself, is the “beyond-of-the-signifier”, a thing to which language and appearances may or may not refer, but which always and forever exceeds and evades them.

As Hegel says, rather enigmatically, at the end of the Preface to Outlines of the Philosophy of Right,

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey, it cannot be rejuvenated but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

In other words, philosophy and language only come onto the scene when it is too late, and can only comprehend in grey what was there originally in full colour.

Zizek, in Enjoy Your Symptom!, echoes the same idea, which suggests that words always fail to capture their referent in its full and original vivacity, and destroy the original wholeness of the object by “picking out” its various qualities, in abstraction.

Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word “quarters” the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.

Lacan, on p. 56,

The things in question are things insofar as they are dumb…And dumb things are not exactly the same as things which have no relationship to words.

Lacan distinguishes between two words for “word” in French, la parole and le mot, “‘Mot’ refers essentially to “no response. ‘Mot,’ La Fontaine says somewhere, is what remains silent; it is precisely that in response to which no word is spoken,” (55).

Mot is a word that has undergone transformation as part of the Jespersen Cycle, a process described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle

Lacan continues on p. 56,

…It is enough to evoke a face which is familiar to everyone of you, that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity? This dumb man alone is sufficient to sustain the atmosphere of doubt and of radical annihilation which is the stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary farce and the uninterrupted play of “jokes” that makes their activity so valuable.

…Just one more thing. I have spoken today of the Other as a Ding. I would like to conclude with something that is much more accessible to our experience. And that is the isolated use that French reserves for certain forms of the pronoun of interpellation. What does the emission, the articulation, the sudden emergence from out of our voice of that “You!” (Toi!) mean? A “You” that may appear on our lips at a moment of utter helplessness, distress or surprise in the presence of something that I will not right off call death, but that is certainly for us an especially privileged other—one around which our principle concerns gravitate, and which for all that still manages to embarrass us.

I do not think that this “You” is simple…I believe that one finds in that word the temptation to tame the Other, that prehistoric, that unforgettable Other, which suddenly threatens to surprise us and to cast us down from the height of its appearance. “You” contains a form of defense, and I would say that at the moment when it is spoken, it is entirely in this “You,” and nowhere else, that one finds what I have evoked today concerning das Ding.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – December 18th, 2022

Today, we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 4, Das Ding, pt. 3, on p. 53.

However, before beginning the reading proper, we go back to p. 40 to where Lacan discusses the φ and ψ systems, outlined by Freud in his work Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), in order to orient ourselves in the ongoing discussion.

You perhaps skipped a little quickly over the reference to the φ system and the ψ system. If the one is related to exogenous stimulations, it isn’t enough to say that the other is related to endogenous stimulations.

Freud begins the Introduction to the General Scheme for Project for a Scientific Psychology (355),

The intention of this project is to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of contradictions. The project involves two principal ideas:—

That what distinguishes activity from rest is to be regarded as a quantity (Q) subject to the general laws of motion.

That it is to be assumed that the material particles in question are the neurones. N and Qή [neurones and quantity].

The φ system refers to a system of neurons that is outward facing, responsive to excitation from the external world, like sensory and motor stimulation, but not does not retain these excitations for long. In fact, the “primary function” of neuronic systems is to discharge this excitation, and thereby clear themselves to receive new receptions.

We can think of the example of when the doctor strikes our knee with a hammer to test our reflexes. “Reflex movement now becomes intelligible as an established method of thus getting rid of quantity,” (357). The excitations caused by the hammer are discharged by the movement of one’s leg.

On the other hand, for Freud, the ψ system is related to endogenous or internal stimulations.

Freud explains,

As the internal complexity of the organism increases, the neuronic system receives stimuli from the somatic element itself—endogenous stimuli, which call equally for discharge. These have their origin in the cells of the body and give

rise to the major needs: hunger, respiration and sexuality.

In the pursuit of its primary function, i.e. to discharge its excitation, the exogenous system is able to take leave of whatever object is exciting it, it being an external object. The endogenous system is not so lucky, since it receives its stimuli from an internal source from which it cannot remove itself.

One needs to perform some kind of specific action in order to externally resolve the internal excitation (e.g. to eat lunch in order to resolve one’s hunger).

Therefore (358), in service of its primary function,

[t]he neuronic system is consequently obliged to abandon its original trend towards inertia (that is, towards a reduction of its level of tension to zero). It must learn to tolerate a store of quantity (Qή) sufficient to meet the demands for specific action.

Returning to p. 40 of our original text, Lacan takes up this thread:

The discharge cannot, in effect, be complete, reach a zero level, after which the psychic apparatus achieves a final state of rest. The latter is certainly not the plausible goal or end of the functioning of the pleasure principle…He distinguishes in the φ apparatus between its Aufbau, to retain quantity, and its function, which is to discharge it, the Funktion der Abfuhr. The function isn’t simply to circulate and discharge; it appears at this level as split.

The neuronal system seeks to discharge its excitation, but in order to do so, it must retain it, in order to meet the threshold by which a specific action can be motivated.

These somewhat contradictory goals represent the “split” topology of subjectivity.

In A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’, Freud speaks of memory as needing to juggle these two contradictory aims. On the one hand, a piece of paper preserves information indefinitely as an aid to memory, but fills up quickly and can only hold so much. On the other hand, a chalkboard and chalk can be wiped clean with ease, and can be used over and over again, however in order to write something new down, the chalkboard must first be cleared and the previous message erased.

Lacan, on p 41,

There is no more vibrant commentary on the gap that is inherent in human experience, on the distance that is manifested in man between the articulation of a wish and what occurs when his desire sets out on the path of its realization.

In that language can only ever speak in universals and must necessarily pass over the particular in silence, when one attempts to articulate one’s desires in language, their true object necessarily becomes lost.

The specific action aims at finding the object of its satisfaction and must learn to tolerate a level of dissatisfaction in order to motivate this search. Yet, in the case of a lost object, e.g. the mother’s breast, this search will always be inadequate, incomplete and unsuccessful.

This impossible pursuit of the lost object is the source of the phenomenon of repetition.

This lost object, Das Ding, becomes the subject of the next two chapters, the first of which is our reading this week.

According to Ernest Jones’ 1929 paper, Fear, Guilt and Hate (which Lacan recommends near the end of this seminar on p. 306), the mother’s breast is encountered in a pre-perceptual, pre-linguistic state of infancy, with no signifier there to stand in for it.

Yet it nevertheless leaves its mark on the body, makes, through the repetition of our encounter with it, a kind of track, like a forest path worn by many steps.

In the doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant draws the classical philosophical distinction between appearance and reality. Things-in-themselves necessarily stand outside of the world as it is for-us. They are an aspect of things that is forever inaccessible—things as they are, unmixed with our own faculties.

The ethical dimension in Kant’s philosophy depends on this distinction, which guarantees, against all appearances, at least the possibility of ethical action in a deterministic world of scientific laws.

As objects of phenomenal experience, we appear like all the other objects of the natural world, subject to Newtonian laws, we react, rather than act of our own accord, buffeted about by the law of cause and effect. In such a world, there is no possibility of freedom.

Kant’s monumental insight, referred to as his “Copernican turn”, is to suppose that the causal maxim is something we apply to our experience rather than something we discover in it. For Kant, Hume was quite correct in saying that we cannot perceive cause and effect, but only contiguity and correlation.

For Hume, cause and effect is something like an instinct, something which we cannot do without, in making sense of experience, but not something found in the contents of experience itself.

For Kant, it is rather, the form of any possible experience.

In reconceptualizing the causal maxim as a subjective law of experience rather than a feature of things-in-themselves, Kant preserves freedom as a noumenal possibility.

As Kant says, in the Critique of Pure Reason (Bxxx), “I have had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief.”

In reconceptualizing natural science to be making statements only about possible experience, we are able to, while denying any knowledge of things-in-themselves, make universal and necessary statements about experience in general, based on the transcendental method. That is, by asking the question, what is necessary for experience to be possible at all? For if something is necessary for experience to be possible at all, it can be said to be true of experience in general.

For Kant, we can’t know anything about things-in-themselves, nor make any legitimate statements about them. But, is this not itself a statement about things-in-themselves? Is this not a statement of the kind Kant precisely wanted to avoid?

Does the concept of this barred object not emerge retroactively from its very prohibition?

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – November 20th, 2022

Today we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 4, Das Ding, on p. 43.

But, before we get into discussing today’s reading, we discuss Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Hamlet constructs a version of his father, the late King Hamlet, that doesn’t match anyone else’s view of him. Whereas Hamlet remembers an idealized version of his father, we get the sense that King Hamlet was by no means perfect. It is King Hamlet’s killing of the elder Fortinbras in a duel that brings the younger Fortinbras to Denmark for revenge, in an act that mirrors Hamlet’s own quest for revenge against Claudius.

Question: What causes Hamlet’s famous delay? Polonius remarks to the audience, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” (2.2). What is the “method in the madness”?

Answer: Hamlet is engaging in reality testing. He wants to find the lost object of this idealized father. He wants to be sure that what the ghost told him is true. He wants certainty, above all else. To that aim, he sets up the ruse of the play, whereby he plans to “catch the conscience of the king”.

During a scene of the play which is very similar to the events of his father’s murder, Hamlet sees by the look on Claudius’ face, “clearly and distinctly, with Cartesian certainty”, that he is guilty, and the ghost’s accusations are true.

In giving Claudius a vision of himself on stage, we might consider the play to have given him the chance to reflect on his misdeeds and to see his own actions objectively, from the outside, not merely as a self-interested party. This brings Claudius closer towards thinking in a reciprocal and universal style of moral reasoning that is emphasized in principles like the Golden Rule. His prayer immediately afterwards seems to indicate something moved in his conscience.

On the other hand, we might consider that, in seeing the play, Claudius now knows that someone else knows about his misdeeds. What we conceptualized above as an intensified self-regard, might plausibly be understood as the sense that someone else is watching.

Yet when Hamlet goes to follow through on his plan of taking revenge on Claudius, he finds him in prayer. Though Claudius’ prayer is insincere, for Hamlet, it appears that killing him in prayerful confession will leave his soul clear of sin, and thus, guarantee Claudius a spot in heaven, while Hamlet’s own father (who was denied the opportunity to confess before death) remains forever a damned soul wandering the earth.

Hamlet’s idealized father remains out of touch. One moment its certainty appears to be confirmed in the look of a villain, a moment later the opportunity to make right the crime is robbed, because doing so would render its earthly justice immediately undone, inverted in a perverse heavenly injustice.

One interpretation of the scene with the gravediggers (5.1), says that Hamlet is able to transfer the feelings he has towards this idealized father onto the figure of Yorick, who is, as a loving parent figure to Hamlet, perhaps far closer to this idealized father than Hamlet’s actual father ever was.

When the play begins, Hamlet is filled with adolescent ennui and a feeling of the world gone wrong. He is very much a beautiful soul, projecting his own feelings of dislocation onto the world. After the encounter with the ghost, and increasingly through the play Hamlet’s focus shifts from himself to his mother, specifically, the crime of her infidelity, that is, the question of her desire.

Though the ghost’s lament to Hamlet begins (1.5.780-4),

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,–

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power

So to seduce!–won to his shameful lust

The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:

It concludes with the following prohibition in carrying out his task of revenge (819-26),

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge

To prick and sting her.

This prohibition sets up Hamlet’s preoccupation with his mother’s desire and her infidelity with Claudius. Playing the role of Nemesis, it is Hamlet’s task (literally, within the logic of the story, and dramatically) to set right what was done wrong through an act of vengeance. But his mother’s infidelity remains outside the scope of his ability to make right, prohibited in the same breath that bid him take vengeance in the first place..

Within a legal framework, if you have a claim against your neighbour because they have done something to you, while you may want revenge, you instead go to a lawyer and your lawyer listens to your complaint and connects it to the body of legal discourse, and your complaint is put in the dry language of legality and after some time you get a legally prescribed remedy in the form of cheque. Your grievance is taken up into a signifying system, and provided a certain remedy. What is lost in this process is all the jouissance you invested in the claim.

In such a system, the ability to remedy a complaint involves, in some sense, giving up the complaint.

This is what Lacan is talking about in his reading of Freud’s castration complex as the entry into the symbolic order at the expense of giving up one’s jouissance. An entry into language means gaining access to a myriad of universal terms, but losing the unutterable, inexpressible particularity of things.

We shift focus to today’s reading, and begin reading ch. 4, Das Ding, on p. 43.

It had been understood among psychoanalysts of Lacan’s day, that for Freud words related to conscious experience. When Lacan spoke of the unconscious as structured like a language he seemed to be differing with Freud.

Laplanche and Lacan engaged in a debate on this topic. Laplanche, reading Freud, saw the unconscious as being made of the images of things.

In this seminar, Lacan attempts to resolve his apparent contradiction with Freud by drawing a distinction between two words in Freud’s vocabulary, “Ding” and “Sache”.

In Lacan’s reading, Sache refers to “the thing under discussion”. We read, “[t]here is no doubt Mat in German, too, ‘thing’ in its original sense concerns the notion of a proceeding, deliberation, or legal debate,” (43). He explains later, “Sache and Wort are, therefore, closely linked; they form a couple. Das Ding is found somewhere else,” (45).
When Freud mentions the reality principle, Lacan asks if he is talking about the phenomenal reality of everyday needs, the Sache of discourse, or something else that we might think about in relation to Das Ding.

Lacan continues on p. 43, “Das Ding may imply not so much a legal proceeding itself as the assembly which makes it possible, the Volksversammlung.”

Das Ding is precisely what is lost upon entry into language, what always stands outside the symbolic order, like a Kantian thing-in-itself.

However, in a typical Hegelian reversal of Kant, is the thing-in-itself not an illusion created retroactively by its own prohibition? In claiming to know that something is unknowable we make a claim to know something about it, and so, we enter into a contradiction.

Lacan on p. 45, “The straw of words only appears to us as straw insofar as we have separated it from the grain of things, and it was first the straw which bore that grain.”

Though we might say Das Ding is what is lost upon entry into language, it’s important to remember that we never could have really entered into a relationship with Das Ding at all. As Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason, “intuitions without concepts are blind,”. For us to have an object before us at all, sensuous intuitions must be given conceptual articulation. Without this framework we have nothing, no objects at all. Through the symbolic we have a dead recollection of the living moment, but one that is indispensable to us, for whenever we try to grasp the moment directly, it disappears, as Hegel illustrates in the chapter on sense-certainty Phenomenology of Geist.

From Phenomenology of Geist (❡95),

To the question: “What is Now?”, let us answer, e.g. “Now is Night.” In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth we shall have to say that it has become stale.

If Das Ding belongs to the order of the real, we have to ask what Lacan means by the real. Is it a mind-independent world of things-in-themselves? Or is it a kind of warping of the symbolic order producing a shadow?

The mystery of language is its referent, for how can language refer to something outside of language?

According to Kant, space and time are a priori forms of intuition, that is to say all our sensuous intuitions are represented in a synthesis (externally) in space and (internally) in time.

For there to be an intuition of an object for me at all, there must be some act of synthesis whereby the object is represented to me as external to myself in space and in relation to other objects in space, so as they all form a unity.

One could imagine an alien coming to earth with different forms of sensuous intuition and marveling at the poverty of our faculties.

However, if they are able to marvel at us, they would still have to have some a priori form of intuition of some kind. They too are only able to interact with the world as it is “for them”.

We see just such a scene imagined in Voltaire’s Micromegas. In ch. 2,

“I want to be taught. Tell me how many senses the men of your planet have.”

“We only have 72,” said the academic, “and we always complain about it. Our imagination surpasses our needs. We find that with our 72 senses, our ring, our five moons, we are too restricted; and in spite of all our curiosity and the fairly large number of passions that result from our 72 senses, we have plenty of time to get bored.”

“I believe it,” said Micromegas, “for on our planet we have almost 1,000 senses; and yet we still have a kind of vague feeling, a sort of worry, that warns us that there are even more perfect beings…The Saturnian and the Sirian proceeded to wear themselves out in speculating.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – November 6th, 2022

Today we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 2, Pleasure and Reality, pt. 3, on p. 30.

Orienting ourselves in text, we reiterate what we’ve already covered in ch. 1, concerning the topic of this seminar, namely, “the recognition of the omnipresence of the moral imperative, of its infiltration into all our experience, to the other pole…the pleasure in a second degree we may paradoxically find there, namely, moral masochism,” (20).

