My four lectures will deal with the same topic: symptom and fantasm. I am making this clear now since some people were uncertain about this. I will stick to this topic because it seems to me to be fundamental for psychoanalytic clinical practice and theory. That is why I will now try to show the clinical importance of the Lacanian matheme barred A.
The desire of the Other
This matheme is translated as “the desire of the Other,” inasmuch as it is necessary for the Other to lack something so that it could have something to desire. But at the same time this is a partial translation. It would not be very interesting to invent and use this kind of writing if it had only one sense. The advantage of barred A lies precisely in the fact that it is unique to at least two significations: 1) the desire of the Other, and 2) a lack in the signifying field.
And this, when dealing with the fantasm, is very useful as the fantasm corresponds both to the manifestation of the desire of the Other and to the manifestation of a lack in the signifying field.
This is why the fantasm appears in the clinical analytic experience as a limit and a resistance to the analyst’s intervention. Freud indicates this in “A Child Is Beaten,” which involves the fantasm’s connection to that barred A. Freud says, “The analyst must admit to him or herself that these fantasms, for the most part, subsist independently of the rest of the content of a neurosis, and ultimately do not have an appropriate location within its structure.”
For us, the formalized translation of that sentence—which I think is essential to this issue of the fantasm—is the link of the fantasm to that lack in the Other as a locus for the signifier. Let us also observe, in Lacan’s graph, how there is a direct connection between barred A and the formula of the fantasm, $ ◊ a.
This is an eminently Freudian connection. The question does not only concern the resistance or reluctance of talking about the fantasm–an experiential datum that all analysts can bear witness to–but also of articulating and formalizing it, because it does not arise from the patient’s ill will, nor is it a resistance on the part of the ego or an aspect of the superego. The truth of the resistance refers precisely to that of its occurrence in the place of the Other, which is a lack in the signifier.
These two aspects of the fantasm must be taken into account: its role as a response to the desire of the Other, and its link to the lack in the signifying field. Otherwise, we will find contradictions in Lacan’s teaching on this topic. Even though it is true that Lacan doesn’t mean the same things all the time, it is possible to maintain one’s bearings by not losing sight of those two senses of the matheme barred A. This matheme is not a gratuitous invention, but rather corresponds in a very precise manner to what appears in the clinic. If there is no interpretation of the fundamental fantasm, it is precisely because it is located in the lack in the signifier—hence we can say that this is the hardest issue in the direction of the cure and also in the end of analysis.
There is a dimension of the analytic experience that is a demand for movement. On the one hand there is the demand, and on the other, how the analyst responds to it. The analytic way of responding is none other than interpretation, and one might say that even though there are many different demands, the fundamental demand on the part of a patient in analysis is a demand for interpretation. There is the demand on the part of the patient in the same way that there is the desire of the analyst as such.
The analyst, for his or her own part, on a first level of experience, can have certain fantasms. This is a problem that I think is a matter of much concern over here, and is one of the reasons for the attention paid to countertransference. In Lacan’s teachings, the desire of the analyst is precisely what erases the question of countertransference. Nonetheless, there are certain fantasms on the analyst’s part, among which a very frequent and well-known one is that of feeding the patient, of breast feeding him or her. But given that the analyst’s breasts are signifying breasts, they find a limit in the patient’s own fantasm, because the patient does not bring it up for interpretation and keeps it hidden. Generally, the fantasm is not subjected to the movement of interpretation and achieving its revelation is a question pertaining to the direction of the cure, to the work proper to the analyst. Hence we can define the fundamental fantasm as that which appears in experience as untouched, as not directly attained by the signifier.
When a theory of the analytic experience is elaborated on the unilateral basis of the dimension of the symptom—that is, exclusively on the basis of the patient’s initial demand—the analysis appears exclusively as merely therapeutic. Its problem is limited to how to cure the symptom.
This is doubtlessly so as described also throughout Lacan’s work. According to Lacan however, the question isn’t about curing the patient of his or her fundamental fantasm, but rather, to place the problem of the end of analysis on the side of the fantasm and not on the side of the symptom.
The aim of the end of analysis is a modification much deeper than at the symptomatic level, for what is aimed at is a certain modification in the subjective position within the fundamental fantasm. This then is not a matter of curing.
Even though the fantasm can be understood as daydreaming, the analytic practice shows that its dimension is extraordinarily broad and varied. In this respect the fundamental fantasm is something like the residue of the development of an analysis. It might even be described as the residue of the interpretation of the symptom. In order to aid the understanding of this topic, we can try and discern three dimensions within the fantasm.
