During the retreat of the vacation, I felt the need to make a little excursion into a certain domain within the treasure house of English and French literature. “Quaerens,” not “quem devorem,” but rather “quod doceam vobis”– seeking what to teach you and how, on the subject that we are navigating towards under the title of the ethics of psychoanalysis. You can certainly sense that it must be leading us toward a problematic point, not only of Freud’s doctrine, but also of what one might call our responsibility as analysts.
It is a point that you haven’t yet seen rise up on the horizon. And, my goodness, there is no reason why you should, since up till now this year I have avoided using the term. It is something that is so problematic for the theorists of analysis, as you will see from the testimony of the quotations I will cite; yet it is so essential. It is what Freud called Sublimierung, sublimation.
Sublimation is, in effect, the other side of the research that Freud pioneered into the roots of ethical feeling, insofar as it imposes itself in the form of prohibitions, of the moral conscience. It is the side that is referred to in the world in a manner that is so improper and so comical to a sensitive ear – I mean in the world outside the field of psychoanalysis – as the philosophy of values.
We who find ourselves, along with Freud, in a position to give a radically new critique of the sources and the incidence of ethical thought, are we in the same fortunate situation concerning its positive side, that of moral and spiritual elevation, that of the scale of values? The problem seems much more uncertain and more delicate there, but one cannot for all that say we may neglect it for the sake of the more immediate concerns of straightforward therapeutic action.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud uses two correlative terms concerning the effects of the individual libidinal adventure: Fixierarbeit is the fixation that is for us the register of explanation of that which is, in fact, inexplicable, and Haftbarkeit, which is perhaps best translated by “perseverance” but has a curious resonance in German, since it means also “responsibility,” “commitment.” And that is what is involved here; it concerns our collective history as analysts.
We are caught up in an adventure that has taken a certain direction, a certain contingency, certain stages. Freud didn’t finish at a stroke the trail he blazed for us. And it may be that, on account of Freud’s detours, we are attached to a certain moment in the development of his thought, without fully realizing its contingent character, like that of every effect of our human history.
In accordance with a method you are familiar with – for if it isn’t mine, it is at least known to me – let us try to take a few steps backwards, two, for example, before taking three steps forward. That way we may hope to gain one.
A step backward then: let us remember that psychoanalysis might seem at first to be of an ethical order. It might seem to be the search for a natural ethics – and, my goodness, a certain siren song might well promote a misunderstanding of that kind. And indeed, through a whole side of its action and its doctrine, psychoanalysis effectively presents itself as such, as tending to simplify some difficulty that is external in origin, that is of the order of a misrecognition or indeed of a misunderstanding, as tending to restore a normative balance with the world – something that the maturation of the instincts would naturally lead to. One sometimes sees such a gospel preached in the form of the genital relation that I have more than once referred to here with a great deal of reservation and even with a pronounced skepticism.
A great many things immediately present themselves in opposition. It is in any case in just such a simple way that analysis leads us in the direction of what, for reasons that I do not believe are merely picturesque, one might call the domain of the pastoral.
The domain of the pastoral is never absent from civilization; it never fails to offer itself as a solution to the latter’s discontents. If I use that name, it is because over the centuries that is how it has happened to present itself openly. Nowadays, it is often masked; it appears for example in the more severe and more pedantic form of the infallibility of proletarian consciousness – something that has preoccupied us for so long, although in recent years it has receded a little. It appears also in the form of the somewhat mythical notion I referred to just now concerning the hopes, however vague, that were raised by the Freudian revolution. But it’s the same old idea of the pastoral. And, as you will see, it concerns a very serious debate.
Perhaps we need to rediscover it, to rediscover its meaning. There is perhaps a good reason why we should reexamine the archaic form of the pastoral, reexamine a certain return to nature or the hope invested in a nature that you shouldn’t imagine our ancestors thought of in simpler terms than we do. We will see whether the inventions that the ingenium of our ancestors attempted in this direction teach us something that needs to be elucidated for us, too.