Lacan says that the moral imperative, “is that through which the real is actualized—the real as such, the weight of the real.” But what does this mean?

On p. 20-21, Lacan explains,

…the thrust of my purpose has precisely to do with the meaning to be given to the term real…[t]hat meaning isn’t immediately accessible, although those among you who have wondered about the final significance I might give the term will nevertheless have already noticed that its meaning must have some relationship to that movement which traverses the whole of Freud’s thought. It is a movement which makes him start with a first opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle in order, after a series of vacillations, oscillations and imperceptible changes in his references, to conclude at the end of the theoretic formulations by positing something beyond the pleasure principle…known as the death instinct.

Somewhat anachronistically, Lacan says that we can see the opposition of the reality principle and the pleasure principle illustrated in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Lacan recommends reading it on p. 29-30,

I believe that Chapter V of Book VII on pleasure is worth reading in its entirety. Beside the major premise—one must always taste what is sweet—there is a particular, concrete minor premise, i.e., this is sweet. And the principle of wrong action is to be found in the error of a particular judgment relative to the minor premise. Where is the error found? Precisely in the circumstance that the desire which is subjacent to the major premise causes the wrong judgment to be made concerning the reality of the supposed sweetness toward which the action is directed.

It’s in this light that we should understand Lacan when he says that the reality principle is presented as functioning in a way that is essentially precarious,” (30). Reality is constituted in and through our desire.

In times of stress or trauma, desire rises to almost absolute significance, as people will reportedly lift impossibly great weights and perform death defying feats in the face of great danger.

The pleasure principle’s control is exercised on perception, which determines ahead of time what we consider to be reality. “If it isn’t lucky enough to coincide with reality, it will be hallucinated,” (31).

A perception is just a variety of hallucination that is “orthogonal to reality”.

From p. 32,

All thought by its very nature occurs according to unconscious means. It is doubtless not controlled by the pleasure principle, but it occurs in a space that as an unconscious space is to be considered as subject to the pleasure principle.

When people act ethically, they do so in relation to certain “primordial values” that might be called sacred—values which form a constellation at the highest levels of an individual’s symbolic order.

Everyday experiences take on different meanings within the symbolic framework of our lives. For example, a job interview might mean the chance to explore life in a new city, and speak to promising new opportunities. Dinner with an old friend might spark up memories of bygone days, and insist on the importance of maintaining connections. Even negative events give life structure and meaning—a certain shape. Traumatic events, on the other hand, disturb the very framework of meaning itself, upsetting whatever is “sacred” for a given subject, rendering these traumatic events impossible to incorporate into our world of meaning. Traumatic events are not merely negative, but render such distinctions as “negative and positive” impossible to make.

When a toddler encounters something for the first time which is genuinely new to them, they won’t be immediately sure how to conceptualize it, where it fits into and how it expands the picture of what they already know. What they need is a parent or other authority figure who they trust, who can give it a name and a place in their world of meaning.

For a child with no clear authority figure in their life or whose parents are always fighting and contradicting each other, the very framework which gives events meaning in their lives has collapsed before it has even had the chance to be built.

With few resources available from within the family, the child must make do with what they can get elsewhere to give their lives a meaningful structure, to repair the damage done. For example, a child might read fairy tales, fables, or otherwise make use of a mytho-poetic structure to imbue their lives with a sense of order and moral sense—stories in which the bad are punished and the good are rewarded.

Beyond the child’s own ingenuity and resourcefulness, psychoanalysis can help as well. Over time, in analysis, these traumatic events are repeated and retold with enough distance such that they can be processed, given a meaning and a place within the symbolic framework that they once so upset.

An analysis gives the analysand the vocabulary to express themselves in a way that they couldn’t previously, in order to make sense of their trauma.

A depressed analysand sees and expresses their relationship with the world in a certain vocabulary and way of speaking which reiterates and cements their depression. When the analyst offers another set of words to express the same events in a different way, (while it may be a genuinely open question who is correct), in simply providing an alternative plausible vocabulary the analysand is given a new perspective, and a way out of their quagmire.

How are we to understand the opposition of the good and pleasure? Morality has often been considered opposed to desire, indeed it is for Kant, with whose moral imperative we began. Indeed, for Kant, only actions done for their own sake, because they are the right thing to do, can be considered truly moral. If we do something because we want to do it, it doesn’t really count. Morality is born from the struggle between our duty and our passions, and without this struggle there is no real morality to be had.

Yet hedonisms like utilitarianism do not see the good opposed to pleasure at all. What could the good consist in, if not in the pleasurable, in what is desirable? A concept of goodness divorced from everything that is pleasurable and desirable seems empty, without content—a good that no one wants, with nothing you can name that is good about it.

Attentive readers will note that these questions go all the way back (at least) to Plato’s

The opening line of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—“the Good is that at which all things aim,”—must be read together with the opening line of his Metaphysics—“All men by nature desire to know.” Philosophy understood by the Greeks is a desirous activity, not one of sanitized detachment—an activity that inevitably turns upon itself, to try to understand its own desire as the very ground of its possibility.

Book recommendation: If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity by Justin Gregg

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – October 9th, 2022

Today we continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading with ch. 1, Outline of the Seminar, pt. 3, on p. 13.

From an article in The Atlantic by Caleb Madison, The True Meaning of Happiness, published March 28th, 2022,

In his book Happiness: A History, the historian Darrin McMahon writes that “in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck.

In English, we can note the similarity of the words happiness and happenstance—”hap”.

In German, the word Glück means both happiness and luck..

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud explains that “culture pays a price to nature”, that in exchange for civilization we experience a diminishing of pleasure, happiness, joy as well as other extremes of emotion.

We might call this castration.

When psychotic or autistic subjects come to analysis, they are often caught in an experience of life lived with extreme emotion, outside the bounds of what is accepted by society. Analysis aims to turn them into “good neurotics”, as much as possible, which means, for them, conforming to the dictates of a life lived with other people, accepting limitations on their desire, and overall, the diminishment of extreme emotional experience.

This implies a value judgment by neurotics about psychotic and autistic subjects, whereby neurosis is seen as the normal or even preferred clinical structure.

Instead of attempting to change the person so that they fit into society, analysis ought to help the person find a place within society where they can find acceptance for who they are, and there they can pursue some kind of social role or function.

We shouldn’t try to change someone into our own image, but rather, open up a space which allows them to question themselves. As Lacan says on p. 10, “For in truth one cannot say that we ever intervene in the field of any virtue. We clear ways and paths, and we hope that what is called virtue will take root there.”

Reference here is made to the work of Leon S. Brenner, whose 2020 book The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, examines autism from a Lacanian perspective.

Whereas for the neurotic, language is made meaningful in its difference to the world through the paternal metaphor, for the autistic subject, language simply falls short and fails to describe anything at all.

Without recourse to metaphor and metonymy, the language of the autistic subject is much more direct.

Rather than look at the meaning of what the autistic subject says, it can be more valuable to look at how the words “hit, cut and create space”.

A member of the group gives an example of an autistic woman in her sixties who has never had a relationship. Every story she tells has a distinct beginning, middle and end but is conveyed with no affect.

Another example: when asked if they have difficulty raising their hand in class, an autistic student responded, “You mean like someone would care what I said?”

This shows what is at stake for the autistic subject: the disconnect between language and meaning.

For Freud, we can experience an affect, but the reason why, the thought that lies behind the affect is repressed.

For instance, I might feel sad (an affect) but not know why I feel sad.

However, there are cases where affects are themselves repressed. Which means that they can be displaced unconsciously. For instance, if someone is angry about something, if you are nearby they may become angry at you. The actual reason for their anger is elided .

In the story Counterparts, in James Joyce’s Dubliners, tells the story of a man who experiences a number of humiliations throughout the day and at the end of the day comes home to beat his children. Here, the repressed affect of humiliation is given a new outlet, displaced onto his offspring.

In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus grapples with unconscious guilt related to his sexual desires growing up Catholic in Ireland, expressed in the condemning tones of the hellfire sermon in ch. 3.

Neurotic guilt is not just a simple affect like anger or sadness. It includes a narcissistic aspect of seeing yourself as central to a situation in which you are causing the suffering of the other, with the assumption that you are the most important thing in the scenario.

This kind of guilt forms a stabilizing aspect of your identity and you don’t want to be relieved of it.

In feeling guilty about doing bad things, we get in touch with that small part of ourselves which is good, i.e. our guilty conscience, from the perspective of which we condemn ourselves.

What relationship does this bear to masochism? Does this explain the pleasure which accompanies the feeling of guilt?

Typically, in analysis, the affect of guilt is conscious while the reason for the guilt is repressed, unconscious.

In most therapy, the idea is to relieve yourself of the guilt, to show that you really shouldn’t be guilty at all. However, for Freud, you must instead trust the affect, and find the reason why you feel guilty. There is an unconscious wish to be discovered.

Truth has the structure of fiction but what is the structure of fiction?

When you examine a fictional statement like “Phillip Marlowe walked into his office,” it is propositional.

Lacan is giving an argument against analytic philosophy, which says we can cut the world at its joints and purify language—reduce it to a set of propositions which can be assigned a truth value.

For Lacan, all propositions are inherently fictional by virtue of being propositions and not the things themselves. For truth to express itself it has to take on this structure, which he calls: the symbolic.

According to Roland Barthes, to achieve a realistic effect in your writing, you ought to add one superfluous detail. Rather than stick to a strict economy of storytelling whereby every element of the story has a distinct purpose à la Chekov’s gun, or overwhelm the reader with a plethora of superfluous detail, it is best to give one more detail in a description than is necessary.

Conversely, Hemmingway’s iceberg theory, or theory of omission, writing can be strengthened by omitting key details. From Wikipedia,

Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned “how to get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth.”

Providing either too much or too little information provides a sense of realism, whereas a strict one to one accounting, which we see in analytic philosophy, produces only an abstraction in which reality is evacuated.

We might think of how mannerism somehow improves in the representation of its human subjects by departing from the strictly realistic picturing of them.

Book recommendation: Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – September 25th, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. We pick up reading from where we stopped last time, ch. 1, Outline of the Seminar, pt. 2, on p. 8.

Lacan sets out three ideals or values that have so far guided psychoanalysis which he will call into question in this seminar:

The ideal of human love
The ideal of authenticity
The ideal of non-dependence

With regard to the ideal of human love, Lacan has in mind the view that there is such a thing as a mature genital relation, i.e. a supposedly healthy form of desire, a kind of love in which we no longer use the other as a partial object, wherein we follow the Kantian ideal of treating others as an end in themselves, rather than as a mere means to our own ends

Lacan will argue in the seminar that no such form of healthy sexuality exists.

With regard to the ideal of authenticity, Lacan has in mind the conception of psychoanalysis as an exercise in “unmasking”, that is, revealing what is concealed in the unconscious. The product of psychoanalysis, in this view, is the authentic subject, living out their formerly hidden or repressed desires.

Lacan mentions Helene Deutsh’s clinical concept of the “as-if” personality: someone who has no real genuine feeling for others but behaves as if they do. These inauthentic personalities reveal paradoxically that though they do not feel the authentic emotion, they feel an imperative to feel authentic emotion, and so they behave as if they do.

In this case, what is repressed is that there is nothing to repress, a deficiency rather than an excess of desire.

If the goal of psychoanalysis is to produce people who live authentically, and works as a process of “unmasking”, as we said, it shouldn’t impose its own values or beliefs or cultural program onto the analysand. Yet it imposes the very value of authenticity.

With regard to the ideal of non-dependence, isn’t there an inherent contradiction in the idea of psychoanalysis conceived of as an intervention to achieve independence?

On p. 10,

Isn’t there a limit there, too, a fine boundary, which separates what we indicate to an adult subject as desirable in this register and the means we accord ourselves in our interventions so that he achieves it?

The analyst will often take up the stance of non-intervention, will pretend to withhold judgment and remain inscrutable, but only up to a point. As soon as real harm is on the table, they are obligated to act, to step in.

On this topic: last year, we discussed a situation in which Sergio Benvenuto, a psychoanalyst, suspended his collaboration with a group of Russian colleagues over whom he differed greatly about the war in Ukraine. Their political disagreement seemed to block any possibility of working together. For this action he received some criticism, which he now responds to here: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/my-meeting-with-a-group-of-russian-analysts-response-to-some-criticism/.

Ethics, for Aristotle, is about our desire to achieve happiness or eudaimonia, which for the spirit or soul is analogous to health for the body.

Being at the highest possible flourishing of the kind of thing you are, means, for the human being, among other things, engaging in the use of reason, though this is not to say everyone ought to be a philosopher.

As in Plato’s model of the charioteer, for Aristotle, the rational soul ought to be in command of the other two souls and guide and regulate their forward momentum.

Through what we repeatedly do, the development of good or bad habits, our education or miseducation, the doing of good or bad works, the attainment of virtue or vice, we develop character, some distinguishing mark. Repetition leaves a mark.

From the footnote on p.10,

Both ήθος and ίθος derive from a Greek verb meaning “to repeat.” Their

meanings came to be differentiated insofar as ήβος is active and refers to the capacity

of creatures to form habits, whereas ίθος connotes a condition in a passive sense.

Through the development of good habits, our less rational inclinations are made rational and brought into alignment with our highest and most rational desires, like parts of an army serve a particular function and are given significance by their place in the whole. Unlike more modern philosophies which might see one’s desires and the pursuit of virtue to be fundamentally in conflict, in this view, our desire to be happy means a desire for our spirit to be well-ordered, virtuous and active in its highest capacity, thinking.

This is a view of desire as something which self-regulates, which creates a hierarchy or balancing of multiple various wishes, impulses and inclinations to create a kind of stable thing, which can work towards its highest-level desires.

For example, let’s say I have three apples and a desire to eat apples. If I eat all the apples now, I fulfill my desire immediately, but frustrate it in the long term. If I regulate my desire for apples in the short term, I can space out the apples and eat one a day, thus fulfilling my long term desire to eat apples.

On p. 10,

Wouldn’t it be interesting to wonder about the significance of our absence from the field of what might be called a science of virtues, a practical reason, the sphere of common sense? For in truth one cannot say that we ever intervene in the field of any virtue. We clear ways and paths, and we hope that what is called virtue will take root there.

The “man of pleasure” (3) is the embodiment of this “naturalist liberation of desire” (3) that seeks to liberate us from the puritanical pursuit of virtue, and the repressive and guilt-ridden moralism which comes along with it, in the hope that without these things holding us back our good nature would be enough to guide us on its own. This is expressed most famously as the motto of the Abbey of Thélème in Rabelais’ Gargantua, “DO WHAT YOU WILL”.

An example we see of this phenomenon at the level of politics is the idea promoted by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s, that “greed is good.” Here, sin and virtue are inverted, and conspicuous consumption becomes a kind of moral imperative. Yet although this is sold as a liberatory ideology, it only creates new forms of guilt, “Am I foolish for not investing in the stock market/buying property?”

Psychoanalysis has often been thought of as the continuation of the project to alleviate the repression of human sexual desire in this manner, but Lacan wishes to rescue it from this conception, which he sees as a doomed enterprise.

We cut our reading group discussion short this week to have our annual Board Meeting.

To join Lacan Toronto there is a membership fee of $150 Canadian, to be sent to Joan Guenther at joanguen@sympatico.ca. If you pay via Paypal, it has a $6 fee.

Lacan Toronto remains an independent group, working primarily in English, with an aim to support people working on and writing about Lacan in North America.

All teaching sessions are recorded and available to members on request. Please contact Judith Hamilton at jehamilton@rogers.com to request a copy for yourself or for information on past sessions.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – September 11th, 2022

We begin our reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis! We begin ch. 1, Outline of the Seminar, on p. 1.

Lacan gives a partial explanation for the title of this new seminar on p. 2,

“In speaking of the ethics of psychoanalysis, I chose a word which to my mind was no accident. I might have said “morality” instead. If I say “ethics,” you will soon see why. It is not because I take pleasure in using a term that is less common.”

What is it that we will soon see?

How do these two terms (morality and ethics) differ?

Rather than look at what these words mean as rigid designators, as if they always and essentially refer to two distinct terms, we should explore the connotations that each word conjures up in our mind, which may lead in diverging or converging directions.

For Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics will receive special attention in this seminar, ethics consists in pursuit of living well. The good life for humans has to do with what makes us distinct as humans, which for Aristotle is our ability to think rationally, and so the good life must be one that consists in the pursuit of thinking rationally.

However, according to Aristotle, no one is perfectly rational all the time. As human beings we have not only a rational soul, but a nutrivite and appetitive one as well. What we need to do is cultivate virtue, i.e. the moderation of these appetitive and nutritive desires, in order to not be ruled by them, and instead be ruled by our rational desires, which define us and distinguish us uniquely as human beings. Practically speaking, we need time to do the work of philosophy, which is only possible if one is not a slave to one’s passions, one is well fed and not desirously seeking after one’s appetites, one has one’s needs are met, etc.

Moderation is the name of the game for Aristotle. Virtue is defined as the midpoint between two extremes. For example, courage is the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness.

When we act virtuously we cultivate virtue over time, it becomes a habit, part of our character, though unlike we might think of a habit as something that one does passively, by accident or thoughtlessly, when we are said to possess virtue we do so in an active state like health. Virtue is to the soul as health is to the body.

Eudaimonia or happiness is the highest human good, desirable for its own sake, as an end in itself. Though we should think of this notion as larger than simply psychological happiness.

In Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel distinguishes between morality (Moralität)—the impossible pursuit of abstract virtue—and ethical life (Sittlichkeit)—the embodied engagement with one’s social being and the responsibilities and duties that one has to other people, in terms of family, civil society, and the state.

For instance, the cult of abstract virtue which formed in the French Revolution sought an impossible standard of moral purity, and the reign of terror which followed was justified as the process to bring it about. Hegel wrote to understand this contradiction: how the values of the French Revolution (liberté, égalité, fraternité) turned into their opposite when brought into practice. Hegel warned against the violence that comes from trying to bring a too abstract notion of virtue into the world.

By contrast, for Hegel, concrete forms of ethical life offer an actual embodied mode of existence lived for oneself and others as a member of a family, community or broader social or political sphere. These ways of life come with all sorts of norms, customs, mores, social expectations and obligations built into them already. Rather than try to constitute a new way of life from whole cloth based on abstract virtue, these social institutions offer us a more organic way to live—not as an individual subject, dreaming of a French Revolution in the abstract—but as a member of a group with ties to other people.

Further, the individual Cartesian subject, and indeed rationality itself, is predicated upon our social being, language, etc.

Psychoanalysis, framed as working through the guilt brought about by sexual desire, is likewise interested in alleviating the burden of a too abstract notion of virtue.

The aim is to alleviate the conscience from the guilt which comes from its failure to achieve an impossible imperative.

However, this libertine ideal is not without problems, as Lacan argues. As we will see, removing the prohibition against pursuing one’s desires can paradoxically remove the very desire itself. Our desires seem, at least partially, to be formed retroactively based on what is prohibited. We want what we can’t have, and when we can have it, we likely don’t want it anymore. This is why getting what you want is often the worst thing that can happen to someone.

Watch Žižek make a similar point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Cjd6H6RmY.

Aristotle famously said that “nature abhors a vacuum”, that the cosmos was “full”. Lacan seems to take the opposite view in his exploration of what is translated as The Attraction of Transgression, but might be better rendered as The Attraction of the Fault, though this makes for an uglier phrase. From the footnote on p. 1,

“Lacan’s word here, “la fame,” is particularly difficult to put into English because of the great range of its potential equivalents – from wrong, error, mistake to blame, misconduct and offense – and because the most obvious choice does not have the moral resonances of the French. ‘The Attraction of the Fault’ not only does not suggest anything, but even manages to sound like pidgin English.”

While “transgression” has the connotation of going over a boundary, exceeding what is allowed, “fault”, like Augustine’s notion of sin, is about priva tion, about being defective or lacking in something.

This constitutive lack is central to the universe of desire, and cannot be eliminated. The idea that we can cure ourselves of guilt, or that psychoanalysis ought to aim at this kind of libertine ideal is a mistake, an illusion of which we ought to disabuse ourselves.

Lacan explains, on p. 3,

A certain philosophy—it immediately preceded the one which is the nearest relative to the Freudian enterprise, the one which was transmitted to us in the nineteenth century—a certain eighteenth-century philosophy assumed as its task what might be called the naturalist liberation of desire. One might characterize this thought, this particularly practical thought, as that of the man of pleasure. Now the naturalist liberation of desire has failed.

Not only does desire depend on prohibition, but attempts to relieve the guilt of transgression inevitably lead to even more all-encompassing forms of moralism.

For instance in Joyce’s Exiles, the attempt to do a Nietzschean revaluation of the values of marriage, to open it up and allow infidelity, becomes an even more restrictive demand to tell one’s partner everything about the affair, to be utterly truthful and faithful in the recounting of infidelity.

Tied up in this critique of the “naturalist liberation of desire” is a critique of the notion that love can be made hygienic. That, if we love in the right way, i.e. a mature relation between individuals, rather than merely the use of each other as part-objects, we will reach a healthy and mature psychology.

We can see here the influence of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: to treat others as ends in themselves rather than as mere means to an end.

Eric Fromm, in his book The Art of Loving, released in 1956, suggests that love is rational, and expresses our desire to overcome the separation that comes from being an individual.

Lacan takes the opposite view. Far from something we ought to eliminate, the guilt of transgression is indispensable, and indeed central to a neurotic’s psychic life, rather than being something accidental, imposed from the outside. Drawing from Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Lacan sees the murder of the father of the primordial horde as a grounding and fundamental transgression which forms the very basis of civilization.

On p. 6,

…transgression is not in this instance just something which is imposed on us in a formal way; it is instead something worthy of our praise, felix culpa, since it is at the origin of a higher complexity, something to which the realm of civilization owes its development.

Moral experience in analysis is not limited to accepting as necessary the dictates of the superego. Lacan goes further, “If I may put it thus, isn’t [the ego’s] true duty to oppose that command?” (8).

If we think of morality as a command of the superego, ethics is equal and opposite movement, the work that the ego does in response to “the half-unconscious, paradoxical, and morbid command of the superego,” (7).

September 1, 2021 – July 31, 2022.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – July 10th, 2022

We continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. This week we begin reading ch. 23, ‘Me Donnera Sans Femme Une Progéniture’, which begins on p. 380.

Lacan starts the chapter by discussing the work of Robert Fliess.

Robert Fliess, the son of Freud’s correspondent who occupies an honourable place in psychoanalysis, has produced in the jubilee issue of the IJP commemorating the centenary of Freud’s birth a worthy study under the title Phylogenetic vs Ontogenetic Experience. Certainly, it is inordinately striking on account of its character of manifest incompatibility. Since there are unresolved riddles in the Hans case, he ventures to resolve them by contributing to the file a vast extrapolation, the only completely unjustified drawback of which is that it assumes something to have been resolved that precisely has not been resolved (380).

While phylogenetics looks at the evolutionary history of groups, ontogenetics looks at the developmental history of an individual.

Rather than being some kind of inborn fact of our evolutionary nature, Fliess understands the superego as something which comes into being at a specific point in an individual’s development.

Fliess “quite validly” focuses his analysis of the case on the conversation between little Hans and his father on April 21st, “during which little Hans appeals to his father to play his role as a father by saying, You must be jealous,” (380).

Yet Lacan is careful not to conflate this single conversation with the whole involved development, as Lacan says on p. 382,

On the one hand it’s a matter of the integration of speech in its overall movement, in its fundamental structure as the grounding of an internal agency of the superego. On the other, there is the precise moment of the dialogue with his father, which is wholly externalised. The former can certainly not be matched fully to the latter, even though one might believe that its paradoxes would thereby be sealed over.

Yet it is not a “overly brazen extrapolation”, as we learn on p. 381,

Indeed, the father is the one who introduces for the first time the word Schimpfen, which has been translated [into English] as scold. Weshalb schimpf ich denn eigentlich? is rendered as What do I really scold you for? Fliess rightly notes that this is injected into the conversation precipitately and from nowhere, and speculates on what participation might be occurring on the part of the father in what at that moment is assumed to be a constituent part of Hans’s ego. All of this does not add up to an overly brazen extrapolation, conveying instead the need that the author feels to tell us that Hans’s superego is being constituted at that moment.

Continuing on p. 382,

The child integrates the adult’s speech, but will perceive only its structure and not yet its meaning. All in all, it’s a matter of interiorisation. This is purported to be the first form of what will allow us to envisage what the superego is, properly speaking.

At this stage, the commands of the superego are empty, without meaning, they exist as a purely formal system of relations and self-relations.

When a child enters into language, a child sees only the relation of terms to one another without knowing the rules governing the relations. It has to take on the whole structure, before it can ever hope to know what any particular element means.

When we learn any language, or other supposedly rule-governed activity e.g. mathematics, we do so by memorization, repetition, trial and error, and guesswork. We bootstrap ourselves into it. Before any rules about how a language ought to be interpreted can be expressed or taught in language, the student must invent, guess or make up rules to interpret that communication. Kripke, following Wittgenstein, expresses a similar thought https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rule-following/.

We start reading pt. 1, on p. 382.

Neurosis is a question posed to the subject at the level of its very existence about its relation to the symbolic.

For example, the question of what it is to be a man or a woman is a question not only about an immediate private experience but one about a relation to “something symbolised”, a term which is given its meaning by its place within a larger symbolic structure (382).

As the neurotic feels all too keenly, no one can fully assume their symbolic position and occupy their place in a symbolic structure without issue or discomfort.

Language is unable to express the qualia of our particular experience and can only offer universals, generalities and approximations in its stead. This is what is known as symbolic castration. The phallus, the signifier for jouissance, symbolizes this loss, and becomes a symbol for what cannot be symbolized.

In obsessional neurosis, “it is not only a matter of the subject’s relation to his sex but also of his relation to the very act of existing. What does it mean to exist? How can I relate to the one that I am without being him, since I can somehow do without him?” (382).

If, as Lacan says, neurosis is a language and symptoms are a text to be deciphered, then the network of contingent relations we spoke about above is the grammar, or inner structure of that text.

When they analysand speaks they invoke the Other, as the witness of their message. The analyst takes on this position. In that the analyst is there, they take the place of the Other. Through transference, the analyst can uncover how the personage of this Other functions as a signifier in the structure of a subject’s superego.

The meaning of the discourse will be formulated through a dialogue that progressively decrypts it by showing us what function is held by the personage whose place we occupy. This is what is called transference.

The said personage cannot help but change over the course of the analysis, and this is how we try to uncover the meaning of the discourse. So, indeed, we are the ones, inasmuch as we are integrated as a person, as a signifier-element, who are positioned, and lastingly so, in such a way as to resolve the meaning of the discourse of neurosis (384-5).

The case of little Hans displays this structure well, because of rather than despite the unusual form of its sessions. Rather than typically meet one on one, Hans’ father dominated the sessions and the communication between Freud and little Hans. This displays a dynamic typical of all analysis, which is the interplay between an unconscious Other who steers and guides the subject with messages in the form of symptoms, and a little other which stands as an intermediary or screen between the subject and correctly interpreting these messages.

Lacan goes on, on p. 385,

This is precisely what makes for the specificity of the time when the patient was dealing with father Freud himself. On that occasion, the duplication didn’t exist because the higher authority didn’t exist behind him, and the patient had a strong sense that across from him was someone who had made a new universe of signification loom up. This new relationship between man and his own meaning and condition is precisely what he was faced with. And it was there to be used by him. This explains what appears paradoxical to us in the sometimes very stunning results that Freud obtained, and also in the very stunning patterns of intervention he employed in his technique.

Lacan makes clear that, while in the past he has spoken about the relations between the subject, the little other and the big Other, in terms of intersubjectivity and object relations, that he is now shifting his focus to see this relation as not primarily a relation of the subject to real objects, but as objects made to function as signifiers.

We move on to pt. 2, which begins on p. 386.

Lacan notes that the fetish is best understood as a signifier, and similarly and crucially we must understand little Hans’ phobia as one as well. That is, something which forms connections with other signifiers and serves as a node in a larger structure. For little Hans, the horse is not merely a node but the single point which anchors his entire symbolic structure, in the absence of the paternal metaphor.

We should not ask, what the concept of horse means to little Hans, what about it he finds scary, or look for some other explanation, but instead ask what function does the signifier of the horse serve in the structure of signifiers? That it is of a horse that little Hans is afraid is arbitrary, but for these connections, this unique role it has in the structure.

The phobia of the horse ends up serving the function of the father. It localizes the overwhelming anxiety little Hans feels at being devoured by his mother into a single object—giving an overwhelming and totalizing anxiety towards nothing, an something to occupy it.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – June 26th, 2022

We continue our reading of Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. This week we begin reading pt. 3, ch. 22, An Essay in Rubber Sheet Logic, on p. 373. However, we begin our discussion a few pages earlier, by focusing on the formula, presented on p. 370, which describes the “typical neurotic’s” traversal of the Oedipus complex, which Lacan contrasts with little Hans’ own navigation of the Oedipus complex.

Defining terms: P stands for the paternal metaphor, x stands for the child, M stands for the mother, C stands for castration, and s stands for signification.

We see that the “typical neurotic” as a child is able to understand itself in relation to its mother with the help of the paternal metaphor. Though, this understanding and the significations which arise from it are all under the mark of castration, that is, they can never say everything and are ultimately tied to something metaphorical.

In the pre-Oedipal stage the child’s psychic economy is focused entirely around trying to satisfy the mother and her desire. This is impossible because, while the mother is the child’s whole world, the child is but one very important aspect of the mother’s world, which includes other desires and goals, apart from being a mother, which the child can only vainly hope to satisfy.

This imbalance, which begins to destabilize the pre-Oedipal dyad, is felt especially when the mother is absent. The absence of the mother is conceived of as a deficiency by the child, both in themselves, i.e., they lack something which the mother receives from others, and of the mother, who desires—what else—what she does not have. This absence comes to be explained by the Name-of-the-Father, a name which comes to stand “in the place that was first symbolized by the operation of the mother’s absence.” (“On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”, Écrits, 557)

The Name-of-the-Father is, for the child, a signifier for everything which intrudes into the dyadic relationship with the mother—a third party which prohibits incest.

Primary among these intrusions is the mother’s desire, her lack, which is signified by the phallus, and thus, for the child, taking on/taking up the phallus offers circuitous route towards the original incestuous destination, though one that leads unexpectedly into a cul de sac.

It’s at this point that the desire of the child to be the object of the mother’s desire is connected to the mother’s desire for the phallus. To be the object of the mother’s desire, the child must either become the phallus or else possess it. But this is precisely what is prohibited!

The realization comes “too late”, for by signifying the other’s desire, it becomes forever barred, below the line. For what is particular and individual cannot ever be fully expressed in language, which deals only with universal and public signs. So, upon signifying the object of the mother’s desire, it immediately becomes an impossibility. This is what underscores both castration and the prohibition of incest.

The phallus is thus the signifier of that which lies outside of signification, what is lost when you enter into language. It is at the same time the jouissance to which language ultimately refers, its signified.

In the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father comes to stand in the place of the mother’s desire. Yet as with any metaphor, the replacement is not complete, and there remains some transparency between terms. In the psychic economy of the child, the mother’s desire is no longer the central determining factor, and becomes repressed in favor of the Name of the Father, which promises growth towards one day possessing the phallus, while at the same time barring such possession in an uncastrated form.

In On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (Écrits, 557), Lacan writes out the formula for the paternal metaphor:

When we say “Boaz’s sheaves are hateful and mean,” if the metaphor is successful, Boaz is at first not the subject of the sentence and then he is. Similarly, the mother’s desire is first annulled by the Name of the Father, and then returns as its signified in the form of the phallus.

This is why here, in the formula for the metaphor, the second term, S’ has been crossed out.

Just as the mother’s desire would be repressed in the paternal metaphor. Yet in a successful metaphor, the first term, though preserved, remains excluded (bracketed away from) from the signification, which is really about the second term, which returns once more from being previously annulled.

The paternal metaphor grounds our symbolic order. A term which signifies the mother’s desire, her lack, i.e. nothing at all, gives space for the rest of the terms in a symbolic structure to move, like blocks in a Klotski

We might think about what is asked when we are asked to define a word. We provide a synonym or another few words, we use it in a sentence, but we are unable to really define it in a way which doesn’t fall into recursion. “Quick means fast means speedy means quick means fast means speedy means quick…”

Attempts to pin down language by anchoring it to a world beyond language inevitably beg the question or fall prey to the Myth of the Given.