First, the fantasm has an imaginary aspect that corresponds to all that the subject can produce as images, features of both his or her worlds and of characters within his or her environment, etc. This was the first aspect articulated by Lacan, and we can see how all the fantasms are located in one of his first schemes in what appears as the a ——> a’ relation, that is, the imaginary dimension.
This is all a splendid simplification of a whole range of clinical material that no doubt does exist, but which belongs, whatever its varied and extraordinary complexity may be, to the relation between the individual and his or her images. Moreover, there is something else here that can be found in Lacan’s teaching, namely, the fact that this entire dimension can be simplified to demonstrate the direction of the cure.
Let us clarify that there are formulas and expressions of Lacan’s concerning the fantasm in its imaginary dimension which would be meaningless when applied to its other existing dimensions as Lacan had already attempted following this first theorization.
Second, we find the symbolic dimension of the fantasm, a dimension much more hidden that involves the incorporation of little stories dependent on the use of particular rules and on the construction of laws pertaining specifically to language.
Freud’s fundamental text on this topic “A Child Is Beaten” shows this very clearly as it deals with a fantasm that is only a sentence long, and whose three stages are depicted as grammatical variations. That is to say that in Freud’s text there is already a grammar of the fantasm. Of course we must take into account that unlike the imaginary dimension, this symbolic aspect does not appear on a first level of experience. It is only when there is a profusion, when the jungle of the fantasm is completely apparent, that we can obtain it as a sentence with certain grammatical variations. This result cannot be understood by appealing solely to the imaginary, and this can be seen in Écrits as a change in Lacan’s theorizing, a shift in the stress placed initially on the imaginary dimension, towards the question of its symbolic dimension. But this is not all. By effecting this shift, Lacan did not place the stress on the grammar of the fantasm but rather on its logic. As always, a term only acquires its sense in relation to another term which might have been uttered in its stead and was not. That is why the value of the expression “logic of the fantasm” is derived from not having uttered “grammar of the fantasm.” Lacan’s idea arises precisely from this question: what kind of sentence is the fundamental fantasm? You may know the answer already: the fundamental fantasm is the kind of sentence that is known as an axiom in logic. We will see later on what it means for the fantasm as symbolic to be defined as a logical axiom, but of course it must have something to do with the A–the lack in the field of the signifier. But before we go there, let us consider the third dimension of the fantasm, which Lacan deals with at a late stage in the development of his teaching. Even though it may seem paradoxical, the fundamental dimension of the fantasm is its real dimension. Saying that the fantasm is something real within the analytic experience amounts to saying that it is a residue that cannot be modified.
It is an axiom in Lacan’s thought that the Real is the impossible. Here, for instance, it is what is impossible to change. For this reason, the end of analysis for Lacan is the achievement of a modification in the subject’s relation to the Real of the fantasm, which gives rise to the variations of the analytic movement.
Here we also find ourselves faced, above all, with a question pertaining to the training of analysts not reduced to the attendance of conferences, courses, and seminars. The problem is how to achieve that subjective modification of the Real, or the residue of analysis through the means of language and of the signifier, the only options available to the analyst. For these reasons, the direction of the cure requires knowing the precise delimitation between symptoms and fantasms. When the correct orientation is maintained, the development of the cure is characterized by the obtaining of an increasingly pure and tragic fantasm. It is very hard to conduct the cure in this way if the distinction between symptom and fantasm is ignored.
There is a dynamic to the symptom, that although varying in speed is nonetheless dynamic. Whereas on the contrary—expressed by Lacan in “Kant With Sade”—there is a “statics of the fantasm.” That explains the difficulty for the analyst of locating him or herself in a relation with the statics, and why it is easier to just say that it is a resistance or that there are resistances. There is an inertia to the analytic experience, and the solution is being able to see it as the Real, as the residue of the analytic operation itself. In this sense, there is also a truth to the analysis of resistances, the truth of the existence of that Real inertia. But this is not only a negative factor. What must also be highlighted with regard to the fundamental fantasm is the fact that in the development of the cure, the fantasm is increasingly reduced to an essential instant, or the point of an instant; and therefore, it does not possess a temporal dimension. In a 1967 text by Lacan collected in Écrits, we can find the expression “the instant of the fantasm,” which is something whose importance must be borne in mind as it implies that the fantasm does not have the same kind of retroactive time that is characteristic of the symptom.
The fact that the unconscious is structured like a language does not entail that everything can be interpreted, but even what is not interpreted also has a function. I think that the direction of the cure is precisely its use as a tool of that reduced fantasm. That is to say, the fundamental fantasm, which is not interpreted as such, is in itself a tool for analytic interpretation.