Obviously, as soon as one takes a look at Freud’s thought as a whole, one sees immediately that there is something that from the beginning resists being absorbed into this domain. And it is that through which I began to attack the problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis with you this year. Freud allows us, in effect, to measure the paradoxical character or practical aporia of something that is not at all of the order of difficulties that an improved nature or a natural amelioration can present. It is rather something that introduces itself immediately as possessed of a very special quality of malice, of bad influence – that is the meaning of the French word méchant. Freud isolates it increasingly in the course of his work up to Civilization and Its Discontents, where he gives it its fullest articulation, or in his studies of mechanisms such as the phenomenon of melancholia.
What is this paradox? It is that the moral conscience, as he says, shows itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueller and crueller even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of our impulses or desires. In short, the insatiable character of this moral conscience, its paradoxical cruelty, transforms it within the individual into a parasite that is fed by the satisfactions accorded it. Ethics punishes the individual relatively much less for his faults than for his misfortunes.
This is the paradox of the moral conscience in what I hesitate to call its spontaneous form. Rather than speak of the investigation of the moral conscience functioning in a natural state – we would never find our way through that – let us choose the other dimension covered by the meaning of the term “natural”; and let’s call it the critique, by means of psychoanalysis, of wild, uncultivated ethics, such as we find it functioning all alone, especially in those whom we deal with as we explore the level of affect or pathos, and of pathology.
It is here that analysis sheds some light, and it does so, in the end, on that which in the depths of man might be called self-hate. It is something that is suggested by the classical comedy whose title is He Who Punishes Himself.1
It is a little comedy which belongs to the New Comedy taken over from Greece by Latin literature. I don’t especially recommend that you read it, for after that fine title you would only be disappointed by the text. You would only find, like everything else, a concrete satire of character traits, precise notations of forms of the ridiculous. But don’t forget that the function of comedy is only apparently without profundity. Through the very fact of the play of the signifier, through the simple force of signifying articulation, we find ourselves going beyond something that is simply depiction or contingent description, to the revelation of what lies below. Comedy makes us rediscover what Freud showed was present in the practice of nonsense.
We see the depths emerge, we see something that detaches itself beyond the exercise of the unconscious, there where Freudian research invites us to recognize the point where the Trieb is unmasked – the Trieb and not the Instinkt. For the Instinkt is not far from the field of das Ding in relation to which I invite you to recenter this year the way in which the problems around us are posed.
The Triebe were discovered and explored by Freud within an experience founded on the confidence he had in the play of signifiers, in the play of substitutions; the result is that we can in no way confuse the domain of the Triebe with a reclassification of human beings’ associations with their natural milieu, however new that reclassification may seem. The Trieb must be translated insofar as possible with some ambiguity, and I like sometimes to say dérive in French, “drift.” It is in any case “drive” that is used in English to translate the German word. That drift, where the whole action of the pleasure principle is motivated, directs us toward the mythic point that has been articulated in terms of an object relation. We have to be precise about the meaning of this and to criticize the confusions introduced by ambiguities of signification that are much more serious than the signifying kind.
We are now getting close to the most profound things Freud had to say about the nature of the Triebe, and especially insofar as they may give satisfaction to the subject in more than one way, notably, in leaving open a door, a way or a career, of sublimation. Within psychoanalytic thought, this domain has remained until now almost undisturbed; only the boldest spirits have dared to approach it, and even then not without expressing the dissatisfaction or unassuaged thirst Freud’s formulations left them with. I will be referring here to a few texts found at more than one point in his work, from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to Moses and Monotheism, and including Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and Civilization and Its Discontents.
Freud invites us to reflect on sublimation or, more exactly, he proposes – in a way that enables him to define the field – all kinds of difficulties that merit our attention today.
Since the problem of sublimation is situated for us in the field of the Triebe, I would like first to look for a moment at a passage taken from the IntroductoryLectures, that is to say a work that has been translated as Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is on page 358, Volume XI, of the Gesammelte Werke2:
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.
We can see there the metaphor that is no doubt at the origin of that surrealist work which is called Communicating Vases.
Freud goes on, and I paraphrase, “They behave, therefore, in that way; and this is true in spite of the fact that they may have fallen under the domination or the supremacy of the Genitalprimat. Thus the latter must not be thought to be so easy to gather into a single Vorstellung, representation.”
Freud warns us in this passage – and there are plenty of others – that even when the whole Netz der Triebe has fallen beneath the Genitalprimat, it is not so easy to conceive of the latter structurally as a unitary Vorststellung, a resolution of contradictions.