This is why language is more than a 1-to-1 system of labels, and is instead a creative and poetic enterprise, where new significations are always being created—because it is fundamentally unfinished!

All this might be true of a “typical neurotic”, what does this say about the case of little Hans?

For little Hans, unlike the typical neurotic, the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed. It is not accessible to him, and thus he has no recourse to the paternal metaphor in helping him understand his relationship with his mother. The invention of the phobic object of the horse somehow serves this end instead. How?

On p. 371, Lacan formulates little Hans’ own way into the symbolic, without recourse to the paternal metaphor.

Defining terms: M stands for the mother, φ stands for the phallus, a stands for Hanna, little Hans’ sister, I stands for the phobic object of the horse, m stands for the devouring, oral-sadistic relationship with the mother and Π stands for little Hans’ own penis.

From p. 373,

Freud makes [the horse] an almost arbitrary object, and this is why he calls it a signal. Thanks to this, in this field of confusions, limits will be defined that, however arbitrary they may be, introduce no less the element of delimitation that will ensure, at least potentially, the beginning of an order, the first crystal of an organised crystallisation between the symbolic and the real.

A completely absent father is still consistent with may even be preferable for passing on to their child the Name-of-the-Father, a kind of non-biological inheritance, an inauguration into the family’s lineage and story, a chain of signifiers. To enter into this language of signifiers is to accept paternal castration.

Like the psychotic, who has foreclosed around the Name-of-the-Father, little Hans is left to be devoured by his mother’s desire, except for his own inventiveness. The horse localizes the all-encompassing anxiety little Hans feels at being devoured onto a single phobic object. Little Hans is making his own way into language.

This is underscored when little Hans says, “Now I’m the daddy,” (374), poor Hans must play the role of the father for himself, absent that role being fulfilled.

Little Hans’ solution to the whole Oedipal dilemma is to send his father back to be with his grandmother (his father’s mother), leaving his mother and him free to be together and him free to take on the role of his own father, just as he’d be already doing through the invention of horse as phobic object.

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Lacan Toronto Meeting – June 12th, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 22, An Essay in Rubber-Sheet Logic, on p. 362. We pause at the beginning of pt. 1 on p. 364.

Intersubjectivity is an impossible wish, to relate to the Other subject to subject.

We might think of Descartes’ old problem about perceiving the subjectivity of animals. As far as we can tell, animals are simply very complex machines, and we can locate subjectivity nowhere in our investigations of them. The same holds true for other people as well. We can only perceive them, and they can only perceive us, as objects.

This impossible relationship between two subjects can never take place as their relationship is always in practice mediated by some third element, an object which stands between them.

Words are objects in this sense. One’s deepest and most particular qualia are inexpressible in the generality of language, so in order to communicate at all, one must “make do”, i.e. give up what one wanted to truly express in order to express something of its kind.

We might think of language like the wall which separates the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe, for, like Romeo and Juliet, it is a deeply unfortunate miscommunication, a “bad reading”, which ends their tragic romance.

What Lacan is developing here goes back to Seminar 2: the notion of the Big Other as language. It’s cybernetic, combinatory, and it features the play of signifiers. When one speaks, one opens oneself up to misunderstanding, over-determination, the guesswork of implied subtext, and being held to mean multiple different perhaps even conflicting connotations of what one says.

In order to speak at all, we must speak “as they speak”. We must follow the code.

Yet, language is not merely a code. Language, despite it all, allows for new significations to take place. Through metaphor, genuinely new things can be said by rearranging and recombining what is already there.

Both through language and embodiment we find ourselves separated by the very conditions prerequisite for bringing us into relation with others.

But put another way, it is our own particular individuality in its alienation from substantial life that allows us access to the universal position of the subject.

Another barrier to intersubjectivity is fantasy. The object is never simply given, but always constructed, “it already contains the idea of how we want to enjoy it”.

We begin reading pt. 1 on p. 364. We pause at the beginning of pt. 2 on p. 367.

The mother becomes an object for the young child only in and through her absence. When fully present in a dyadic prelinguistic relationship, there is no distinction for the child between themselves and their mother, it is only when the mother is absent that a child can distinguish the mother as a thing at all, something which it took to be a part of itself, but it now realizes must be separate.

Aristotle’s view, via the Catholic church, like Freud’s concept of Penisneid also identifies the woman with a kind of constitutive lack or non-being. Man is associated with actuality, woman with potentiality.

From p. 365,

Go and tell a wife of this day and age that she is potentiality—as is said by the unknown theologian who went under the fictitious name of Aristotle throughout the whole medieval and scholastic tradition—and that you, the man, are actuality, you will receive a swift response. Not on your life, she will tell you, do you take me for a pushover? And this is surely quite clear.

Penisneid should be conceptualized as a moment, not a permanent state or feature of what it is to be a woman.

There’s also the question of whether penis envy even exists primarily as a phenomenon in the minds of women or whether it is something men imagine women feel because of their own failure to imagine sexual difference beyond the binary of “having/not-having”.

What can psychoanalysis say about Socrates and Xanthippe?

For Socrates, the primary pursuit in life is intellectual. Philosophy means “love of wisdom” and is conceived of as an eroticized and desirous activity,. Though the goddess Sophia is of course feminine, this activity is pursued almost exclusively through male relationships, the ideal form of which is described in the Symposium’s description of Platonic love which Lacan reads in Seminar VIII.

Xanthippe is known for having an argumentative nature, so we can see Socrates’ love of argument and for truth extend even to their relationship.

This argumentative and conflict ridden nature of the pursuit of truth, is perhaps what Lacan means when he says that Xanthippe was, for Socrates, “the test of his forbearance, his for forbearance of the real” (366).

While we might say Xanthippe is included in the erotic pursuit to this extent, but it is only as a way to pursue the real object of his desire, wisdom, knowledge, that is Sophia.

Book recommendation: Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke.

With all of these examples of ways in which the imagined and wished for intersubjective relationship fails to take place, we might be better able to grasp the failure which is occurring between little Hans’ parents.

Little Hans’ phobia is a product of his father’s failure to assume the proper position in the Oedipal dynamic, and thus also a byproduct of the failure in his parent’s relationship.

Little Hans, himself, can be considered a symptom of the couple.

His father, in failing to set a limit or a boundary on the relationship between him and his mother, leaves little Hans unable to properly move from the prelinguistic, sensuous relationship with his mother to a relationship based in language. Instead, this movement has been done improperly, by little Hans’ own resources and “metaphysical” invention of a phobic object.

The father role properly fulfilled provides a kind of symbolic paternity, a chain of signifiers which anchor the subject in the world.
“God”, “Reason”, etc are signifiers which anchor a whole chain of signifiers, yet each are empty to the extent that they refer to nothing beyond themselves. “I am that I am.” They are signifiers with no signified.

Yet, this constitutive lack is what allows for meaning at all. Furthermore, it establishes a structure where meaning is not simply fixed, set and determined, but has an openness to it. It allows for movement, sliding significations which create new combinations allowing new things to be said, allowing language to be more than just a code.

We might think of a good novel which opens up greater and greater levels of interpretation, rather than imagining language as a narrow and fixed technical vocabulary.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – May 29th, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 21, The Mother’s Drawers and the Father’s Shortcoming, on p. 344. We read to the end of pt. 1.

To recap: we are, with Lacan, examining Freud’s case of little Hans, who is five years old, trying to find the relationship between his phobia for horses and some unknown anxiety.

The answer to this question is not to be found in a “beyond-zone” but rather in little Hans’ speech itself, in “the prattling of a five-year-old-child from 1 January until 2 May 1908,” (344-5).

On p. 347,

Freud refers the signs of disgust that are shown when little Hans sees his mother’s drawers to the Lumpf Zusammenhang, the context of the lumf. His father has just posed a few questions that lead in this direction, Hans having surely evinced how the question of excrement was neither insignificant nor uninteresting for him. But of course this lumf context turns around. We can conversely say that the lumf appears to have been brought in with regard to the drawers.

The same pair of drawers evokes different reactions from little Hans depending on whether his mother is wearing them or not. On their own, they produce disgust and the association with excrement, when worn they produce a much different reaction.

Hans’ mother’s drawers, when worn, work as a veil behind which the mother’s non-existent phallus is hidden.

For Lacan, “what is surely at stake here is the desire to watch his mother do lumf, to the extent that he tags on right behind her whenever she is putting on or taking off her drawers,” (347). There is a game between little Hans and his mother which revolves around trying to see what is hidden, “of seeing and not seeing, and not only that, of seeing what cannot be seen, because it doesn’t exist,” (ibid).

As long as the veil remains up, the mother’s drawers remain on, the mother’s phallus can be “seen” behind the veil.

When the veil is not in use, and subject to inspection, it inspires disgust, a dramatic reaction. Without the veil to simultaneously reveal and conceal what is absent, we lose the lost object again, which transforms a first order loss into an all pervasive anxiety without an object.

We can imagine someone inheriting a ring after a loved one’s death, which comes to represent that loss for them. Now, imagine them losing that ring, it would be like losing the loss itself. There is no longer a place for that loss to be inscribed, and so it becomes a loss without focus or specificity.

Following Heidegger, anxiety has no object. It is about nothing. Yet precisely in being about no object in particular it becomes inescapable.

Jumping ahead for a moment to pt. 2, p. 351,

[W]hat is in question here is an anxiety that concerns not only the mother in reality, but the whole surrounding, the whole milieu, everything that thus far had constituted little Hans’s reality, the fixed bearings of his reality, what last time I called la baraque, the whole shack.

Little Hans, as “metaphysician”, comes on the scene to give this anxiety an object, and, in so transforming it, gain some measure of control over it.

Little Hans’ phobia for horses must be understood primarily as a strategy for dealing with something worse.

What is the parallel to be drawn between little Hans’ work as a “metaphysician” and the job of the psychoanalyst?

Little Hans is desperate to escape the anxiety which overwhelms him, and turns to a kind of radical myth-making to give himself the symbolic distance needed to cope. How should psychoanalysis view its own myth-making activities?

For example, analysts often diagnose our patients by type “obsessional, hysteric, perverted, etc.” How real or fixed are these categories? Is this categorization itself an attempt to alleviate anxiety on behalf of the psychoanalyst?

The problem of little Hans is the way he becomes “stuck” on the horse. The symbolic is properly constructed through a pedagogical history of its mistakes, i.e. what we learned along the way. For little Hans it has become, rather than a progressive and developmental Bildungsroman, a cyclical movement around a fixed object.

We start reading pt. 2, on p. 349. We read to the end of pt. 2.

It is becoming increasingly clear that little Hans himself has become a “symptom of the couple”. His phobia is a ploy or a strategy to resolve the lack of sexual rapport between his parents. He is, in a sense, making a sacrifice of himself in order to resolve that felt unhappiness.

In the bathtub fantasy, where little Hans’ belly is punctured, he is putting himself in the position of his mother. Like Lacan’s own patient,

in his childhood he had fantasised being in the maternal position, precisely so as to offer himself, if I may say so, as a victim in his mother’s place…Little Hans is saying to his father, fuck her a bit more, while the other subject, my patient, is telling his fuck her a bit less. Clearly it’s not the same, even though they each have to make use of the term, fuck her, and even fuck me instead of her if need be, (352).

A member of the group recalls their child confronting them with a look of rivalry over the affections of their now ex-husband, and feeling sorry for the child because any desire for affection from the ex-husband had faded, so the jealous rivalry by which this child was making sense of their world simply didn’t exist.

We start reading pt. 3, on p. 354.

In the Oedipus complex, the father is supposed to intervene between the child and mother. By accepting paternal castration, the child avoids the worse fate of maternal castration.

Yet, in the case of little Hans, the father is not able to fulfill his function properly. He appears to be not able to properly set firm boundaries and limits on little Hans’ jouissance. Without the proper paternal castration taking place, little Hans is left to the fate of maternal castration, that is, consumption by his devouring mother, in which has no future.

The invention of the phobic object of the horse is a way for little Hans to save himself from this fate, to give himself some language to articulate what was before a vague and yet overwhelming anxiety with no object—to veil what isn’t there and to allow it to appear.

While maternal castration has no independent future for the child, there is a future to paternal castration, a rivalry with the father which will in the end lead to an overcoming, and the idea that though you must accept castration now, you will be given the Name of the Father and can earn the right “to accede to a full paternal function later on, that is to say, to be someone who feels himself to be in legitimate possession of his virility,“ (355).

The Name of the Father or symbolic father is what anchors the symbolic order. As God’s “I am that I am” to Moses in Exodus quiets all questions about his nature without really answering them. This empty and trivial tautology is what gives the possibility of stable meaning and knowledge of things.

Prior to the entry into language, the relationship between the mother and baby is a purely physical and sensory/sensual relation. The father intervenes to say that mother and baby can’t have each other as their primary physical object and that as the baby grows they will have to move this relationship to the symbolic, to a relationship based on language.

We discuss the quote by Nietzsche which ends pt. 3, “Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiẞ die Peitsche nicht!” as well as the famous photo with Lou Salome and Paul Ree.

Note the contradiction between Nietzsche’s misogynistic pronouncement and the photograph, where he appears to be on the receiving end of the whip.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – May 15th, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 20, Transformations, pt. 2, p. 334. We pause at the end of pt. 2.

We discuss the Greek proverb, “ta pathemata mathemata”.

Things undergone, suffering (pathema) imparts a lesson (mathema), a new way of looking at the world.

Returning to the text, at the end of pt. 2, on pg. 339,

Now it will always be like this, little Hans tells us when he is trying to recreate, in a way that is completely fantasmatic, the moment when he got the nonsense. He continues, and his wording bears a structure that we must keep in mind. All horses in buses’ll fall down.

This is the formula in which is embodied what is at stake for little Hans, namely the calling into question of the very foundations of everything that thus far constituted the seat of his world.

Although the Oedipus complex is Freud’s own “infantile theory of sexuality”, his own individual neurotic myth, it allows us to enter an otherwise completely uncharted field.

Freud is “in the ballpark”, close enough to allow for us to begin asking questions and articulating what before we had no language to express.’’

This makes Freud and Little Hans colleagues in a sense. Does Little Hans’ phobia of horses not work in a similar manner to these other theories, to give shape and expression to what cannot otherwise be expressed?

From pg. 336,

Anxiety is not the fear of an object. Anxiety is the subject’s confrontation with the absence of an object, where he is drawn in and where he loses himself. Anything is preferable to this, up to and including the forging of an object that is the strangest and least objectal of all objects, the phobia. The unreal character of the fear that is at issue here is manifested precisely by its shape and form, if we know how to see it. It’s the fear of an absence. I mean the absence of the object that has just been designated for him. Little Hans comes to his father to tell him that he is afraid of its absence. You should hear this in the same way that I have told you that in anorexia nervosa, what needs to be heard is not that the child doesn’t eat, but that the child eats nothing.

The case of Little Hans is not only a story of attachment, of Little Hans’ anxiety in the face of the lost object, but also the story of Little Hans as a “metaphysician” working out the symbolic construction of a world whereby something can be present and then absent, be there and then fall away, exist and then not exist.

Little Hans’ invention of his phobic object, like any good inventor, solves a problem. It inverts an anxiety about an absent object into a phobia about a present one, giving something with no object, an object, saving him from an engulfing and overwhelming anxiety by localizing it, giving it shape and definition.

For Lacan, objects are never concrete, that concreteness is an imaginary illusion. The object is something that must be symbolized first before it can come to be an object. What we think of as a solid object is just something like a placeholder within a symbolic matrix.

When Little Hans initially confronts the absence of his object, “he is drawn in… he loses himself.” As the object falls away, so too the subject fades. All that is left is “the cut”, the space between, nothing.

