Previously I spoke of the mediated character of desire, and I recalled the well known Hegelian saying, desire is the desire of the other. As a matter of fact, this mediated character was already known to Immanuel Kant. In his Pure Practical Reason he mentions the story of the French king who said, referring to a city his brother wanted to capture, “I want what my brother wants,” from which Kant concluded that the relation between one human’s will and another’s cannot be anything but conflictual. In other words, you can’t deduce moral law from empirical experience. I added that Lacan retained the notion of the mediated character of desire, but gave it a different turn: desire as mediated not by another ego (le semblable) but by the Other, with a big O, considered to be the place of language and truth. This gives desire a different character and leads to a different dialectic. And we may now remark that if desire has the capacity of bringing peace to the conflict between wills, it is because it is itself mediated by law.
Given that the Other is considered as the place of language, the question then arises, what is the elementary form of language? According to Aristotle language is there to say something; assertion is the primitive form of language. But the fact is, as Lacan remarked, the first form of speech is the demand: one first speaks not to assert something but to demand something. Now the demand is, by definition, addressed to the Other, and this experience of the Other is at the same time an experience of her desire, inasmuch as the Other will answer according to her wish, by saying either yes or no.
This experience of the Other’s desire is also an experience that makes me feel that I realize in my being, at the level of worthiness or unworthiness, some intrinsic value, which is translated by the Other’s acceptance or rejection of my demand. This experience of the Other’s desire, inasmuch as she may answer yes or no, is moreover an experience of the commutative nature of the signifier, or of what Roman Jacobson names the metaphoric axis of language. This leads to what he calls the connective or combinatory axis, inasmuch as a child has to combine signifiers in order to articulate her demand. But what is important is that, in front of the mystery of the desire of the Other, the child is completely helpless. This experience of helplessness is the essence of what Freud calls trauma. According to Lacan it is at this very place of helplessness or anxiety that desire is produced, which amounts to saying that in its very essence desire is a defense. For Freud, as you know, all defense is defense against desire, which is fundamentally right. But according to Lacan, desire is itself defense, a defense against the desire of the Other.
Here one may add the precision that the subject defends herself with her ego, or with some element borrowed from the register of the imaginary relation to the Other. That’s what’s going on when, for example, the child transforms her shit into a gift. What this gift or offer expresses is not simply an exhibition of prestige, something akin to what takes place in the relation with a small other. What is at stake here is the subject herself; as a speaking subject she is the gift.
Here we grasp the originality of Lacan’s theory of the fantasy. The formula of the fantasy according to him is this:
The barred S is the subject herself, the speaking subject as such, marked by the effects of the signifier. The letter a is the element borrowed from the imaginary field. The function of the fantasy is to fix and define the subject’s desire, which is why human desire has the property of being coordinated not to real objects, but to fantasies. This conception of desire entails an answer to the question of what the unconscious means: it means that the subject never enjoys complete possession of her being, that there is always some distance between her and this being of her, which forbids attaining it except, as Lacan says, through that metonymy of being called desire. For example, she attains it in the aforementioned anal object.
What is the reason for this so-called flight of being? It is clear that being would not escape us if there could be a complete and definite answer to the question, what am I? In other words, being escapes the subject because, at the level in which the subject is engaged in its relation to the Other as the place of language and truth, there is no signifier that can answer this question. According to Lacan, however, this lack of a signifier is itself a signifier, and is indicated in the unconscious by a signifier, namely the phallus. But in his seminar on desire and its interpretation, Lacan said that the lacking signifier is the phallus, which seems to be a contradiction, since the very fact of naming it seems to be proof that it doesn’t lack. Before giving this answer, however, and for no other apparent reason than to relax his audience, he gave a narration of a witticism, which Darwin had mentioned in his book about the expression of emotions, because it somehow started him off.
The story was that Darwin had attended a meeting in British high society where people were socializing, when they began to discuss Lady York, who was very old and gravely ill. I mean everybody there knew her days were numbered. Then an Englishman said something to the effect, “I heard Lady York was overlooked,” and everyone immediately understood that she was overlooked by death. Thus, the man succeeded in evoking death without calling it by name. And that’s what caught Darwin’s attention, how you can say something without naming it.