We know only too well that that in no way eliminates the communicating or fleeting, plastic character, as Freud himself puts it, of the economy of the Triebregungen. In short, as I have been teaching you for years, that structure commits the human libido to the subject, commits it to slipping into the play of words, to being subjugated by the structure of the world of signs, which is the single universal and dominant Primat. And the sign, as Peirce put it, is that which is in the place of something else for someone.
The articulation as such of the possibilities of Verschiebbarkeit, or the displacement of the natural attitude, is elaborated at length and ends up in this passage with the elucidation of the Partiallust in the genital libido itself. In short, an approach to the problem of Sublimierung must begin with a recognition of the plasticity of the instincts, even if one acknowledges subsequently, for reasons to be explained, that complete sublimation is not possible for the individual. With the individual – and as long as it is a question of the individual with all that that implies concerning internal dispositions and external actions – we find ourselves faced with limits. There is something that cannot be sublimated; libidinal demand exists, the demand for a certain dose, of a certain level of direct satisfaction, without which harm results, serious disturbances occur.
But our point of departure is the relationship of the libido to that Netz, that Flüssigkeit, that Verschiebbarkeit of the signs as such. It is to this in any case that we are always brought back whenever we read Freud with an attentive eye.
Let me posit another essential point of articulation, necessary if we are to move forward once more.
It is obvious that the libido, with its paradoxical, archaic, so-called pregenital characteristics, with its eternal polymorphism, with its world of images that are linked to the different sets of drives associated with the different stages from the oral to the anal and the genital – all of which no doubt constitutes the originality of Freud’s contribution – that whole microcosm has absolutely nothing to do with the macrocosm; only in fantasy does it engender world. That’s Freud’s doctrine, contrary to the direction in which one of his disciples, namely Jung, wanted to take it – this schism within Freud’s entourage occurring around 1910.
This is important particularly at a moment when it is obvious that, even if one once located them there, there is no point now in seeking the phallus or the anal ring in the starry sky; they have been definitely expelled. For a long time even in scientific thinking, men seemed to inhabit cosmological projections. For a long time a world soul existed, and thought could comfort itself with the idea that there was a deep connection between our images and the world that surrounds us. This is a point whose importance does not seem to have been noticed, namely, that the Freudian project has caused the whole world to reenter us, has definitely put it back in its place, that is to say, in our body, and nowhere else. Let me remind you in this connection to what extent, in the period which immediately preceded the liberation of modern man, both scientific and theological thought were preoccupied by something that Freud did not hesitate to mention and to call by its name, but about which we never speak anymore, namely, the figure who was for a long time known as the prince of this world, Diabolus himself. The symbolic here is united with the diabolic, with all those forms that theological preaching has so powerfully articulated.
Read a little Luther; not just the Table Talk, but the Sermons as well, if you want to see to what extent the power of images may be affirmed, images that are very familiar to us because they have been invested with the quality of scientific authentication on a daily basis through our psychoanalytic experience. It is to those images that the thought of a prophet refers whose influence was such a powerful one, and who renewed the very basis of Christian teaching when he sought to express our dereliction, our fall in a world where we let ourselves go. His choice of words is in the end far more analytic than all that modern phenomenology has been able to articulate in the relatively gentle terms of the abandonment of the mother’s breast; what kind of negligence is that which causes her milk to dry up? Luther says literally, “You are that waste matter which falls into the world from the devil’s anus.”
That is the essentially digestive and excremental schema forged by a thought that draws the ultimate consequences from the form of exile in which man finds himself relative to any good in the world whatsoever.
That’s where Luther leads us. Don’t imagine that these things didn’t have an effect on the thought and the way of life of people of the time. One finds articulated here precisely the essential turning point of a crisis from which emerged our whole modern immersion in the world. It is to this that Freud came to give his approval, his official stamp, when he made that image of the world, those fallacious archetypes, return once and for all there where they belong, that is in our body.