The symptom appears to the subject as a subjective opaqueness, as an enigma. The patient does not know what to do with that irruption and that is why he or she demands interpretation. If Lacan places the subject supposed to know at the start of the entry into the analytic process, it is because at that time the patient’s fundamental demand relates to the enigma, to the interrogation caused by his or her own symptom. And the difficulty, which is different in each case, is that the fantasm appears to the subject as transparent as if its reading were immediate. Thus the change that must be achieved in the analysand is aimed at the subject’s considering what is covered by his or her fantasm.
Precisely defining how the fundamental fantasm can be a tool for interpretation is difficult, but I can tell a little story in order to bring us closer to the question while taking advantage of the fact that it is easier for me to talk about this here than in Paris.
This is about a woman who from the very start told me a tale with which she comforted herself. There may be, I must say, a difference between male and female patients in this respect, that it may be easier to obtain a tale from the woman than the man though difficult to prove. Let us leave this on the intuitive level, but I remind you that most of the vignettes in “A Child Is Being Beaten” corresponds to female cases that I do not believe is due to chance. To return to the tale with which this patient would comfort herself, let us say it was very familiar to her and that it served her well from a very young age to become sexually aroused. It can be communicated because it has a simple and delicate nature which allow for its transmission. It is about the following: to be a laundress, to love a priest, to be burnt at the stake as a witch. I must clarify that I hold this patient in high regard, for everything that she brings up in analysis has this precise, strong delimiting quality, which is not generally the case. She is talented in her ability to relate to the unconscious, something about which people differ.
As she is an educated person, she evokes in relation to her fantasm a literary reference which you may know, Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris. This novel tells the story of beautiful Esmeralda, who is not in love with the priest of Notre-Dame. On the contrary, she is in love with a knight even though the priest pursues her. Finally, it is Quasimodo who saves her from the priest’s amorous assaults. On the basis of this well—known plot, the patient introduced a variation consisting of imagining a new Esmeralda who was in love with the priest. Maybe she was led to do so by the fact that her first name is Maria, like the Virgin, Notre-Dame, Our Lady both of Paris and other cities. The fact is, in her fantasm, she identified with the new Esmeralda, a woman connected to an authority figure–a priest, an incarnation par excellence of someone removed from sexual indecency. Others could also inhabit this role so long as they were of a higher class than that of the subordinate position she assigned herself in the story.
Later things lead to a bonfire, something that burns, expressions that are regularly repeated in everything she utters concerning her passions for a series of men throughout her life: “To burn for a man,” “to burn in passion,” “a burning passion.” This evokes what Freud, inThe Interpretation of Dreams formulates as “Father, do you not see that I am burning?” This was one of my associations, which in this case was quite useful because the father’s gaze has for her an essential value. More importantly however was the fact that her father was one—eyed. I must clarify that the presence of that dead eye is in this case structuring, as shown by a sentence that was uttered in her presence by a friend to her father. This melancholy father, who lived in a region on the French coast, always “kept his blue eye on the sea” (where “sea” and “mother”–mer and mère – are homophonous in French). Obviously, her concern is of the eye that is not there gazing at her. It is because of that eye that she unceasingly burns for the men she chooses, men who are married and with whom she only wishes to have violent encounters. From a sexual point of view, these encounters are perfectly satisfactory, but she cannot have daily relations with those men. A difficulty with this case is that, in a way, she has no symptoms to complain about. Moreover, the risk of the analyst taking a place within her series of authoritative men also lends this analytic relation its own difficulty. Anyway, what is essential and what I would like to highlight in the case is that this little story–being a laundress, loving a priest, being burnt at the stake–is a formulation that is completely detached from the rest of the discourse, like an isolated monument while at the same time, the matrix for all her behavior. That is why one should take care to not be hypnotized by the difference between the fantasms and the fantasm. The fantasm is like an accordion: it can cover the entire span of the subject’s life and yet at the same time be the most concealed and atomic thing in the world.
This year, I sought an example which would allow us to return to our path towards the barred A, for it shows precisely the function of the fantasm as a response to the desire of the Other.