The moral of the story is that you can’t say what death is, even if you do name it, because in this sense a name is insufficient. Suppose the man had said, “I hear Lady York hasn’t yet died,” this would not presentify death, it would simply be news. Or suppose he even went so far as to say, “I wish Lady York would die”; this would simply be a death wish. And, as a matter of fact, a death wish completely masks death as “the final destiny” or as “the final word of life,” or as “the last judgment,” or as “the absolute master.” Even here you see I can’t name it, I can only accumulate metaphors. Of course we can talk about death inasmuch as it structures life. We can say, for example, that it is because we forget death at almost every moment of our lives that at the end of our lives we feel as though we were strangers to all we had lived, to all we had gone through. But to talk about it as a structure is not the same as saying what death is.
The same thing is true for the phallus, inasmuch as it is articulated only in the unconscious. I mean that speaking about the way it structures our relation to language, or to the Other as the place of language, or to the unconscious, is different than saying what it is. Like death, the phallus lies outside the field of representation; we can only “represent” it through metaphor. This means that we cannot, so to speak, put our hand on it, and if we do it’s something else, for example the fetish.
There is a point here that must be underlined. I said two things: (1) there is no signifier that can tell us what we are, and (2) this signifier is the phallus. Suppose I had stopped with the first assertion. This would mean all talk is in vain, because nothing definite could ever be said, and that what is between you and me is simply absence of any definition, that is, absence of any true answer. And then you would have to say that speech is a complete stranger to the dimension of truth, which would not be able to find its place in this state of things. But Freud’s experience shows there is a point to speaking, and that point is castration. A fear of passivity in the man; this for him was the rock that couldn’t be crossed.1 (Whether it is as rocky as all that and whether there may be a means to traverse it is another question.) What is important is that there is a point to speech, and the point takes its shape as castration, independent of the question of whether or not it can be surmounted or overcome. And it is precisely because lack proves itself at the end of the psychoanalytic experience as having a definite point (the point called phallic) that the dimension of truth comes into play, as introduced in discourse.
It is interesting here to notice that it is the lack in the set of signifiers that brings about the lack in the imaginary, mentioned earlier when I said that the paternal metaphor engenders an imaginary object. In fact, it is an object that can never appear, not even in the imaginary. It’s a case of something imaginary that isn’t specular, a case of that which escapes the image. It is more like a thought of an image than an image. It appears in the mirror as an absence,2 regarding which the boy feels his insufficiency and the girl her lack. That’s why the girl sees her image through the image of the other sex, where her lack seems to be defined, and that’s why the boy seeks the cancellation of his insufficiency in the image of his father or father substitute, the image of the leader he supposes is not insufficient. In each case the mirror image is marked by a break or cut from that, which would have made each of them complete and perfect. This is the precise cut or lack that mediates all object relations, in the case of the girl or the boy, since otherwise each of them would be drowned in complete sufficiency, in complete narcissistic satisfaction with her or his own image. That’s why we may say there is nothing like primary narcissism in the sense of a complete one. Primary narcissism is rather an inspiration.
To repeat: this imageless image of the phallic object appears only as absence and this absence is the very absence where we are. At this place where being lacks, the lack through the operation of the paternal metaphor proves to be the lack of being the phallus, or of castration. The subject tries to cancel this lack by imagining that the Other possesses the object she lacks, so that she may recuperate her completeness through identification with that Other. This is the mechanism of idealization, which usually goes with the movement of what Freud calls regression from object relations to identifications. Idealization inaugurates identification with the object.
This means that accession to object relations proper goes hand in hand with the perception of the lack of being, or of being the phallus as a lack, which is as well shared by the Other as by the subject herself. The rock of castration is, in the final account, the rock of castration of the Other.3 Here we touch the point of the desire of the analyst.
But for the moment, let us return to the question of the interpretation of desire. To deal with this question we have to add some words concerning desire in its relation to the demand. Lacan’s first reflections concerning this difference between desire and demand probably began with his reading of Freud’s Jewish stories. Most of them are stories of demands made by people of humble means. What brings about the comic character of these stories and the pleasure we take in them comes from the revelation of the desires that the demands disguise. That’s why a simple answer to the demand misses the point, the point of desire. The demand is for a small sum of money, but the desire is to eat salmon mayonnaise. The demand is to be cured from an ailment, but the desire is to enjoy the most expensive spa in the world. The subject not only borrows from the Other her signifiers as the place of language, she borrows only those signifiers the Other authorizes her to take. The articulation of the demand is submitted to a certain censorship.