Henceforth we are to deal with the world where it is. Do these erogenous zones, these fundamental points of fixation, open onto rosy possibilities and pastoral optimism? Does one find here a path that leads to freedom? Or to the strictest servitude? These erogenous zones that, until one has achieved a fuller elucidation of Freud’s thought, one can consider to be generic, and that are limited to a number of special points, to points that are openings, to a limited number of mouths at the body’s surface, are the points where Eros will have to find his source.
In order to realize what is essential and original in Freud’s thought here, it is sufficient to refer to those openings that the exercise of poetic lyricism gives. According to a given poet, to Walt Whitman for example, imagine what as a man one might desire of one’s own body. One might dream of a total, complete, epidermic contact between one’s body and a world that was itself open and quivering; dream of a contact and, in the distance, of a way of life that the poet points out to us; hope for a revelation of harmony following the disappearance of the perpetual, insinuating presence of the oppressive feeling of some original curse.
Well now, Freud, on the contrary, emphasizes a point of insertion, a limit point, an irreducible point, at the level of what we might call the source of the Triebe. And it is precisely that that our experience then encounters in the irreducible character – once again the ambiguity is clear – of these residues of archaic forms of the libido.
These forms, we are told on the one hand, are not susceptible to Befriedigung. The most archaic aspirations of the child are both a point of departure and a nucleus that is never completely resolved under some primacy of genitality or a pure and simple Vorstellung of man in human form by androgynous fusion, however total one may imagine it. There always remain dreams of these primary, archaic forms of the libido. That is a first point that experience insists on and Freudian discourse articulates.
On the other hand, Freud reveals the opening, which at first sight seems limitless, of the substitutions that may occur at the other end, at the level of the goal.
I have avoided the word Objekt, which never fails to appear at the point of one’s pen as soon as one begins to differentiate what is involved in sublimation. One cannot characterize the sublimated form of the instinct without reference to the object, whatever one does. In a minute I will read you some passages which will show you the scope of the difficulty.
It is a question of the object. But what does the object mean at that level? When Freud at the beginning of his more emphatic formulations of his doctrine begins his first topic by articulating that which concerns sublimation, notably in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, sublimation is characterized by a change of objects, or in the libido, a change that doesn’t occur through the intermediary of a return of the repressed nor symptomatically, indirectly, but directly, in a way that satisfies directly. The sexual libido finds satisfaction in objects; how does it distinguish them? Quite simply and massively, and in truth not without opening a field of infinite complexity, as objects that are socially valorized, objects of which the group approves, insofar as they are objects of public utility. That is how the possibility of sublimation is defined.
Thus we find ourselves here in a position to hold firmly in our hands the two ends of a chain.
On the one hand, there is the possibility of satisfaction, even if it is substitutive, and through the intermediary of what the text calls a Surrogate. On the other hand, it is a question of objects that are going to acquire collective social value. We find ourselves here faced with a trap into which thought, with its penchant for facility, would love to leap, merely by constructing a simple opposition and a simple reconciliation between the individual and the collectivity.
It doesn’t seem to be a problem that the collectivity might find satisfaction there where the individual happens to need to change his batteries or his rifle from one shoulder to the other; where, moreover, it would be a matter of an individual satisfaction that is taken for granted, all by itself. Yet we were told at the beginning how problematic the satisfaction of the libido is. Everything that has to do with the Triebe raises the question of plasticity and of limits. Thus the formulation suggested above is far from being one that Freud could adhere to.
Far from adhering to it, he establishes a relation in the Three Essays between sublimation in its most obvious social effects and what he calls Reaktionsbildung. That means that right away, at a moment when things cannot yet be articulated powerfully, for want of that component of his topic he will produce later, he introduces the notion of reaction formation. In other words, he illustrates a given character trait, a trait acquired through social regulation, as something which, far from occurring as a direct consequence or as in line with a specific instinctual satisfaction, necessitates the construction of a system of defenses that is, for example, antagonistic to the anal drive. He, therefore, introduces the idea of an opposition, an antinomy, as fundamental in the construction of the sublimation of an instinct. He thus introduces the problem of a contradiction in his own formulation.
Thus, that which is presented as a construction in opposition to an instinctual tendency can in no way be reduced to a direct satisfaction in which the drive itself would be saturated in a way that would have no other characteristic than that it succeeds in receiving the seal of collective approval.