It was difficult to find a convincing example of this problem except in the field of culture and literature. Lacan also takes this latter route when he deals with the fantasm. If we compare Freud and Lacan’s respective ways of proceeding on this point, we can observe that the former takes a fantasm from clinical experience, whereas the latter takes a fantasm elaborated in literature, e.g., Sade’s fantasm. There is a reason to choose this latter path—namely, that is it very hard to publicly narrate one’s own cases. You have to cross the Atlantic to do so. But there is another reason, which is that a fantasm such as Sade’s attains a certain level of objectivity through its literary production that allows for careful scrutiny. Of all of Lacan’s texts, “Kant With Sade” contains the most cultural references. It makes references to all of French literature, particularly that of the 18th and 19th centuries. Last year, I held a seminar with some people in order to follow up on these references: it took thirty people working for a year to collect them all.
Diana and Actaeon
Thus I believe it is possible to take a properly literary source as an emblematic example. I have chosen one that was considered a sort of game for writers in various centuries, as well as for painters mainly from the Baroque. It alludes, I believe, to an experience of the fantasms, because it is a presentation or illustration of the fantasmatic instant. The instant which, as stated in the $ ◊ a formula, fixates the subject to a given place.
Let us observe that the subject of the signifier has no such place. He or she moves with the signifier and can appear here or there. In the fantasm, by contrast, there is a place for the subject–a fixed, peculiar, concealed place, which may seem ridiculous. Perhaps that is why everyone laughs when someone else fantasm is described. But everyone has his or her own fantasm. The fantasmatic instant which I have chosen is the story of Diana and Actaeon.
This is somewhat a shared fantasm, a common machination in the literature of the Baroque, illustrating what Lacan calls the “instant of seeing,” because that is what it is about, seeing the naked goddess and the consequences of that act. Several relevant topics appear in the story of Diana and Actaeon, and different topics might be highlighted. There is the topic of beauty caught unawares, the topic of the vision of the eye, the topic of the hunter, the topic of the dogs, etc. Hence the feeling that in the $ ◊ a formula, the lozenge is merely a mark rather than a function. Writing does not posit the existence of a fantasm in a sentence, but rather this occurs through the fixation of the subject by a special object.
I will briefly summarize this well—known story. Actaeon, a hunter, is lost in the forest–or that of fantasms–when suddenly, on turning a bend in his path, he comes across the naked goddess Diana, bathing with her nymphs. 
Afterward, he is turned into a stag by the goddess and torn to pieces by dogs which she sets upon him. I have in Paris a catalogue of pictures on this story, a countless number of illustrations. Some correspond to the previous moment, when Actaeon approaches; others to the very instant of seeing the goddess. There are also those which depict –even rarer–Actaeon being devoured by the dogs. An image can also be found in Lacan’sÉcrits. He uses this reference two or three times, but not with regard to the fantasms but for his baroque commentary. Among the goddesses, Diana is the virgin goddess. She is also cruel and malevolent. She is a huntress herself, even though in this story she is hunted by the hunter. Hunted but not married, because she epitomizes the goddess who rejects marriage. Actaeon, for his own part, is not only a hunter but a voyeur.
Afterward, he is turned into a stag by the goddess and torn to pieces by dogs which she sets upon him. I have in Paris a catalogue of pictures on this story, a countless number of illustrations. Some correspond to the previous moment, when Actaeon approaches; others to the very instant of seeing the goddess. There are also those which depict –even rarer–Actaeon being devoured by the dogs. An image can also be found in Lacan’sÉcrits. He uses this reference two or three times, but not with regard to the fantasms but for his baroque commentary. Among the goddesses, Diana is the virgin goddess. She is also cruel and malevolent. She is a huntress herself, even though in this story she is hunted by the hunter. Hunted but not married, because she epitomizes the goddess who rejects marriage. Actaeon, for his own part, is not only a hunter but a voyeur.
Let us remember that Diana is the inhuman figure par excellence insofar as talking about woman as “the inhuman” or “the inhumane” was a typical expression in 17th century drama, and even earlier than that, in courtly love. Diana’s refusal to submit to the choice of sex can lead us to regard her, perhaps, as a hysteric. Lacan identifies her with truth in the sense of the truth which he makes speak in “The Freudian Thing.” Truth, as is well known, is a woman, and this justifies the identification which I propose: taking Diana as an emblem and to reflect on her history as a subject. This is further justified on the basis that Actaeon, obviously, appears at the end, when he is devoured by dogs, as a remainder, an object. “Being devoured by dogs” is also what happens to Athalie in Racine’s eponymous tragedy, from which Lacan took his example for the quilting point.