Another point regarding the distinction between desire and demand concerns the evolution of the relation between the mother and her child. Lacan distinguishes between two moments. In the first moment the mother has value only as a presence or as an absence, that is, she is symbolic; she has no value other than that she is either here or not here, and the object itself is an object that is real, which brings out its effects concerning the satisfaction of needs without the child being aware of it. You may say that while the mother is symbolic, the object is real.
The second phase begins when the child starts making demands for herself. When the child becomes the agent of the demand, the first state of things is reversed. Then the mother becomes real, in the sense that she becomes a power that can either give or refuse to give, while the object becomes symbolic, as a mere sign of love. Then the demand, if I may say so, becomes double. It is an expression of need, but at the same time it’s a demand for love, or for a sign of love. This means that the object, since it’s been reduced simply to its value as a sign of love and nothing more, loses its particularity. If an object fails to function as a sign of love, the child won’t give a damn for it. The exact wording of the demand at this level is not, “Give me this object,” but “Give me this object to show me you love me.”
But then, curiously enough, our experience shows that the object reappears as an object of desire, that is, as an absolute condition without which there is no possible satisfaction. It is inasmuch as the breast, for example, is neither an object of need nor an object of love that it functions as the cause of oral desire. This means that it is in the interval, between the demand as an expression of need and the demand as an expression of love, that the object regains its particularity as an object of desire, which as such can be described by a double negation: it is neither a sign of love nor an object of need. What is the reason for this return of particularity?
Here we join up with what was already said about desire being defense. The return of particularity is the very condition for there being a subject at all. Indeed, it is through the production of desire as an absolute condition that the subject is not simply a living puppet, at the disposal of the Other, although she may come to identify herself with the object of the Other’s desire, through confusing the Other’s desire with the Other’s demand. This enables us to understand why the subject is so keen to defend her desire as such, by keeping it away from satisfaction, and so much so that you may say the subject doesn’t even want what she desires. Recall the dream of the butcher’s beautiful wife. Although she desired caviar, she didn’t want it, which is why we may say that her desire was the Other’s desire. To Freud, all defense is defense against desire, and we now see what this means: all defense is defense against the satisfaction of desire.4 Or, you may say again, all defense is defense against the lack of the lack.
The experience that first attracted Lacan’s attention to this paradoxical status of the object of desire seems to have been the phenomenon relating to feminine sexuality.5 At some moment in her development a little girl demands the phallus from her mother, a demand as alienated from the natural order of things as anything can be. It amounts to demanding the impossible. A little girl asks her mother, “Mother, give me something,” with it being completely understood that nothing the mother can give will ever be that something. One may say that things go this way because such an impossible demand is what maintains her as a subject of the signifier (she can always go on demanding) and therefore as a subject of language. So here we are able to see, in its full ambiguity, the state of desire. It is structured like a demand, but it goes in the opposite direction. Its objects (for example, caviar for the butcher’s beautiful wife) are only metonymic signifiers of unsatisfied desire. (But this is not a catastrophe; it simply means that the only satisfaction that can be given to a desire is not the attainment of an object, but the gift of a complementary lack.)
Since one may say, however, that the subject both desires and doesn’t desire the metonymic object, how then is interpretation possible? To answer this question, Lacan mentions a dream that was reported by Freud in his paper, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,”6 where he speaks about the pleasure principle and the reality principle. At the end of this short paper he reports the dream of a man whose father had died after a long illness that had caused his father terrible suffering. Right after his father’s death, this man dreamed he was standing in front of his father and his father was talking to him and in this dream he felt immense pain because he realized that his father was dead but didn’t know it. Freud says this absurd dream becomes completely intelligible when you add to the phrase “that he was dead,” “according to the dreamer’s wish.”7 This implies that for Freud interpreting this dream consisted in restoring the omitted part of the phrase to the analysand.
But may we consider this to be the kind of interpretation that ought to be given to an analysand? His dream is a fantasy, which has an element that comes from the imaginary: his father appears, as the object of his rivalry, and it is from this rivalry that the subject may forget the possibility of his own death. So we may indeed suppose that his father’s death struck him so closely he had to regress to his old oedipal wish, in order to restore the figure of his father as his rival. But if that’s so, what’s the point of restoring the omitted part of the phrase to him? While it’s true it was omitted, this very omission is itself a signifier, a signifier of his refusal to equalize his own destiny to that of his father’s, which is why he regressed to the primal father image. So, the question is then: If the dream’s wish lies in this fantasy, what about the analysand’s desire outside his dream? Is his desire outside his dream to be awakened to what we may call the dream’s message as betrayed by the omission in the text of the dream, or is it to not be awakened to this message, and to keep on refusing his mortal reality?