We continue on reading, beginning pt. 3 on pg. 339. We stop at the end of the chapter. For further reference, we consult Bruce Finks, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, pg. 198:

Hans’ phobia is an attempt to put some other being (a certain kind of horse) into the father’s place between mother and child, as shown in the figure. It is a being to which he can attribute pride and anger, the sentiments he believes his father feels when he sees Hans in bed with his mother (though the father denies any such sentiments, no doubt in part to conform to his and his wife’s initial decision to raise the boy with the least possible coercion [SE X, 61). The phobic object here binds or reduces his anxiety about being the sole object of his mother’s affections for a certain amount of time (and takes on many attributes that I cannot go into here), yet it provides no permanent solution: the phobia dissipates when Hans finds a new solution. But the solution he finds is not a metaphorical one, whereby his mother’s “desire/lack” is named (indicating that she wants, say, status, wealth, a “real” man, advancement in a career, or recognition in an artistic or musical field—something beyond Hans that Hans would then have to grapple with, perhaps trying to help her achieve it or to give it to her through his own accomplishments). I would argue that it is a metonymic solution, whereby Hans simply hopes to have a child of his own whom he can offer up to his mother in exchange for himself. To get his mother off his back, he will follow his father’s example: he will give her a male child to come between them, just as his father had Hans, who came between the mother and father.

This leads Hans to create an entirely new genealogy for himself, recreating the family tree—his symbolic lineage-in such a way that Hans marries his own mother and his father marries his own mother (Hans’ paternal grandmother). It may look Oedipal from the outside, but it is not at all the expression of an Oedipal wish. Rather, in seeking some separation from his mother, he is required to give her another child to dote on; this is the only solution he can find to create a space of his own. Like Jean, Hans remains—at the end of his pseudo-analysis with his father and Freud—his mother’s “little man.” His hope—hardly a neurotic one—is to give her another son to suffocate.

Metaphor vs metonymy: what’s the difference?

Roman Jackobson proposes, in his 1956 essay, Two Aspects of Language and-Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances, two axis of linguistic analysis. Metaphor operates on a vertical axis of substitution and condensation, whereas metonymy works according to horizontal displacement and contiguity.

In metonymy instead of saying a word, you say a closely associated word contiguous or “next to” the word you mean. In this way, what is signified is displaced down the line, forming a horizontal chain.

Hans, in creating an object to substitute for himself, displaces the anxiety he feels down the horizontal axis. Rather than giving symbolization to his mother’s “desire/lack”, it is simply displaced onto a newly invented object.

What is it about feminine desire that means it is always unsignifiable, unrepresentable, beyond language? How deeply is psychoanalysis implicated in misogyny?

“There is no Other of the Other”. Freud, as the anchor of our discourse, lacks any such anchor himself. We are implicated in his partiality, the unthinking misogyny of his day and anything else which might limit his perspective. There is no pure metalanguage, however we are not helpless. We can think critically, both with and against Freud.

Systems of domination and oppression seek to enshrine a power that is already enfeebled. The desperation to quash any alternative view speaks to at least some self-knowledge of their own inadequacy.

This self-knowledge is unconscious and works to create a kind of deliberate ignorance. For example, the artificial panic about critical race theory works to maintain deliberate ignorance on matters of the historical record or other facts which are inconvenient for the self-image of white Americans.

One technique of analysis is to focus on the opaque aspects of language, such as metaphor, metonymy, displacement or substitution, poetic techniques which “roughen the surface of language”, to focus on what remains unsaid.

A neurotic might endlessly wonder about what was meant by their partner saying “I’m going out for a bit.” It might be perfectly innocuous, or it might reveal deep frustrations about the relationship. Was it a clear communication or did it mean something?

An analyst might wonder a similar thing about the symptom.

But “unconscious is structured like a language”, therefore the meaning of what is unsaid is structured by the big Other, just as much as what is said.

For the neurotic, a joke is always a riff or a take on what already exists in the code which everyone shares. A joke must be tacitly endorsed by the big Other in order to critique or poke fun at it, for meaning to be possible. A rule, in order to be broken, must first be followed.

The psychotic has their own code, not ratified by the big Other.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – May 2nd, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 19, Permutations, pt. 3, p. 323. We pause at the end of the chapter.

Where to begin? Questions of orientation and disorientation: how do we get our bearings, as analysts, in terms of deciphering the images used by Little Hans? What do we need to know, what can we ignore?

What does Little Hans need to know? How do these images related to his phobia give Little Hans his bearings in the world?

As Little Hans did before, with his infantile sexual theories about screwing and unscrewing, he uses the images he has around him to try to make sense of the Oedipal conflict; but in the fantasy of May 2nd (coincidentally the date of today’s meeting),he uses a far more “biting” image for castration.

Der Installateur, a fitter, arrives with a pair of pincers, rather than a screwdriver. We can, as well, draw an association to horses: a horse’s mouth is like pincers. A farrier will use a tool of the same shape to trim the hooves, called a hoof nipper.

The “notorious black on the horse’s mouth” (p. 290) is a positive manifestation of this bite.

The belly button is a hole, a kind of bite, which connects us to a lost sense of wholeness, in our relationship with our mother.

For Little Hans, his mother’s words are biting. They recall what has been lost.

We discuss the following passage, on p. 322, which concerns Little Hans’ bathtub fantasy, in which the Schlosser (the fitter who screws and unscrews the bath) unscrews the bath, and then with his Bohrer (his gimlet) bores a hole in Little Hans’ stomach:

…ultimately he is the one who takes on board, in his person, the mother’s hole. This hole is precisely the gulf that is the crucial and ultimate point in question, the thing that cannot be looked at, the thing that floats in the shape of the blackness that is forever ungraspable around the horse’s head, and precisely around where the horse can bite. Somewhere in this vicinity is this thing into which he was not to look.

Little Hans finds himself in an inverted Oedipal position, as a stage in his development through the Oedipal complex. He has assumed the position of the mother, in that his father has failed to intervene, and to play the proper role of a father.

Little Hans is crying out for a line to be drawn, some form of limitation or prohibition around which he might orient himself.

We have a look at Lacan’s discussion of the fantasy of April 22nd, on p. 323.

Little Hans, who is perfectly recognisable in the guise of the young street-boy who has climbed onto the truck, spends the whole night there ganz, nackt, quite naked. This is something altogether ambiguous, both a desire and a dread. It is tightly bound to what immediately precedes it, when Hans says to his father, in the dialogue that I have pointed out as a crucial one, du sollst als Nackter, you’ve got to be naked.

Note on the translation: rather than say “be naked”, it might be closer to say “be a naked one”. Rather than being called upon to simply take up a certain attribute, one must become naked, to take up that position.

Presumably, as a “naked one”, Hans’ father will be able to satisfy his mother sexually, to become a phallic father in a way he is not currently able to be. Hans finds himself caught in the intimacy, or lack thereof, between his parents. A more phallic father would set boundaries necessary for Hans to navigate the Oedipus complex.

There is a myth known as the “decline of the father” which imagines that there was a time in the past when “men were men”, and that we are only in recent times failing to live up to the function of being a father. However, it is important to point out that this is a conservative fantasy.

Even if there was such a person, who lived up in every way to the function of the father, they would be a pervert.

We can imagine a judge or cop who thinks they are the embodiment of the law, “judge, jury, and executioner”, rather than an imperfect stand-in just doing their best.

We ought not to consider Hans’ father deficient in that he wasn’t this idealized true father, for no father is the true father. Every father questions whether he is good enough, and worries about not fulfilling his role. Still, what should Hans’ father have done differently?

In 1866 the Paris Linguistic Society banned the topic of the evolution of language, because it was considered to be lacking in scientific proof. In Totem and Taboo, Freud defies this prohibition by sketching an origin of language.

While not literally true and unsatisfying at the anthropological level, this origin story serves as a functional myth for explaining the Oedipal dynamics of castration, prohibition of incest, etc.

In Seminar XVII, Lacan refers to the Oedipus complex as Freud’s own “neurotic’s individual myth”.

We take a 10 minute break. When we return, we begin reading ch. 20, Transformations, on p. 327.

Traumatic events reorganize what we take to be “reality” into a new symbolic configuration.

In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud mentions the profusion of images as a feature of mourning. Dreams and fantasies help this process of sorting through and reshuffling, restructuring of the symbolic order.

When a loved one has passed away, their absence cannot be marked as absent, until this “symbolic renovation” has taken place.

In the loss of a loved one, the very co-ordinates whereby loss is marked, are themselves lost. Mourning requires a symbolic reorganization whereby loss can be properly registered.

Movie recommendation: Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). This film features an imaginatively depicted “psychic remodeling”, at the end of a relationship, where one partner seeks to erase the loss of the other partner from memory, by erasing his memory of the whole relationship.

In analysis, through language, the analysand can do the opposite: reorganize the symbolic in such a way as to be able to mark loss, to be able put into words what before could not be registered.

Little Hans’ fantasies might be regarded as exactly this work, seeking to organize a symbolic order so that his Oedipal anxiety can be given coordinates, and thereby given expression.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – April 17th, 2022

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 19, Permutations, pt. 1, p. 312. We pause at the end of pt. 1, p. 318.

The maps of Little Hans’ physical environment on p. 317 are meant to help illustrate the connection between inner and outer space. Like a mobius strip, the geography of Little Hans’ world stretches between both.

Navigating the movement between inside and outside, we gain the proprioceptive capacity to “create our embodiment”, to find our literal place in the world.

We discuss a passage on p. 312 that began the reading,

For Freud, what is at issue is none other than the Oedipus complex, the drama of which brings of its own account a new dimension that is necessary to the constitution of a replete human world and to the constitution of the object. This object is not merely the correlate of what is claimed to be instinctual genital maturation, but rather the fact of having acquired a certain symbolic dimension.

Here, Lacan argues against the idea held by object relations theorists, that biological maturation will lead us by instinct towards an appropriate and natural object for our genital drive.

Instead of being conceived of as a natural object, for Lacan, the object of our genital drive is best understood as part of the symbolic dimension, an object which stands in for something else.

What object relation theorists and ego psychologists saw was that, as we grow up, we learn to balance our needs and drives against those of others, but there are situations, such as sexual relations between people, where we are liable to treat others as partial, rather than whole objects, in a way that seems to recall our young childhood, before we could properly grasp that others exist in the same way that we do.

A very young child cannot see beyond these partial objects to the whole object which lies behind them. The baby cries out for the breast, thinking only of itself, not realizing that the object it wants for itself is actually part of its mother.

Object’s relations theory sees the goal of analysis as to help the analysand become able to have genital relations while taking the other person as a whole and not a part object. This process, guided by biological instinct, brings us to our properly natural and mature genital relationship.

Notice the strong undertones of Kantian morality here, with the categorical imperative to treat others as ends in themselves and not as mere means to an end.

The problem with this thinking, for Lacan, beyond its moralism and unearned conflation of what is given with what is natural, is believing that a sexual relationship with a whole object is even possible, when the field of sexuality is dominated as it is by drives which aim at partial objects.

In French society, it was common to have a wife and a mistress, this “separation of powers” shows a kind of incompatibility of between the whole object of love and the sexual object.

There is no natural object of sexuality. The object is symbolic, and is selected not on the basis of biological instinct, but rather because of its place within the greater order of objects.

We begin pt. 2, on p. 318. We continue to the end.

We discuss the following passage on p. 321,

Never forget that the signifier is not there to represent signification. It is there much rather to stand in for the gaps in a signification that signifies nothing. It is because the signification is literally lost, because the trail is lost as in the fairy tale of Hop-o’-My-Thumb, that the white stones of the signifier surge up to fill this hole and this void.

Rather than ask what this symbolic object represents, we should focus on how the signifier operates at the concrete level to draw chains of association.

Some signifiers stand at the intersection of many these different chains, making many connections. The horse, the object of Little Hans’ phobia, is an example of one such signifier.

Little Hans identifies with his home and he identifies with his mother. When his mother isn’t at home, Hans doesn’t know who he is. He loses his topos, his place in the world.

In losing his orienting point, he seeks another one, the phobia of horses.

Yet, we should be careful to say that we are not repeating a conservative argument for mothers to stay home and mother their children. Lacan would see that, though Hans may be struggling in some sense, the space which opens up between the child and mother in the Oedipus complex is crucial in the development of the child as an individual. Without this diremption Hans would not be able to become a separate person of his own.

We jump ahead to p. 362, to shed some light on what we were discussing earlier as Lacan’s critique of object’s relations theory..

It seems to me that a minimum requirement in analytic formation is to realise that while man has to deal with his instincts – instincts that I credit, whatever some might say, including the death instinct – what analysis has brought us is, even so, the awareness that not everything can be summed up and encapsulated in a formula as simplistic and sanctimonious as the one to which we can commonly see psychoanalysts rallying, namely that, on the whole, everything is resolved when the subject’s relations with his fellow man are, as they say, person-to-person relations and not relations with an object.

For Lacan, there can be no natural or healthy object for the genital drive, for drive always aims at some partial object. Love is understood, not as the relationship between people regarding each other as whole objects, but as someone willingly giving themselves as part object for another’s use.

What the idea that the object of the genital drive is biological, natural and instinctual misses, is that it can’t explain the role of the signifier in determining sexual attraction and interest. For example, why is it that people tend to fall for the same type, again and again? Why do certain specific traits recur through a series of partners?

What unconscious factors are at play which determine our partner selection?

Is the “I” any more than a dummy signifier which unifies a set of disparate experiences by collecting and containing them?

If I say, “It is raining,” “it” refers to nothing at all; “it” just reiterates “raining”.

Similarly, the Kantian “I think…” accompanies all representations as their necessary frame.

If the “I” is a point of negativity with no content, the ego psychology which tries to find its natural object, has nowhere to look and nothing to find. Only in the unconscious are symbolic objects constituted through their place in material chains of signification, coming to fill in the gaps in a signification that signifies nothing.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – March 20th, 2022.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 17, The Signifier and Der Witz, pt. 2, p. 287. We pause at pt. 3, p. 291.

We discuss the concluding passage, on p. 291.The signifier is a bridge in a domain of significations. The consequence of this is that the signifier doesn’t reproduce significations. It transforms and recreates them.

This is what is at stake, and this is why we always need to focus the lens of our question on the signifier.

Signifiers are defined by the fact that they are transforming even as they are spoken.
We turn to p. 288: It is possible, at any moment, to call any element of meaning into question insomuch as it is grounded on a use of the signifier. That is to say, it is grounded on something that in itself is profoundly paradoxical in relation to any possible signification because, in establishing this use, the use itself is what creates what it is designed to sustain
Signifiers find their meaning in their use, not in any fixed essence or meaning.

The nonsense word famillionär (p. 287) exists in a superposition between millionaire and familiar. Its shifting reveals a kind of nonsense implicit in all signifHirsh-Hyacinth is a Hamburg lottery agent who boasts of his familiar relationship with the wealthy millionaire, Baron Solomon Rothschild. He says, on page 15 of Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, “And as true as I pray that the Lord may grant me all good things I sat next to Solomon Rothschild, who treated me just as if I were his equal, quite famillionär.”

In the mode of free-association, the nonsensical connections between signifiers have no ordinary logic to depend on, only the arbitrariness of the signifier itself.
For a joke to be funny, the teller and the listener need to share, or at least hold compatible signifying chains. They need to be “from the same parish”, to “share the same kind of naivety.” For a joke to land it must be authorized by the Big Other.

We pause to discuss a recent article, by Sergio Benvenuto, entitled Psychoanalysis in the War. A debate with Russian colleagues, available at https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/psychoanalysis-in-the-war-a-debate-with-russian-colleagues.

In the article, Benvenuto explains that he has been working with a number of Russian analysts in supervision groups over Zoom. When he asked one of these groups about the war in Ukraine, each member expressed support for Russia. The article explains his decision to no longer work with the group
This brings up the problem about how to interact with people from “other parishes”, with few points of contact.
To take a simple example, if two people are thinking about jumping in a lake, one might have the associations “exhilarating, refreshing, fun”, whereas someone else might have the associations “cold, wet, dangerous”. To get these two people to agree on a single course of action is difficult, if not impossible. Was Sergio right to break off contact, in order not to violate the ethics of psychoanalysis, or is psychoanalysis like diplomacy, an activity where talking becomes even more important in times of war?
What tools can psychoanalysis give us in this situation?

From the article:

B: “I’m disappointed, because I thought you partially understood the Russian world. It seems to me that you do not understand something essential about us. I voted for Putin, I respect Putin’s decisions, I admire Putin. I am Russian and I follow what he does. What you haven’t understood is that Putin is Russia! “

S.B.: “Hitler also said that Germany was Hitler, and Hitler was Germany! But as a psychoanalyst I cannot believe in identities, and I always consider identifications as alienations. I prefer Russian colleagues who condemn Putin’s policy, at least until recently.