We can say that in the story we are commenting on, Diana disrobes herself, se dérobe, which in French means both that she undresses and that she escapes. She escapes when the desire of that poor Other, Actaeon, is made manifest. Diana is precisely the goddess who wishes the Other to remain Other, and that is her properly mythological function. That is why she stays among her nymphs all the time, having relations only with her animals, be it to kill them or to make them fight. Like the case, Diana is the one who rejects man. There is a modern work that contrasts to the story of Diana and Actaeon. It is Marcel Duchamp’s piece The married woman undressed by single men. It really is the opposite since the problem of Diana among the gods is that she is unmarried.
Let us now perform small variations on these stories that are so well structured. What would happen for instance, if in the story of Diana facing the desire of the Other, she were to be phobic? Not hard to answer. If Diana was phobic—which is not completely impossible in mythology—her dogs would already be there before Actaeon’s approach. They are at the forefront, and whenever the Other’s desire is made manifest, the dogs are already there, barking. What is extraordinary about phobia is that the dogs bark against the subject in order to only avoid the approach of the desire of the Other.
Lacan, who I don’t think speaks about a phobic fantasm but about a phobic desire, provides the following formula for the latter, “Phobic desire is a wary desire.” Which means exactly that the dogs bark before Actaeon approaches. They act as a sign signaling the desire of the Other, and thus the subject is made aware, wary and warned of the Other’s approach. Put otherwise, the dogs anticipate, they are the sign that anticipates what was pointed out and prevents the Other’s desire from coming near. In this variation, the premise would be that Diana is afraid of her own dogs, in the same way Little Hans was afraid of horses. Both are ways of protecting oneself against the anxiety caused by the desire of the Other. In addition, let us remark on the presence of animals, which is fundamental in phobia.
What would the situation be, however, if Diana was a hysteric? Maybe, in mythology, she is a hysteric. On the one hand, she demands that her “semblances” (in the technical Lacanian sense of the term) be respected, and her evident phallic value can be seen when she is depicted naked. But in the story itself, she requires veils, and she may be a hysteric who uses her veils to provoke the Other’s temptation to discover her. We do not know what’s going on in Diana’s head, but it might even be the case that she set up Actaeon’s approach in order to kill him later. Here we have the contradiction Freud mentions when he described the hysterical attack of a subject whose pantomime consisted in two opposite movements: with one hand she held her dress while with the other hand she removed it. For Freud, this is typical of the hysteric fantasm, because the hysteric behaves both as a man and as a woman. On one hand, she protects herself—as a woman—against man’s desire, and on the other she behaves like a man who will tear off her dress. Later on, I may talk a bit about this presentation by Freud of the hysteric’s fantasm with its contradictions regarding nakedness which he sees as an expression of bisexuality. For the time being, all that can be said about the story of Diana and Actaeon is that both movements are mutually detached.
We could also say something about what it would be like if Diana was an obsessive.
In mythology, she is a bit obsessive, being completely obsessed by the hunt, her exclusive passion. If she was an obsessive however, Diana would not unleash her dogs on Actaeon following the instant of seeing; but rather, she would send them after him once Actaeon was three miles away. In the same way as we have the Rat Man, we could also talk now about the Dog Woman. What is important is that many variations on this theme exist. For example, we can invert the structure of the fantasm constructing things through Actaeon’s eyes. This case can be considered without any problems because there is no doubt that Diana is the fascinum of the fantasm. The disappearance of poor Actaeon at the end of the story can thus represent the eclipsing of the subject. We can see that, unlike feelings which are mutual, desire does not necessarily correspond to the Other’s desire. The premise of the story is that there seem to be anxiety-prone gods. The gods were not neurotic however but only induced anxiety, but maybe Diana was an exception. That is why I think that what is most peculiar about this story and the reason for its fascination is that it suggests that there is a man who is capable of making a goddess anxious. Clearly, the goddess made him disappear straight away.
It seems to me that this can also help us to locate the dichotomy between desire and jouissance where we find the neurotic. The neurotic can be said to defend him or herself against jouissance by means of desire, whereas the pervert, by contrast, assumes desire as a will to enjoy. The pervert’s fantasm is founded on a distancing from and a setting aside of the Other’s demand–on a question, thus, of subjection or coercion. Sacher von Masoch used to negotiate with his wife in order to have her coerce him, which we know because she left us her Memoirs of her relationship with von Masoch. Frau Masoch was a saint.
For a masochist, a naked Diana is not interesting. He requires a dressed Diana, if possible, in furs. Here we might have another possible variation on the story of Diana and Actaeon. Actaeon has never been depicted trying to see a Diana dressed in furs–a variation which would result, by the way, in a difference in structure. Here we can see the illusory nature of the masochistic machine, and we should take into account the fact that in the perverse structure these kinds of objects caused by its fantasm appear all the time.