It is true that the subject’s desire outside the dream was also a fantasy, which is why one may say that his waking life was something of a dream. But a fantasy is a lie, and as such it is the negation of some truth. And by coming to light it indicates the presence of that truth. So the question may be put again: Is the analysand’s desire to be told his fantasy, or is it to be enabled to recognize the message of his dream?
This example shows that the difference between the dream wish and desire corresponds fairly to the two mediations we began by recalling. We saw the Hegelian view of mediation, that the desire of the small other leads to rivalry and generates a lack, which is frustration. But according to Lacan, the symbolic order introduces a different form of lack, which is called castration. And you may say, using this example of the dream related by Freud, that desire consists precisely in interpretation, if we mean by this word the acknowledgment of the dream’s message.
Question: Could you say more on the gift of a complementary lack?
Suppose you go out with a friend, and she sees a particular object that she likes, perhaps a vase or a lamp. This may be considered as an expression of her desire, but it doesn’t imply that she necessarily wants to acquire that object. To give her the object is not for sure the way to answer her desire. But suppose you happen to have the same appreciation for that particular object and you express it at the same time, this coincidence between two desires will surely be a source of joy for both of you. Similarly, if a girl falls in love, what she wants in exchange, if one may say so, is not any particular object; she will find certain satisfaction in no other gift than that of your own love, your lack. This is a point that is at the source of many misunderstandings, because we normally consider a gift to be of something we have, not of something we haven’t.
Question: What are the consequences for psychoanalysis when you have a lacking subject who comes to analysis thinking that the analyst is complete and has the answer to his lack? Do you say that the best gift is to show him that you are lacking too?
The analyst doesn’t proceed like Socrates in The Symposium. Of course Alcibiades’s transference consisted in his idealization of Socrates. He makes recourse to the simile of the agalma, of the little boxes with ugly figures on the outside, but hidden inside is a beautiful statue of some divine being. So Socrates was for Alcibiades the container of the unknown, the thing that is good. What it is that is good he doesn’t say, but he says that Socrates is the container of it. In this you see an example of the Other as idealized, as containing what I must have, at any price. Specifically, Alcibiades was a man of powerful desire; he was passionate. But Socrates could see that Alcibiades’s declaration was an act of deception, deceiving himself and the Other by the same token. So, Socrates’ answer consisted of telling him he was mistaken, because he didn’t have any of the gold Alcibiades had put into him.
The analyst doesn’t proceed by making a declaration to the effect that she is nothing, or that the patient is deceiving her. Being nothing is an existential fact. It should be proved through acts. It is usually sufficient for the analyst to abstain from subscribing to the analysand’s fantasies, although she may question those fantasies. For example, in the dream concerning the dead father, there was an absurdity. The dream said that the father was dead without knowing it. The analyst may make the remark that, after all, one can’t be both dead and know it. That’s why an analyst should proceed, among other ways, as a logician. Freud signaled it; we all remember his remarks on absurdity in dreams, and similar topics. Besides avoiding imprisoning him in his fantasy, such an act would bring, if not a liberation, at least a revision of the fantasy, and by the same token it would signify that the analyst’s desire is not situated on the same level as the analysands, inasmuch as the latter is engulfed in rivalry. So you see that it all goes through the analyst’s desire.
Question: What are some of the other ways an analyst should proceed?
The other ways are many. You may proceed as a rhetorician, or as a dialectician, not to mention situations where you must put a limit to a certain behavior, or sometimes you may need to confirm the truth of what has just been said. It is always a matter of what is suitable in the moment. In psychoanalysis, readiness is all.
Question: If idealization is the first step in the process of identification, could you speak about where identification goes beyond idealization; how does it move beyond that?
There is a well known chapter in Freud’s book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,8 entitled “Identification.” In this short chapter he names three kinds of identification. The third one is hysterical identification, which he describes as identification with another’s desire. The example is identification with another girl, without any idealization.