Psychoanalysis is able to question and move beyond identifications, rather than letting them remain stable.There is no final word, but instead, “Please, tell me more about that.”

Analysis can open up a space where identifications can be questioned and escaped, shed, transformed, etc.

Yet this analytic space exists in the real world, “Psychoanalysis is not done on the moon, but on the earth.” Like accepting drug money in exchange for an analytic session, the analyst risks becoming an accomplice to the crimes of their analysand, even indirectly.

We begin reading Lacan’s Seminar IV, taking things up again on p. 291, pt. 3, and read to the end ch. 17.

On p. 292-293 Lacan discusses how Freud interprets Little Hans’ mythical construction of “unscrewing” as a way to “give him a bigger one”, yet rather than come from Little Hans, this interpretation is rather quickly suggested and imposed on Little Hans by his father and Freud.

To quote:

They are in such a rush to impose their signification on little Hans that they don’t even wait for him to finish his remarks on the unscrewing of his little widdler before they tell him that the only possible explanation is that, quite naturally, this was so that he could be given a bigger one. Little Hans doesn’t say that at all, and on no account do we know whether he would have said it had he been allowed to speak to the end. Nothing indicates that he would have said it. Little Hans speaks only of replacement. This is an instance where we can touch on the countertransference.

What are we to make of this?

Freud’s mistake is to imagine, from his own position, that Little Hans believes himself to be somehow deficient in not having a bigger penis and that this dream of unscrewing expresses the imaginary desire to have a bigger penis, rather than see the unscrewing mechanism in the dream as a mythical construction in the symbolic to explain the experience of growth as Little Hans is already experiencing it.

We take a 10 minute break. When we come back, we begin to read ch. 18, Circuits, p. 295.

The horse, for Little Hans, forms a signifying constellation in relation to other signifiers.

There is no “outside” to this constellation, no metalanguage which explains what it “really means”. Growth, horses, phalluses are all shifting participants of this dance of signification, yet none of them are an endpoint, the place where things are finally and definitely articulated.

While nothing is wrong with identification as such, identifications can become stuck, in which case it is the job of psychoanalysis to get them moving again. “Please, tell me more about that.”

Lacan Toronto Meeting – February 20th, 2022.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 16, How Myth Is Analysed, pt. 3, on p. 271.

Life is a series of failures. The ultimate failure is, by this logic, God, who bungled the act of creation so as to leave it so flawed and unfinished. Yet, in this incompleteness, is where we find the very room for our freedom and the ability to ourselves create something new.

In the case of Little Hans, what we are speaking about as “the desire of the child” is in fact the child possessed by the jouissance of the other. Our understanding is hampered when we misread this possession and desubjectivization by the desire of the other as simply the child’s own desires playing out.

We discuss the following passage on p. 272, which begins with a quote from Little Hans,

I saw Mummy quite naked in her chemise, and she let me see her widdler. I showed Grete, my Grete, what Mummy was doing, and showed her my widdler .

This is a superb response, and utterly in line with what I was trying to spell out for you earlier. What is at stake is very precisely to see what is veiled insomuch as it is veiled. The mother is both naked and in her chemise, just like Alphonse Allais’s tale L’engrasseur, about a friend of his who was wont to exclaim with a flamboyant gesture, You see that woman over there, she is naked under her chemise. It’s quite possible that you have never gauged the impact and scope of this remark in the metaphysical underpinnings of your social deportment, but it is fundamental to interhuman relationships as such.

Whatever state the mother is in, it is possible to imagine her otherwise. Clothes can come to stand for what’s underneath them, i.e. their own absence.

How is this style of “non-dual” or seemingly contradictory thinking that Little Hans displays important to the structure of the neurotic mind in general?

This conception, by Little Hans, of his mother as at once clothed and yet still naked under her clothes, is contradicted by his father, who insists that one is either clothed or naked, and not both at the same time.

Yet this only demonstrates “…the impossibility of taking on board the order of the world simply through an authoritarian intervention….” (p. 273).

Freud makes the mistake of getting Little Hans’ father to intervene and attempt to ease Little Hans’ guilt about touching his winkler, yet this has an unintended effect. In explaining that his fear of horses is connected to guilt over masturbation, and that masturbation is not such a big deal, his father is effectively saying that, “it is permitted to look at horses”. Yet, this permission becomes a kind of obligation or compulsion for Little Hans that he must look at horses, “just like in totalitarian systems,” (p. 273).

For example, if someone invites you over to use their pool this summer, while they have only technically given you permission to come over and use their pool, you now feel a social obligation to go.

You become trapped in the other’s jouissance and feel compelled to enjoy.

What is going on here? How then does an analyst tactfully intervene when appropriate without making this mistake?
Rather than view the truth as a matter of common sense, to be invoked in an empirical way, as in asking someone “What is your evidence for that?” We ought to consider truth in a Heideggerian sense as aletheia, or unconcealment, revelation, something appearing in its full freedom.

Myths give a necessary narrative structure to our lives, a shape. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, our mundane day to day lives are given significance and comprehensibility by, drawing upon a miasma of references and significances by which to measure one’s own life.

We discuss how Lacan’s analysis of mythical structure takes the form of mythemes and mathemes, which move us in the direction of topology, where relations stay the same, no matter the deformations the structure might undergo.

Darian Leader writes:

Freud was also the bearer of gifts: a rocking horse for Herbert. In this 1942 article in the ‘Psychoanalytic Quarterly’, so before his own identity as the father of Little Hans was known, Max describes with admiration how Freud had carried the horse up the four flights of stairs to their apartment for Hebert’s third birthday (Graf 1942, Praz2008). In his later interview with the Archives, he changes the date to the fifth birthday, and commentators have tended to prefer this later dating—despite the fact that by this time they had moved from a fourth to a third floor flat—as it not only absolves Freud of what would have been an extraordinary omission but also endows the gift with the quality of a clinical intervention (Wakefield 2007b). Where once Herbert was afraid of a horse coming into his room, now it was safe to have one in the house: he had conquered his phobia.

We take a 10 minute break. When we return, we begin reading ch. 17, The Signifier and Der Witz, on pg. 278. We stop on pg. 282.

No signifier can be regarded as being univocal, possessing an essence or being related to a single representation, but as a raw signifier exists in its materiality only in relation to other signifiers.

Our entry into language creates the imagined loss of what cannot be said. The barred subject is alienated by language from the ineffable, unsayable remainder, which can never be expressed. Yet the ineffable is as much a creation of language, for without saying something in the first place there can’t be “what is left unsaid.”

On pg. 279, Lacan clarifies that “the word moment is here intended in the sense it carries in physics,” but what does he mean?

In physics, moments are units of momentum which is the quantity of movement.

In Seminar XI, Lacan refers to Otto von Bismarck’s use of the word “moment” in his Blood and Iron speech, which doesn’t refer to anything temporal, but rather all the elements coming together in culmination to produce some kind of result.

He notes that during the siege of Paris in 1870, the Parisians made fun of Bismarck’s “psychological moment” which struck them as a peculiar and humourous use of the term.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – February 6th, 2022

Announcement:

There will be a screening of Adieu Lacan (2021), on March 6th, 2022 at 10:00 am EST.

The event will be free for members of Lacan Toronto; non-members will have to pay around ten dollars. A forthcoming email to the group will explain the details. The film is under two hours, and will be followed by a discussion and Q and A with the director, Richard C. Ledes.

The film itself is inspired by the work of Betty Milan, a Brazilian psychoanalyst and writer, who was Lacan’s analysand. The film is based on her play, Goodbye Doctor, and novel, Lacan’s Parrot. More details can be found at: adieulacan.com

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 15, What Myth Is For, on p. 255. We pause at the end of ch. 15, on p. 260. We discuss the following:

Perhaps not every Oedipus complex needs to pass in this way through such mythical construction, but it’s absolutely certain that each Oedipus complex needs to make a reality of this same plenitude in symbolic transposition.

As we see in the example of Little Hans, myth-making organizes the intimacy of the domestic situation.
A “mythical construction” is what structures perception, and therefore, what is considered to be reality.
This myth sits between the imaginary and the symbolic.
Its symbolic structure incorporates a number of suggestive images (eg. screws, holes, giraffes, faucets, etc.). and although the images are of Little Hans’ own choosing, the structure of the myth is determined by the structure of the triadic relationship between mother, father and child.
Or is it a quadratic relationship between mother, father, child and phallus?
The myth is an origin story, which must necessarily be a story of kinship, incest and prohibition.
We all share the experience of the society around us trying to curtail our pleasure in some way. Laws and taboos are universal to human society, though the specific prohibitions may differ. An individual has to make sense of and finally accept these rules if they are going to get along with others.
While the myth is individual, the situation it grapples with is universal.
Lacan is, at this time of this seminar, highly influenced by structuralism. He argues the analyst can perform a structuralist analysis of these myths in the same way that Claude Lévi-Strauss performs upon the myths subject to his own anthropological study.
Lacan takes up Lévi-Strauss’ theory of myth as a story a culture tells about itself.
Other examples of a structural analysis of the bible as myth:
Northrop Frye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbTIAto5PrQ&list=PLYQV14il9XALl_lTZbgbBdrFWdcLOwKBs
Bill Donahue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2knIz_xBI
To be clear, the myths upon which Lacan is seeking to perform a structural analysis are not broadly shared cultural myths, but the unique creation of each individual for the purposes of navigating the Oedipal situation
Jumping ahead to Seminar XVII, Lacan speculates that the reason Freud thinks the Oedipus complex is universal is precisely because it is his own individual myth for making sense of the dynamic which occurs between mother, father and child.
The neurotic’s individual myth is to be distinguished from the fundamental fantasy Lacan discusses in Seminar VI.
“Every analyst has experienced the frustration of hearing the analysand talk about their fundamental fantasies and realizing they have no connection to the neurosis.”
Question: Where is the concept of the fundamental fantasy to be found in Freud?
Answer: Nowhere does the term “fundamental fantasy” appear in Freud’s work, however the general concept that Lacan is working with can be found in A Child is Being Beaten, the last theoretical section of The Schreber Case, and Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality.
In 2004, the Freud Archives released more information about the case of Little Hans.
In these documents it is mentioned that Little Hans’ sister was abused by her mother.
Also noted is the fact that Freud gave Little Hans a rocking horse for his third birthday.

We start reading ch. 16 on p. 260.

Animals experience the real, but not as traumatic. As human subjects, the experience of trauma comes retroactively, when the way in which we deal with the challenges of life breaks down.
In distinction to animals, we take an “extimate” position in relation to our own life. We take the position of the superego reproaching ourselves for not living life to its fullest. We are always defending ourselves in anticipation of something horrible.

We go back to the chart on p. 242.

When the mother chastises the child,—“Just wait until your father gets home,”—it creates a symbolic indebtedness to the real father.
It conjures in the child’s mind some idea of punishment, lack, castration. Yet, since “the real is full”, this lack has to take the form of some object.
By synecdoche, a lost object comes to stand for loss itself. Little Hans’ giraffes and other imaginary objects invent “lack” down to its mechanical details with screws for disassembling and reassembling itself.
This imagined instantiation of absence and loss is called the imaginary phallus.
For a book to be missing from the library, there needs to be a symbolic filing system which says it is supposed to be there. Without the symbolic register, the library simply contains all the books that it contains: no more and no less.

We discuss the following passage on p. 264,

Those of you who have been attending my patient presentations might have noticed in one of our transsexual patients the truly harrowing character that he depicted for us of the painful surprise he felt the day he saw his sister naked for the first time.

Like Little Hans imagines that everyone has a Wiwimacher, we tend to, without thinking about it, imagine others to be like ourselves.
In the case of Little Hans, the phallus is the signified which gives imaginary content to the symbols and myths of his world.
Penisneid, “penis envy”, is for that reason primarily a phenomenon in the minds of men. Men imagine that women are lacking something, that there is something they don’t have, when in fact, women are simply different.
This logic is shared by perverts and exhibitionists, who seek to shame women for what they don’t have by putting it on display.
These confrontations with bodily otherness have the potential to upset or undermine our childhood sexual theories in a potentially traumatic way.
Each surprises an individual with an image of “what they do not have”, the imaginary phallus, as we described above.
Lacan explains Freud’s aim in the case of Little Hans, on p. 266, which we might apply equally to the case of the transexual patient and that is,

…to produce results that are subjectively liveable for the subject, by which I mean that they enable him to integrate into the sexual dialectic in such a way that it allows the human subject to live it and not merely to endure it.

We take a ten-minute break, and start reading again at p. 266 when we get back. We stop at the end of pt. 2, on p. 271.

A question about “the absence of phenomena that could be qualified as transferential,” (p. 268) in the case of Little Hans:
While Little Hans doesn’t show any signs of transference, can we say the same thing about his father?
For Little Hans’ father, Freud is the subject-supposed-to-know, an authority to which he must submit, a figure who takes on many roles beyond simply the analyst.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – January 23rd, 2022.
Announcements:

If you haven’t received a recording, please send another request to Judith Hamilton at jehamilton@rogers.com
Alireza Taheri gave a presentation and discussion entitled Hegelian-Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, on January 15th, and you can read the short treatise here: https://www.foreignobjekt.com/post/alireza-taheri-spectre-of-madness-a-presentation-and-discussion/.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 15, What Myth Is For, on p. 241. We pause after the end of pt. 1.

Myths are a sort of narrative, but one which relates to certain constants which give it structure. For example, childhood theories of sexuality are narratives which seek to explain the mysterious set of data points created by the act of parental coitus: banging in the next room, screaming, the temporary disappearance of the parents. etc.
While the narratives of these myths are structured so as to make sense of these data points, the myths go on to, themselves, structure future experiences as a kind of “Kantian schema”, the rule by which a non-empirical category or concept is associated with a given sense impression.
Within any work of fiction there is a structure which is identical to the structure of the truth itself, in that “[t]he structural necessity brought forth by any expression of truth is precisely a structure that is the same as that of fiction. Truth has a structure, so to speak, of fiction,” (p. 245).
Film recommendation: The Imitation Game (2014). A myth “gathers the elements”, the beginnings of formalization, from the scant information available, such as a minimal regularity that allows one to decipher a coded message.
For example, the story of Cinderella, a kind of myth, is structured around the dichotomy between Cinderella’s dead mother and her wicked step-mother. The story is about escaping her castigating parental relationship and creating a new couple with Price Charming.
The story gains its shape from the truth that, without distance from the mother, a child will never be able to become an individual or else be able to move on to form a new couple with someone else.
However, as much as it reveals, the myth also obscures. It presents a model of motherhood with two options, either good, but dead, or alive, but wicked.
A mother who is “good enough” is neither the idealized dead mother nor the wicked step-mother, but knows to give their child the distance they need to develop–mothers who are able to “kiss them off” in a healthy way.
Psychoanalysis can help establish a certain distance to these highly fraught and emotional situations through the symbolic expression of retelling. Instead of reacting or retaliating to a given situation, the analysand is able to create some kind of symbolic structure or language between themselves and what is “too close”.
Similarly, a daughter’s “bad boyfriend” might be a way to create an interdict between her “devouring mother” and herself.
Book recommendation: Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. How transgenerational loyalties are established in the body.

We continue reading pt. 2, on p. 248.

We pause to discuss the following paragraph on p. 252:

It’s peculiar that Freud doesn’t ask himself the question of whether the row, the racket, the Krawall, which is one of the dreads that the child feels when faced with the horse, might not bear some relation with orgasm, and even an orgasm that would not be the child’s own. It might be related to some scene he perceived between the parents, for example. Freud readily accepts his parents’ assertion that the child could not have glimpsed anything of the sort. This is a small riddle, and we shall have the absolutely certain solution to it.

Significantly, Freud gave Little Hans a rocking horse as a gift.
Little Hans may have overheard his parents having sex in the room next door, and connected the noise to something dangerous or aggressive. Sexuality appears startling and overwhelming to a child, they have no concept of sex.
Little Hans refers to his penis as the Wiwimacher, “It’s a maker of wee, with the suggestion of a worker, an agent, as in Uhrmacher [watchmaker],” (p. 251).

The group takes a ten minute break, and then continues reading from p. 252. We pause at p. 256, but go back to discuss the two paragraphs which begin at the bottom of p. 253 and continue onto p. 254.