If the pervert says nothing about the dichotomy between desire andjouissance, it is because he or she accepts the Other’s jouissance. He or she accepts to become the instrument for the Other’sjouissance. Lacan’s entire reading of Sade’s fantasm shows that what is concealed therein is precisely the fact that the pervert, through his or her fantasm, agrees to become the instrument for the Other’s jouissance. What is remarkable about Sade is the extraordinary amount of work that those torturers do. They are very hard-working, sometimes in excess of one hundred and twenty days. Everyone else, by contrast, is given. It is true that they are given blows, but nonetheless they are given. Such is the scenario in Sade, and if there is a connection between perversion and male desire, it is that the aim of male desire is to provide the instrument. This differs from the connection between women and sublimation. Sublimation amounts to doing something with nothing. Whereas the pervert attacks, the neurotic defends him or herself. And the neurotic defends him or herself by way of the very desire that arouses his or her anxiety. That is why we are facing a paradoxical knot–namely, that things get tough for the neurotic when the dogs aren’t there.
For Lacan, phobia–that is, where the dogs are–is not a very special clinical entity at all. In Latin America phobia is usually regarded as a great clinical structure, but for Lacan phobia is rather a sort of rotating platform, a previous moment where a clinical structure can be found. That is to say, in a true phobia there is no fantasm because the dogs are really there. The problem in hysteria and obsession is that the dogs are not there when the Other’s desire is made manifest. Which is a great problem indeed. You are probably familiar with the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” The crucial moment in that story is when on a certain night the hound of the Baskervilles do not bark. Thus there must be some problem and Sherlock Holmes is be called for.
What happens then when the dogs are not there to respond to the manifestation of the Other’s desire? Both in hysteria and in obsession the fantasm must be dealt with in such a way that the Other appears as whole. That is to say, deal with things in such a way that the Other appears, for instance, as lord and master of his desire, which amounts to his being left desireless. In order for a desire to exist, eyes must be closed at some point, for all seeing kills desire. There is a 19th century novel by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, called The Future Eve, about a mechanical woman who is the prettiest, most loving, most intelligent, and also the most subjected woman in the world. Lacan says about this highly important female character that the difficulty to enter into a relationship with her lies in the fact that she is all-seeing. Seeing kills all desire. That is why desire shuts its eyes and here we are faced also with a problem regarding Actaeon. Why not represent a blind Actaeon? How can a whole Other be produced in hysteria? We can observe how the hysteric deals with his or her fantasm in the analytic cure, and how the hysteric deals with his or her fantasm in the dogs’ absence because, I insist, there are only dogs in phobia, not in hysteria.
A hysterical subject presents him or herself as someone who has no place within the Other, as someone who has no lodging within the Other. For this reason, the hysterical subject par excellence is $, the crossed-out subject, a placeless subject, a subject who has no room within the Other.
Essentially, this is what the hysteric complains about in a peculiar way according to the occasion. He or she complains in the analytic experience about that lack of a signifier which might attach him or her to the Other.
Diana moves in the forest and is no city-dweller, but if she was a hysteric, even if she lived in a city, it would be just the same as if she was in the forest. A hysterical subject carries the forest within him or herself and a hysterical woman presents herself as a jungle woman. Maybe I see things in this way because my Paris office is near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where there are various nymphs, as well as poets, students, scientists… A very rich and diverse environment. However, I do not think that it is because of the Jardin du Luxembourg that the hysteric appears as a place without lodging.
What might give the hysteric a place? Precisely, a signifier to represent him or her. The following diagram of Lacan’s is for those subjects who have a signifier that represents them:
But the fundamental hysterical problem in neurosis is precisely that the subject presents him or herself as such without its signifying place:
The subject presents him or herself as not having submitted, as rebellious against a signifier, and thus, fundamentally as homeless or as crushed by a home, keeping voluntarily aside with respect to mankind. When a hysterical subject comes to see us, he comes to seek a place within the Other, and that is how we must receive him or her: as a subject who comes to seek a place within the Other and who can find it. Sometimes this can cause difficulties such as the subject’s taking the analyst’s office for his or her home; and if this seems difficult to manage, it is more so because the subject sees disturbing other people’s lives through analysis as an insult. The hysteric thinks that he or she has the duty to teach the Other, whom he or she believes to be whole, the truth of desire. Because the hysteric thinks that the Other is whole, he or she thinks that it is their duty to take charge of the lack and show it. The analyst must respect the hysteric’s semblances, of which there are many, because they make it possible for the hysteric to be somehow attached to the Other, instead of a signifier.