Question: You contrasted imaginary frustration with symbolic castration. What is the relation of this to privation?
When you say the book is not on the shelf, what is not at its place, as Lacan aptly remarks, is not the real object or the real book. The real is always where it is. The lack here is attributed to the book only inasmuch as it exists in language, that is, in the symbolic. You may say, using Jeremy Bentham’s vocabulary, the lack is attributed to the book inasmuch as it is a fictive entity, a term by which Bentham meant things that only exist in language, such as “right,” “wrong,” “property,” and “law,” or at least could never exist without language, like the very idea of place such as “north,” “west,” and so on. But the lack itself, insofar as you can see the hole on the shelf, is real. So here, the object is symbolic, but the lack is real. The main example of privation concerns the woman’s lack of a penis. You can’t say that she lacks a real organ, any more than she lacks a third eye. The object here is symbolic, a woman actually has more sexual organs than a man, but what is real is the lack.
With frustration, the lack is imaginary and the object is real. This is why nothing can satisfy frustration, because frustration is not a real lack. The main example here is the so-called penis envy, where the object envied is indeed a real organ, but it is clear that the lack itself is imaginary: She can’t feel this lack without imagining it.
In castration, the object, that is, the phallus, is an imaginary object, but here it a question of an image that escapes the specular order. It may be considered rather as a hole than as part of this order. As to the lack itself, it is clearly symbolic, inasmuch as it is in the nature of an act of recognition. This means recognition that the phallus, taken as a signifier of the mother’s lack, points here to a lack that should be directed to the father and that he should answer.
In short, in privation the lack is real and the object is symbolic, while in frustration the lack is imaginary and the object is real. And in castration the lack is symbolic and the object is imaginary. But in each case there is discordance between the register of lack and that of the object.
Question: Could you review again something about the subject, the subject is not a thing but an absence? It sounds like you are giving the subject agency to do things, to identify and so on. How can the subject be both absence and agency?
The distinction between the ego and the subject amounts to a distinction between what is transparent and what is not, and it is in that sense absent. But it is precisely because of this lack that the subject becomes an agent, for example, by proceeding to identify. It is out of her lack that she is an agent.
Question: Do you think there is a biological basis for the unconscious?
No. Everything I have said can only be taken as proof of how far the unconscious is from having a biological basis, of the subversion of the biological by the signifier. Take the example of the girl who asks her mother to give her the phallus. (“Mother, give me ‘something’ ”!) This can in no case be explained as in harmony with any biological or natural order, such as is the case with needs, where the lack is real, say hunger, and the object is also real, say food. That’s why I have just underlined the discordance between the lack and the object for human subjects. This discordance is the proof par excellence that we are dealing with an order of conflicts that has no solution in the plans of nature. There is no biological reason why the oral instinct manifests itself in man as a cannibalistic drive. Whenever you try to understand the psychoanalytic state of things, with desire or with the demand for love, you will only witness the subversion of all natural relations, which succumb to something else as a result of our relation to the signifier, as a result of our state as speaking subjects, taken in by language.
Question: In the Freudian theory of the drives, the passive and active aims of the drives, isn’t there anything at all on the side of nature?
There may be passive and active attitudes observable in the relations among animals, but these attitudes don’t function as metaphors for masculinity and femininity. That’s what makes the difference, their utilization as signifiers, for signification.
Question: Is the progress of analysis from privation through frustration to castration? Is analysis this progression?
No. You may describe psychoanalysis as a mediation that enables the subject to overcome her frustration, not by joining the object of her desire or by acceding to some kind of mythical organic completeness, but by assuming another register of lack, which we characterized as symbolic castration. In the dream of the dead father, dead without knowing he was dead, if the analysand remains caught up in his position of rivalry with his father as the means to avoid acknowledging his own mortality, this would amount to remaining in a state of perpetual frustration. That’s why an interpretation that tells him his fantasy of rivalry, if it brings him any news at all, will do nothing, if I may say so, to serve him. The point is not to tell the fantasy but to discover its function; in this example it functions as a denial of death, of castration.
1. Editor’s note: see this page, this page, this page, this page.
2. Editor’s note: see this page, this page.
3. Editor’s note: see this page.
4. Editor’s note: see this page, this page.
5. Editor’s note: see this page, this page, this page.
6. Standard Edition 12:213–226.
7. Standard Edition 5:430–431.
8. Standard Edition 18:107.