In other words, the system of the signifier, or the system of language, to define it synchronically, or the system of discourse, to define it diachronically, is something that the child enters at the outset, but without entering the full breadth, the full scope, of the system, because he enters on an occasional basis in connection with his relations with his mother, who is there or who is not there. However, this first symbolic experience is something that is utterly insufficient. The full system of relations with the signifier cannot be constructed around the fact that something that one loves is there or is not there. We cannot content ourselves with just two terms. There have to be others.

A minimum of terms is necessary for the symbolic to function. It’s a matter of knowing whether it’s three of them, whether it’s four of them – it’s certainly not three, because the Oedipus complex gives us three terms, yet certainly implies a fourth when it tells us that the child has to come through the complex. This means that there has to be someone who intervenes in this business, and this is the father.

We’ve discussed in previous meetings how the child’s entry into the symbolic takes place first with the mother’s absence. Yet, the two terms: presence, absence are not enough.
We read and discussed in our January 9th group about how three terms are the minimum amount of complexity required for the symbolic to function. In the Oedipus complex these are: child, mother and father. Yet in leaving the complex there are four terms: child, mother, father, and phallus, which has been by this time recognized as distinct from the father, ”somewhere else”.
As we discussed earlier, symmetry brings a kind of internal order to the terms. Patients with dyspraxia and discoordination can be aided by playing with blocks to produce symmetrical patterns, to figure out and realize, “Oh! this is left and that is right”.
Without a felt realization of left and right, one has no centre line, no downward vector to ground them.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – January 9th, 2022.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading ch. 14, The Signifier in the Real, on p. 224. We pause after the end of pt. 1.

While the chapter is about how law emerges from within the symbolic order, there is a question of how the imaginary reorganizes or structures the symbolic.

We read a passage from the end of last session’s reading, ch. 13 on p. 222, and discuss.

One keeps wondering whether Hans might not be making fun of everything, or producing a refined brand of humour, which moreover is incontestably the case because what we have here is an imaginary that is being played out to reorganise a symbolic world.

Phantasms, fantasies are what allow Little Hans to be happy with his mother and experience pleasure.

Making reference to the L-schema, we can see where the line between a and a’ resists the symbolic order and actively reorganizes it.

When we encounter something new, we place it within the context of what we already know; yet at the same time, “what we know” is revised and reordered by new experiences.
Therapy is based on the idea that new experiences can influence the structure of a person’s thinking.
Rather than conceive of the analyst as a symbolic authority, or the analysand as an instance of a general kind or type, we ought to take each “one by one”, as a particular individual.

We discuss the diagram on p. 225, and return to the topic of this week’s chapter, how the law emerges from within the symbolic order.

Bruce Fink explains the diagram in The Lacanian Subject and gives a quick summary in Reading Seminars I and II.
Any apparent randomness in the construction of a symbolic structure, eventually gives way to an internal order.
Lacan gives the example of three + + + or – – – symbols in a row. Based on their arrangement, any three symbols taken at random can be called “symmetrical” or “odd”. For example, – + – is symmetrical, + + – is odd.
The laws which govern the symbolic order emerge internally, independent of experience.

On p. 231,

Were it not so difficult to manage to articulate the number 3, then this gap between the preoedipal and the Oedipal wouldn’t be there. This is the same gap that of late we have been trying to cross as best we can, with the aid of little rope ladders and other contraptions. What I simply want to make you realise is that once one has started to try to cross it, one is always falling back on such contraptions. There is no veritable experiential crossing of the gap between 2 and 3.

Lions and other animals live in a dyadic world, whereas human relationships and memories are uniquely structured by the symbolic, a third party which imposes itself between the originary two.
This third is a source of jealousy and conflict. “You understand that it’s because lions don’t know how to count up to 3 that the lionesses do not feel the faintest sense of jealousy for one another, at least apparently” (p. 231).
When we as children learn some law of mathematics or geometry it then structures symbolically what was previously dealt with only in the imaginary. This symbolic realization itself can be very powerful and disorienting.

We take a ten minute break. When we return, we discuss the following passage, on p. 236:

Everything would be all well and good for him [little Hans] were it a matter of his Wiwimacher, but it’s not. It’s him as a whole that’s in question, and this is why the difference starts to become very seriously apparent when the real Wiwimacher comes into play…What is called anxiety hinges on the fact that he is able to gauge the full difference that lies between what he is loved for and what he is able to give.

Rather than love him for something he has, Hans’ mother loves him for his whole being.
But this invokes the idea of the devouring mother, that Hans is for her merely an object to do with as she wishes, to carry around like an appendage, even to consume.

On p. 238:

So, our dear little Hans suddenly finds himself precipitated, or at the very least precipitable, through his metonymic function. To say this word in a way that is more vivid than theoretical, he imagines himself as a nothingness.

The introduction of the little sister (a third) interrupts the dyadic relationship between Hans and his mother.
When his little sister enters the picture, Hans feels sidelined, without purpose, now that he has been replaced as the object of his mother’s immediate attention.
In the jealousy of feeling replaced, Hans enters the symbolic, conceiving of himself in a new light, as a metonymy—something to be replaced, stood in for, or as a stand in for something else—a nothing.
Anxiety has no object, it is always “anxiety about nothing”. Phobias, on the other hand, have a target, and function as a way to give yourself a reference point, and establish a boundary.
Who is suffering from little Hans’ phobia? Little Hans, or his parentsBook recommendation: Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, is an exploration of feelings of horror, the uncanny, disgust, social boundaries and the law.

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meeting December 19, 2021.

We begin reading Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures, with ch. 12, part 3, on p. 201.
The phrase, “in the sticks”, refers to being in a rural area with no markers, no monuments, towers or large buildings you can see from far away, just sticks that people would put out to mark space, in need of a reference point. The Oedipal structure refers to this kind of necessary reference point for a speaking being.
Discussion turns to the following passage on p. 20.

The perspective that I’ve laid out for you allows both the imaginary game of the Ego-ideal and the sanctioning intervention of castration—in virtue of which these imaginary elements take on stability and a fixed constellation in the symbolic—to be located in their reciprocal relationships, each on their own plane.

The imaginary is like a cocoon, or a kind of waking dream, in which the relationship between the mother and the young child becomes an idealized incestuous “first love” to which the child can never return.
This “incest” manifests in adult life not primarily through sex, but in the petty arguments of couples, and in the specific mores of childhood which governed these first relationships, which reappear and continue to govern future relationships.
As long as incest remains in the imaginary, it is normative, it’s only when it becomes real that it is seen by everyone as taboo.
Just as we can interpret “castration” to mean more than literal castration, “incest” refers to more than literal incest but refers to any “taking of satisfaction in a place where satisfaction is renounced”.
We can see the phenomena play out in the unhealthy relationships which develop in families (eg. between adult children and parents), described by the psychological term “enmeshment”.
Film Recommendation: Savage Grace (2007).

We discuss the following quote on p. 205.

“while the real father authorises the one who has entered the Oedipal dialectic to fix down his choice, what is always targeted in love lies beyond this choice, and it is neither the lawful object nor the object of satisfaction, but Being, that is to say, the object that is grasped in precisely what is wanting.”

Love will always seek something more than what is sanctioned by the Oedipus or even its own satisfaction, but, instead, is after “capital B Being”.
Yet what is forbidden by one’s parents matters a great deal. If they are unjust in what they allow and don’t allow, it can play out in the future as a conflict in the superego causing considerable dysfunction.
In raising a child, a mother must go through a number of stages of renunciation, where, precisely because she loves the child, she must let go. The mother must do this according to the needs of the child, rather than the desires of either two parties.
We discuss retroactivity in relation to our earlier discussion on incest.
According to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, or what Lacan calls “après-coup”, it is only once the maternal relationship is lost that it retroactively becomes charged with incestuous energy.
According to George Bataille, it is prohibition by the law, or the father, which makes an act incestuous, rather than the act itself. In the absence of such a prohibition, the desire wouldn’t function.
The story of the golden calf from Exodus (32:4) shows the retroactive nature of the law. While Moses is gone getting the commandments, the Israelites create an idol to Yahweh in the form of a Golden calf, and when Moses returns he finds them naked and dancing. Moses gets angry, but they have not yet even received the law. They do not know they are breaking it, yet they are guilty retroactively.
Something is being said here about the word of God and how the symbolic dimension intervenes to stop the worship of images. Without laws, without a culture of regulating the distance that people ought to have to each other, you have only a naked dance of immediacy.
Other distinctions of the same kind are rendered in dietary laws, which forbid the eating of a calf with its mother’s milk. We read on, beginning ch. 13 and pause to discuss the paragraph at the top of p. 211,

The very notion of privation is exposed in this kind of experience—which entails the symbolisation of the object in the real—as something markedly tangible and visible. In the real, nothing is deprived of anything. Everything that is real is sufficient unto itself. By definition, the real is full. If we introduced the notion of privation into the real, this is because we already symbolise it quite enough, and even altogether fully, to indicate that if something is not there it’s because we suppose its presence to be a possibility. That is to say, we introduce into the real, in order to cover it over and to hollow it out in some way, the elementary order of the symbolic.

One can imagine a library with a computerized catalog that one can search. One might look up a book in the system and then, going to find it, discover it missing. Yet this missing book only exists within the library system, within the symbolic order. In the real, all the books that are in the library are in the library. There is no missing book.
The real is full; it is a lack of a lack. The real is too much, the source of anxiety, too close, a trauma. One cannot look at it or face it directly.
Symbolizing lets us “hollow out” the real, to make space for ourselves. Without it, experience would be as William James imagined, “a blooming, buzzing confusion”.
The later Lacan conceives of the real as “what you bump into”—the limit of the symbolic.
For early Lacan, the symbolic and imaginary form the “little reality” of everyday life, cut off from the inaccessible real.
For the later Lacan, it is the imaginary and real which are connected, while the symbolic is slipping away, held on only by the sinthome.

We take a ten minute break.

We start reading again, ch. 13, part 2, on p. 214.

It is because of the structural parameters of Penisneid, or penis envy, that the mother and child are susceptible to one another, as “what she doesn’t have” is filled in by the child’s imagination.
The patriarchal order is interested in instituting manliness. Women are only recognized as “not-men”, but are lacking in a fundamental recognition of themselves as women in a positive sense.

We read on, beginning part 3, on p. 217.

Must we understand this talk of “luring” as retroactive as discussed above?
The child is depicted as overwhelmed, swallowed up in the mother’s desires. It is only through the intervention of the symbolic, the prohibition of incest by the father, that “[o]rder is thus re-established, within which the child will be able to wait out events as they evolve.” (p. 220).

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meeting December 4, 2021.
Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin Chapter XII, on page 191.
We discuss the phrase on page 193, “apparent heterosexuality”.

Just as we know that for there to be heterosexual object-choice it is not enough to play by the rules of being heterosexual, so do we know that there are all shapes and sizes of apparent heterosexuality. Sometimes the candidly heterosexual relationship can harbour an atypical positioning that will come to light through analytic investigation as being derived from a clearly homosexualised position, for instance.

When this seminar was delivered in the 1950s, people felt, on the whole, a need to be proper, to conform to the social standards of the day, and anything outside of these standards was to an extent invisible or at least hidden to the vast majority of people.
Lacan, with the phrase “apparent heterosexuality” reveals that human sexuality is often more complicated than social norms dictate it ought to be, a fact which is obvious, to anyone who looks from Lacan’s privileged point of view as analyst.
Lacan is seeking to dismantle our notion of normal, healthy and mature sexuality.
Society reinforces its norms around gender and sexuality strictly, often through violence, and in doing so, makes the symbolic real. As society becomes more progressive it realizes that the words we use to describe a person’s sexuality are part of the symbolic order and can be rewritten.
Question: What does “supervalence” mean?
Answer: When something which is above structures or determines that which is below.
We discuss the equation made in the logic of the Oedipus complex, between child and phallus. On page 194,

There is a sliding of the phallus from the imaginary to the real. This is what Freud explains when he tells us that in the yearning for the originary phallus, at the imaginary level where it starts to emerge for the young girl in the specular reference to her semblable—another little girl or a little boy—the child will be the substitute for the phallus.

A child feels the mother’s lack of satisfaction in the mother/child relationship and conceptualizes this lack as what the father is able to give to their mother that they are not.
A healthy relationship between parent and child is one in which the parents are not trying to live out their desires through the child.
What is a father? We contrast two statements. On page 197, “…it’s not unthinkable to say that, in the end, no one has ever truly been a father through and through.” Yet, on page 196, “…let’s not overlook the fact that in the end they do become fathers.”
When Darth Vader reveals, in Empire Strikes Back (1980), that he is Luke Skywalker’s father, Luke responds, “I’ll never be like you!”
When Lacan uses the word “singularity” to describe each individual in their uniqueness, he means something like the English word “oddity”. No one can exactly fit into their place. Yet this itself implies the existence of a structure, something against which one is judged.
Continuing on page 197, “we suppose—and this supposition has to be the starting point—that somewhere there is someone who can fully take on the position of the father, someone who can respond, I am the father.”
We hear about, “the decline of fatherhood” in the media, but was there ever a time before this supposed decline? When was the father ever the father? Even in ancient Rome, when patricians held a supposed absolute power of life or death over their family, we find that in reality things were much more complicated.
In the case of the primal horde, in Totem and Taboo, the father never truly dies, even in death. After killing him, the brothers reinstitute the position of father in the form of the law between brothers. However, there is a transformation from a vertical relation to the father to a new horizontal relationship between brothers.

We take a ten-minute break

Returning to the topic of law and the father, someone notes that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, while being strongmen, are more like maternal figures, exerting their power through magical thinking, propaganda and influence, not the law.
Lacan says in Seminar XVIII, that no one is ever analyzed as a father, but only as a child of a father.

Going back to page 191,

I told you that it was only in an apparent way, and in keeping with the requirements of its expounding, that we found ourselves thereby moving backwards, depicting a sort of succession of stages that would follow on in a line of development, because, quite to the contrary, it’s always a matter of grasping what at each stage intervenes from the outside, retroactively to reorganise what had been initiated at the previous stage.

Is Lacan providing a developmental account or not? If so, which of the trio, “frustration, privation, castration”, comes first?
When the mother is absent, and the child is in the stage of frustration, they assume the mother’s desire is directed to something else (the phallus), and that is when the movement from the stage of frustration to the stage of privation takes place.
We go on reading, before pausing on page 200,

At the point we reached last time, the child was offering the mother the imaginary object of the phallus in order to give her complete satisfaction, and was doing so in the form of a lure, that is to say, by bringing in the Other that is in some way the witness, the one who can behold the situation as a whole.

Who is the implied audience of this act of exhibitionism? The mother, yes, but also the Other.
When the mother rejects the child’s offer, the reason which is given as to why in the child’s mind is “the phallus”, i.e. the explanation of the mother’s absence, which the father possesses.

- What is desire?
- Needs can be satisfied, but, on page 172, “desire in the repressed unconscious is indestructible.”
- The crying infant desires something beyond the mere satisfaction of need, and that is a gift.
- A gift is a matter of symbolic exchange, a sign of love.
- Frustration is the refusal of or the reneging upon the acceptance of a gift as a sign of love.
- We discuss the triad frustration/aggression/regression.
- When do infants begin to desire love? Does this coincide with their entry into the symbolic?
- When a child is able to conceive of their mother’s absence, of the fact that “she could be here but isn’t”, that is their entry into the symbolic order.
- We can say a child is already engaging in a symbolic activity as early as sucking their thumb. While their mother is absent, a child can make her present again with a replacement, a stand in.
- This highlights the ultimately disappointing character of the symbolic order as a whole. Shades of Hegel. “Words are the thumbs that we suck.”
- Is love born of lack?
- Lorenzo Chiesa speaks about the relationship of need, desire and love in his book, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan.

- Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meeting November 21, 2021.
  - Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading Chapter XI, on page 171 and read to the end of part one.
Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meeting October 24, 2021.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We begin reading, Chapter IX, section 2, page 147.
Fetishism is a prototype for perversions, and it is important to understand fetishism if we want to understand the array of various perversions.
The fetish object is a symbol of disavowal of the knowledge of the mother’s castration. “I know very well, but all the same…” “je sais bien, mais quand-même”
As a positive marker of absence, the fetish object is a monument, something that exists in the present but which marks that which is not there, as a sign of disavowal, a point of repression.
Denkmal means memorial or monument, and comes from Denken, to think.
The pervert denies that the mother is castrated and so does not conceptualize lack.
Whenever one relates to objects, instead of subjects, they exist in a fetishistic relation to the world.
Consumer objects substitute for the lack of deeper relationships between people as subjects. Do what extent do we live in a perverse society?
We continue reading on page 149…
The screen veils and yet also reveals the lack which lies behind it.
The screen, bearing a monument of some absence, creates a symbolic “beyond-zone”, to which it refers.
The word “zone” comes from the Ancient Greek zone which means girdle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_(vestment)
Unable to acknowledge lack, the pervert becomes truly stuck on this fetish, much more so than the neurotic.
What is present and certain bears also the mark of what is absent and what is uncertain.
Metaphor and metonymy are the ways in which the unconscious is presented on the veil. “This relationship with a beyond-zone is fundamental whenever a symbolic relationship is being set up. It’s a matter of descending onto the imaginary plane of the ternary order of subject / object / beyond-zone that is fundamental to the symbolic relationship.” In the example of the fetishist who was always looking for a girl with “a little shine on her nose”, we note that this shine is right next to the cavernous nostrils.
We continue reading on page 150…
Can words act as a veil? For example, when niceties imply what can’t be said or the horror of medical trauma is veiled by medical language.
An important distinction between live metaphor and dead metaphor.

Live metaphor does what good poetry does, sparking rich meaning out of new connections.
Dead metaphor has become calcified and becomes part of the metonymic chain, dead of meaning.
In clinical psychoanalysis, one doesn’t tend to encounter true perverts, but rather neurotics who think they are perverts, though perversion is a genuine clinical category. Most perverts are happy to enjoy and do not seek therapy.
The neurotic goes through the Oedipus and accepts his mother’s castration. In doing so, he accepts that he too can be castrated. Only admitting this, can he be bestowed the phallus legitimately by the father.
We compare: a fixated frozen fetishism which tries to maintain the phallus without castration vs. a neurotic who has access to objects of desire, with the tacit acknowledgement that there is nothing behind them, they are fantasy objects.
Fetishists are stuck on one, whereas the neurotic can have a variety of fantasy objects, the metonymy of objects which stand in for objet petit as the cause of desire, rather than the singular phallus which the neurotic has given up.
Does Zizek go too far in his discussion of commodity fetishism? Does it have a structural similarity to our discussion of the fetish here?
Is it more ethical to be neurotic rather than perverted? Is this shunning of perversion an envy of perverts by neurotics for their enjoyment?
Is the pervert happier than the neurotic? A pervert doesn’t ask the typical neurotic questions. “Am I alive or am I dead?” The pervert is certain and speaks from the place of the Big Other.
We take a ten minute break.
While the pervert is happy, how they treat other people can be very problematic. In the sex help column Savage Love by Dan Savage, a pervert wrote in, who was an adult-baby fetishist. Their supportive partner wasn’t doing certain things according to their exacting specifications and this was a source of frustration. The response stressed how lucky they were to have a willing participant and to thank their lucky stars.
The above illustrates the exacting almost contractual nature of perversion and just how stuck a pervert is on the specifications of their fetish, which become absolute conditions for enjoyment, beyond the human cost of such enjoyment.
Neurotics who roleplay at perversion imagine the pleasure they’d have access to if they were in fact perverted and these roleplay scenarios lack the specificity of true perversions.
Fetishes and screen memories mark a particular point in the history of the subject.
Screen memories cover up, memorialize and mark a gap or interruption in that history.
We continue reading on page 157, beginning Chapter X.
Is there a connection in Lacanian thought to Jewish mysticism? Perhaps through Hegel? What is the connection between the Ein Soph and the phallus?
Lacan seeks to set his understanding of the object relation apart from the body of Object Relations theory as embodied in Melanie Klein et al.
Book recommendation: Perversion: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Subject by Stephanie S. Swales

Lacan Toronto Reading Group October 10, 2021.

Today’s Reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We start on Chapter 8, section 3, page 135. Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman. Beginning with the L-schema. “Dora can readily accept…”

We begin a discussion about the distinction between the words “meaning” and “meaningful”. “Meaning” refers to what we normally understand as analytic content; “meaningful” refers to what is ultimately impossible to put into words.

Whenever a signifier is used to express something, that thing is substituted in its uniqueness for something universal, and in a sense lost to expression. Signifiers have a signified meaning which cannot capture the subjective experience of sensation. Signifiers are trans-individual universals which carry meaning, but fail to capture the unique specificity of individual experience. See: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter 1
An application of this insight to the Dora situation: at the level of meaning, things appear one way, but at the level of meaningfulness, everything is completely wrong. Things “start to fall apart” when she realizes the falsity of the stated meanings in the face of what was meaningful and unsaid.
An example of literal meaning and meaningfulness being diametrically opposed: you have a rival and they know you’ve been sick, and they say, “I hope you are feeling better,” Here imaginary hostility, aggressivity lies under the surface but the literal meaning of their statement gives them a kind of plausible deniability in order to hide why the statement was truly meaningful.
We have a note on the translation of the term signifiance, by Fink as “signifierness” and by Grigg as “meaningfulness”.
On translation in general: the only way you can talk about the meaning of a signifier is to replace it with another signifer, and signifiers substituting for one another.
We discuss the Buzzfeed article, Women Shared The Things They Avoid Doing Around Men So They Don’t “Lead Them On,” And It’s No Wonder Women Constantly Feel On Edge by Shelby Heinrich, which you can find here: https://www.buzzfeed.com/shelbyheinrich/women-men-leading-on
Women realize things are “meaningful” beyond their intended or surface “meaning”, even if this unsaid “meaningful” aspect is entirely unmeant.
Almost like a math equation with two men and two women which must remain balanced, when Dora hears, “Frau K means nothing to me”, the negation of Frau K means her own negation as well. “If she is nothing, what am I?”
Dora starts her individuation by saying “I’m not an object, father; I am a singular subject.”
There is the comparison of the split subject to swiss cheese, which is constituted in part by its holes, a kind of constitutive emptiness. Does this emptiness in the subject allow for the mechanisms of condensation, metaphor, metonymy?
In the discussion of meaning and meaningfulness and their distinction there is reference to Frege’s Sense and Reference. Sense is reserved for “shades of meaning” as in when I ask, ”What sense did you mean that?”
We continue with part 3, on page 138…

On page 137 Lacan says, “This metonymy is the principle behind everything that may be called realism in the realm of art and invention. Realism literally carries no sort of meaning whatsoever.”

A strict account of facts fails to capture the meaningfulness of things.
A comparison is made between the economy of storytelling suggested by Chekov’s gun and Roland Barthes’ The Reality Effect essay, which promotes the use of gratuitous detail to achieve realism. For example, a barometer over the piano might be brought up and then never mentioned again, simply as an extraneous piece of set-building which serves only to make the story feel more lived in, more real and more weighty.
Another literary technique: Hemingway has the theory of omission, whereby you can leave out an important detail and the reader will get a sense of what that detail is without being told. This too is a way to add realism.
You need a symbolic account “plus one or minus one”, that is, with too many signifiers or too few. A strictly faithful description fails to mimic our psychological reality.
Metonymy means one signifier standing in for another, as in a part for a whole, a cause for an effect, “touching signifiers” can swap, e.g. “giving birth is related to sucide and orgasm,” and these form a kind of chain.
We start reading Chapter 9, The Function of the Veil, on page 143.

The definition of tralatitious: transferred or passed down.

A symbolic exchange is as much absence as presence, as Hegel said “the word is the death of the thing”. Footprints or a mark of a sled in snow, indicate an absence. They are a “trace”. Similarly, through transference, in a session, the analyst stands in for an absence in the position of objet petit a.
But does absence exist in nature? Is the zero a kind of invention of ours, a kind mechanism? This zero point, or empty space allows all the other signifiers to move and slide and stand in for one another to stand in place and then be replaced.
Zero “placeholds” the lack. “How can ‘nothing’ be ‘nothing’ if there is a word for it?”
Along the via negativa of negative theology, God is definable only by being no definite or namable thing..
We discuss constitutive lack, from the quantum level to the cosmological and the anxiety it produces. Does constitutive lack drive economic expansionism and colonialism?
In metonymy the signifier is replaced by something else, only to reappear in the signifying chain as it circulates in the symbolic order.
We discuss the range of cultural imperatives when it comes to children forming their gender and sexual identities and how “lack” factors into patriarchal formations around having vs not having a penis.
How do we think about the relationship between lack and contradiction? Does contradiction exist in the Real?
Robert Frost on Hegel, “each thing can have more than one opposite”.
We resume our discussion about contradiction. Mao’s essay To Discuss Contradiction is recommended.
The contradiction between presence and absence evidenced in the fort/da game, exists only in the symbolic. The mother is likely, “just around the corner, watching from afar”, or otherwise not really absent, but only symbolically so.
Freud says, “In the unconscious there are no contradictions.” Using the technique of quotation the analyst might repeat back what a patient said a few sessions earlier to illustrate a contradiction in what they are saying now. “I love my mother” becomes “I hate my mother” with seemingly no registration of the contradiction, but when it is repeated back by the analyst, the contradiction is made clear.
Is there a real to the symbolic? The real of the symbolic is the materiality of the letter, not the signifier. The letters of Lacan’s formulas and schemas are a way to capture the Real in a way signifiers cannot.
In the unconscious there is a kind of writing and the analyst’s job is to “read what is written”.
There is some discussion on death. Is death just a posit? Though we may see a dead body, we observe this as a transcendent subjective observer, something which no one has ever observed at all, living or dead.
All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. But did not this syllogism make Socrates immortal?

We continue reading on page 145, “On the one hand…”

Castration is about accepting a limit to jouissance.

There is a question about Lacan and his relation to Kantian ethics and the categorical imperative. Some recommendations: Seminar VII and Kant avec Sade.

Lacan Toronto Meeting – September 26th, 2021.

Today’s Reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We start on Chapter 8, page 123. Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman.

We are studying the early Lacan, before many of the ideas of which would later become famous had been formulated.

Lacan references his earlier work on Edgar Allan Poe’s Purloined Letter to set the ground for his discussion here.
Within the discussion of the even-odd game, Lacan discusses “the third” and the concept of law.

We begin reading part 1, page 124…

“Levity and gravity.” When the father has levity, he creates buoyancy and stability, which in turn supports everything around him; but if this levity is lost, the forces of gravity will take over, as we see in the case of the young woman.

The L schema: the young woman identifies with her father in the imaginary as in possessor of the symbolic penis. The symbolic penis is an object of exchange.
“In the game of plus or minus”, one either has it or does not have it. She claims to have it.
To have significance and assert control, she must “play by the rules of the game”.
Reading 127-128..

Freud is anxious. He takes her assertion of control personally and even feels that she is going to depose him.

There is a group discussion on the formation of the analyst and desire of the analyst.
Whatever happens in transference is not about “you, the analyst”, but about the symbolic position of the analyst. “Who am I being for this person right now?”
The game of analysis works on the basis of a certain essential frustration, in that it relies on the analyst “being what they are not”, in order to stand in for a missing object.
When, in the first session, the analysand makes of you a subject-supposed-to-know, transference is there, they’ve placed you in a symbolic position as an “expert”, from the very start. You make a mistake to abandon this symbolic position you’ve been granted.
Rather than becoming a mutually satisfying imaginary relationship, analysis ought to be destabilizing and questioning.
The analysand starts off being the phallus for someone else rather than asking their question of their own desire.

We continue with part 2 on page 128.

What might the function of the father be, qua giver? “Is it ever the object that is given?”

A gift is something that circulates, it is culturally coded, e.g. flowers, chocolate, jewelry.
“Nothing for nothing,” is a justification for charging interest on a loan, but taken in a different sense is a description of love. In love, one makes a gift of what one does not have, asking for nothing in return.
As Dora has no place in the circuit between her father and Frau K, Dora implicates herself in the place of Frau K.
What is the resolution of a girl for the Oedipus complex?
There are questions about parental identification. As a matter of individuation Dora must distinguish herself from her mother and so must as a matter of adaptation and resourcefulness identify with the father.
Dora wants to be Frau K. For Dora, she is the answer to the question, “What is it to be a woman?”
Because of this, when Herr K says, “I have nothing towards my wife,” it throws Dora’s whole order “out of whack”.
Note on the German: There is a similarity between the phrases, “I have nothing towards my wife,” and “There is a lack in him towards money”. Rather than simply not having something, it is as if I do have something: a lack.
Discussion about the scholastic distinction between being and existence. Being refers to essence, or what something is conceptually, whereas existence refers to whether something actually is the case or not.

We continue reading from page 133…

There is discussion of Dora’s father as a wealthy industrialist.

Lacan Toronto Reading Group September 12, 2021.

Today’s reading is Lacan’s Seminar IV: The Object Relation and Freudian Structures. We will start the reading at Section 2 of Chapter VII at page 113.

- - Discussion of Tom Svolos’ Australian Lacan group: Paradigm shifts, transferences, aims of psychoanalysis. Questions with Russell Grigg. Well worth attending.

- - Focusing the discussion on page 116, “Freud goes still further…”
  - We begin with the question: why do pre-genital frustrations play themselves out in the Oedipal relation?

Lacan argues against a naturalist position which seeks to explain pre-genital frustration in biological terms.

- - His answer: because, as Freud says, objects of pre-genital drives are easy and familiar to use symbolically. They come to stand in for what the child does not have the words to fully understand about the relation between parents in the bedroom.

- - “Lacan’s Great Insight” – We can find the origin of the child’s use of metaphors here, in the child’s use of words related to pre-genital objects to stand in for what the child does not have other words to describe.

- - Children get the details of adult sexuality wrong, in often absurd ways, but they understand that “something is up”.

- - Young children are not being “merely metaphorical” or poetic, but mean what they say literally, though their statements are in a limited vocabulary.

- - Freud says to little Hans, “Well you are a little scientist, aren’t you?”

- - The child is a scientist, and a playwright. A child’s life is an epistemological project, which implies a construction of reality and libidinal fixations. To make metaphors is to engage in this project, which is a “crucible of their own forging”.

- Continuing to read on page 117,

- - “On the other hand…”Deleted: An explanation of the Z schema: in the Oedipal relation, the child realizes their father has a sanctioned relationship with their mother; the child’s imaginary attempts to block this through the connection of a – a’; and father overcomes the child.

- - The incest taboo is built out of mostly unsaid “no”s and frowns. There is a weaning off of touch and closeness with age as these behaviors become inappropriate, which at the time can be seen as confusing and painful to the child.

- - Oral, anal and phallic stages come to an end with weening, exchange and castration, which is why these can be free-floating metaphors to stand in for what is occurring in the Oedipal relation.

- - The discussion turns to Winnicott and transitional objects.A transitional object is often given as a gift to stand in for the loss of a pre-genital object, for instance, a pacifier is given in the absence of the nipple, a blanket might replace the intimacy of a mother and young child, etc

- - The transitional object is often named by the child, and this name is recognized and repeated by others, and it becomes the inauguration of the child as a speaking subject. For example, naming a doll or teddy bea

- - All culture exists within this space of one thing standing in for another, or something being what it is

- - Cultural objects are then in some sense “transitional objects”, and their accessibility is only limited to those with a shared educational background or reference.

- - Beginning section 3 on page 120, “To end, let’s come back to the case of the young woman in love…
  - Notes on the translation of terms in the Z schema diagrams. A translation of the French “enfant” is missing from the English version. The English translation adds the word “ego” where there is nothing written in the French.

- - The love described in the text is not for the object but for what the object is not, “what is loved in love is what lies beyond the subject”, like the love of a transitional object, it stands in for an absence.

- - There is discussion on unconscious choice of sexual orientation and what this means in relation to contemporary gay rights discourse.

- - A remark on the current acceptance of gay love by the general public, and negative narratives concerning gay sex and positive narratives about gay love. Love is universalizing, whereas sex is seen through a homophobic lens by society.

- - Does Lacan’s view on sexuality open up a more transitory or fluid notion of sexuality beyond a strict biological determinism?

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meetings, September 1, 2023 – July 31, 2024.

Lacan Toronto Reading Group Meetings, September 1, 2022 – July 31, 2023.

September 1, 2021 – July 31, 2022.

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