The obsessive attaches him or herself to the Other as a tenaciously held-to signifier, which is much harder for the hysteric since their attachment, although resistant, is frail and ever changing. There are not only seven veils but many, and the hysteric does not know if there is something beneath them, leading at times to their complaints about being a liar. This hysterical complaint, which is sometimes presented in the most distracted and tangential manner, is one of the most tragic things in the world. It is true that the way in which hysteria makes itself manifest has changed, but we can still find the same thing that Freud did: its original lie. No doubt the Other has changed and that originary lie no longer has as much scope to show its effects, to develop its possibilities. More consistent masters than us are required for that. But if hysterical manifestations are less spectacular, we still find what Freud saw and Lacan wrote as $.
We must take into account the fact that by comparison to a hysteric the analyst seems clumsy, but it is in the hysteric that the pain of existence must be found in that fundamental void. That is why, in the direction of the cure, we must respect hysterics’ semblances and allow them to make and produce their own counterfeit coin. They are prone to counterfeiting. I accepted counterfeit money from a hysteric for a year: she would pay me with checks, on the condition that I wouldn’t go to the bank and cash them. I accepted this game, even though later on, obviously, and with her consent, I did go to the bank (one shouldn’t work for nothing). But that game must be respected because it is not a trap but a desire. This is proven by the fact that it was perfectly compatible with the fact that she would give me presents. She would give me gifts, and what is a gift when given by a hysterical analysand? It is a way of being represented in the analyst’s office, of inscribing him or herself in the Other, of remaining there during his or her physical absence. It may be that a hysteric finds it hard to leave at the end of the session because of a certain adhesiveness. One might say that the hysteric is annoying, or, as we say in French, an emmerdeur or emmerdeuse. But it is inelegant to say so, because what we must consider is that this is the hysteric’s way of taking a place within the Other, whom the hysteric believes to be made of concrete, and within whom the hysteric want to carve out a hole for him or herself. The hysteric would like to cross out the analyst as Other, to command the analyst and reveal that the analyst—who thought that he or she was a whole A—is an A. That is why it is also necessary in the direction of the cure to prove to the analysand that the analyst is no such whole A by showing him or her the existence of a desire. The cure of a hysteric cannot be carried out without showing that lack, as clinically remarked by Lacan in Écrits. Everything is in the manner, in the way of showing it, which is peculiar to each case. But it is an inevitable moment in the analysis of the hysterical subject. This is not a seduction as is often crudely put. What we are doing is highlighting the lack in the Other. The hysterical subject demands to be believed, but at the same time doesn’t believe him or herself, and it is due to this fundamental falsity that the hysterical subject is the most appropriate subject to represent truth. For truth never appears naked, as one imagines, but always dressed. Even if she were naked, we would have to see beyond the dress of her skin, as illustrated by that short story by Alphonse Allais in which the dancer is flayed after the seven veils are dropped.
The obsessive deals with his or her fantasm in a very different way, but we will talk about this in the next lecture.
Answers to Questions
1. Question on the grammar of the fantasm. This is just an allusion to the way in which Freud deals with the fantasm in “A Child Is Beaten.” In that text, he detects minimal grammatical transformations—for instance, from the passive to the active voice—which are nonetheless enough to talk about a grammar of the fantasm. What is important, as an introduction to what will follow, is that what Lacan stresses is not the grammar of the fantasm—a stress that Freud doubtlessly accepts—but another symbolic dimension, which is the logic of the fantasm. This is rather undeveloped however as in his seminar on La logique du fantasmethere is actually very little on the fantasm. Nonetheless, he does stress it at the end and somewhat enigmatically: the fantasm is like an axiom.
2. Question on Chomskian grammar. We will stay on a level much closer to the clinic than that which would be involved should be wonder about Chomskian grammar. I could talk about this topic, for four or five years ago, when Chomsky’s Rules and Representation was published, I gave a seminar on it in order to show how Lacan, in just two lines in “The Agency of the Letter,” rejected the whole biological dimension assumed by Chomsky. This is not exactly the topic that concerns us, but I can include the following sentences by Lacan: “Language cannot be confused with the organs that play that role in the individual”—that is to say, language is not a question of individual production. Our fundamental point of view is that “language preexists a subject’s entry into it.” It exists before the question of learning it arises. That is why the problem amounts to knowing how a subject, an individual, enters a language which already exists. Even more, how language already exists for each of us before the individual’s existence. It is not only Lacan, Popper also saw this. That is why, for us, the subject is produced on the basis of that preexisting language, and we don’t regard the problem of the organic nature of grammar as a relevant question. This was Lacan’s view already in 1957, and allows us to avoid Chomsky’s speculations–who is a great linguist but a non—entity as a biologist.
3. Question on whether the woman’s inability to have relationships with men in this case might be taken as a symptom. For us it would be, but at least for the time being, it isn’t one for her—we’ll see if she changes her mind. She is satisfied like this, and does not expect to change. What is difficult, but also interesting for what comes next, is that we must wait. We must wait and see whether she will symptomatize it. This may not be immediate. In a way, analysis contributes a bit to upholding this situation. For on the one hand, she can have an intense and non—physical love relationship with it, while yet on the other, she can keep those physical encounters separate. So we are faced with a certain immobility of the device. Without going into too much detail, I can say that in a certain way the configuration of this case is that of a masculine problematic, or rather, that of separation: on one hand, love (even though analytic, it is love), and on the other hand, sex. Lacan points out that the feminine erotic problem allows love and desire to converge upon the same object. We talk about desire even though it is a desire that is also jouissance—Lacan hadn’t distinguished between both concepts yet. The masculine erotic problem, however, consists in the fact that there is a divergence between both. This patient’s problem, if she has one, is precisely that she lives within this convergence. The way she treats the men she sleeps with! Sometimes they desire some of her love, but when they make that demand manifest, she brutally rejects them.
4. Question on the relation between fantasm and object a. The fundamental fantasms presents that objet a to us as the product of the analytic discourse itself. This is something that can be hard to understand in Lacan, the fact that in a way the objet a is a production of our own operation. But in order to understand it, we must think about that decantation of the fundamental fantasm. It is quite a responsibility for the analyst’s desire to be to obtain the fundamental fantasm of a subject, because obtaining it is no fun task. I think this is the very responsibility of the analytic act. That revelation also takes place exactly at the time when the subject supposed to know falls, when the lack in the Other, his annulation, is made manifest.
5. Question on the opposition between symptom and fantasm and the relation to the Real. It is true that the opposition between symptom and fantasm is something that I glimpsed in 1980, but with the deepening of my own analytic practice it has become even stronger. For me, and I believe that also for the French audience of my course that year, it was a novelty which required both changing some previous views and discovering that that difference and opposition was already in Lacan and in a way, also in Freud. That year, I found it hard to understand the articulation of the Real in the fantasm, its nature as a remainder of the analytic operation with its aspect as a phrase. How can its Real nature and its aspect as an articulated phrase be understood? How can the fantasm be located as Real and symbolic at the same time? One answer would be to see what the fantasm makes manifest, namely, that there is a Real aspect to the symbolic. A Real aspect of the symbolic is exactly the sense I give Lacan’s phrase “the fantasm is an axiom.” I think that this might be a way of expounding how a signifying articulation can take the place of the Real, because the axiom is what remains unchanged in a logical system, what founds the system but is separate from it. And this coincides exactly with an extraordinary quote from Freud: “The analyst must admit to him or herself that these fantasms, for the most part, subsist independently of the rest of the content of a neurosis, and ultimately do not have an appropriate location within its structure.” I think that when Lacan says “the fantasm is an axiom,” what he is aiming at is the formalization of Freud’s insight and of the way of seeing how a symbolic articulation can take at the same time the place of something Real, something unchanging. This however, places the fantasm in a very paradoxical position, which explains why the literature on the fantasm is much smaller than the literature on the formations of the unconscious. There is only analytic literature on imaginary fantasms—something that Lacan criticized, because a catalogue of fantasms explains nothing. The symbolic articulation of experience must be discovered. Hence his belief that locating that limit point of the fundamental fantasm is indispensable for the cure. But this does mean forgetting the symptom. The title of my seminar in Paris this year is “Two clinical dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm,” from which I have taken the title of this seminar. But in Paris, one month after I started my course, the title was already a bit different: “From the symptom to the fantasm and back.” The analyst’s duty has also to do with symptoms, but a detour through the fantasm must take place. This is what Lacan indicates. Tomorrow we will see where the symptom and the fantasm must be located, and what Freud’s thesis is in this respect. Freud’s first insight when dealing with hysterics was that the fantasm is involved in the symptom. He thought that there is a fantasm inside every symptom–something that can be seen exactly the same in Lacan’s graph if we pay attention to the immediate implication between s (A), the place of the symptom, and $ ◊ a, the place of the fantasm.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Lacan.com