In truth, the problem Freud raises relative to sublimation only comes fully to light at the time of his second topic. We will have to approach that from Zur Einführung des Narzissmus (“On Narcissism: An Introduction”), a work that is not only the introduction to narcissism, but also the introduction to the second topic.
In this text that our friend Jean Laplanche has translated for the Society and that you should look up in the Gesammelte Werke, Volume X, pages 161–1623, you will find the following comment: “What we have to seek is that which now presents itself to us concerning the relations of this formulation of the ideal to sublimation. Sublimation is a process that concerns object libido.”
I would just point out that the opposition Ichlibido/Objektlibido only begins to be articulated as such on an analytical level with the Einführung. This text complements the articulation first given by Freud of the fundamentally conflictual position of man relative to his satisfaction as such. That is why it is essential to introduce das Ding at the beginning.
That is Das Ding insofar as, if he is to follow the path of his pleasure, man must go around it. One must take one’s time to recognize, to find out for oneself, to take one’s time to see that Freud is telling us the same thing as Saint Paul, namely, that what governs us on the path of our pleasure is no Sovereign Good, and that moreover, beyond a certain limit, we are in a thoroughly enigmatic position relative to that which lies within das Ding, because there is no ethical rule which acts as a mediator between our pleasure and its real rule.
And behind Saint Paul, you find the teaching of Christ when he is questioned just before the final Easter [la dermière Pâques]. There are two versions, that of the Gospel according to Saint Mathew and that of the Gospels of Mark and Luke. In Saint Mathew’s Gospel, where it is clearest, he is asked, “What good must we do to achieve life eternal?” In the Greek version, he answers, “Why do you speak to me of good? Who knows what is good? Only He, He who is beyond, our Father, knows what is good. And He told you, Do this, Do that, Don’t go any further.” One just has to follow his commandments. Then after that there is the statement, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” That’s the commandment that appropriately enough, given its obvious relevance, is the terminal point of Civilization and Its Discontents; it is the ideal end to which his investigation by necessity leads him – Freud never held back from anything that offered itself to his examination.
I cannot urge you too strongly to appreciate, if you are able, what in Christ’s answer has for so long been closed to aural apprehension, apart from that of knowing ears – “They have ears but they hear not,” the Gospel tells us. Try to read the words of the man who, it is claimed, never laughed; read them for what they are. From time to time, you will be struck by a form of humor that surpasses all others.
The parable of the unfaithful steward, for example. No matter how seldom one has been to church, one is nevertheless used to having that parable trotted out. And it occurs to no one to be surprised by the fact that the Son of Man, the purest of the pure, tells us that the best way to achieve salvation for one’s soul is to embezzle the funds one is in charge of, since that, too, may lead the children of light to grant you, if not a reward, then at least a certain gratitude. From the point of view of a homogeneous, uniform, and stable morality, there is some contradiction there, but perhaps one could confirm it with other insights of a similar kind – such as, for example, the terrific “joke,”4 “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” – and after that get on with it! It is a form of paradox that may lead to all kinds of evasions or ruptures, to all the gaps opened up by nonsense – those insidious dialogues, for example, in which the interlocutor always manages to slip out of the traps that are set for him.
To come back to our subject for the moment, 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. This is confirmed in a thousand different ways, and is for example consistent with Freud’s central question, which concerns, as you know, the Father.
To understand Freud’s position relative to the Father, you have to go and look up the form it is given in Luther’s thought, when he had his nostrils tickled by Erasmus. Reluctantly, after a great many years, Erasmus had finally published his De Libero Arbitrio, so as to remind the excitable mad man from Wittenberg that the authoritative Christian tradition, from the words of Christ to Saint Paul, Saint Augustine and the Church Fathers, led one to believe that works, good works, were not nothing, and that to be sure the tradition of the philosophers on the subject of the Sovereign Good was not to be just thrown out.
Luther, who up to that point had remained reserved in his relations with the figure of Erasmus – although he did privately indulge in a little irony on the subject – then published his De Servo Arbitrio in order to emphasize both the fundamentally bad character of the relations between men and the fact that at the heart of man’s destiny is the Ding, the causa, which I described the other day as analogous to that which is designated by Kant as at the horizon of his Practical Reason – except that it is a pendant to it. To coin a phrase whose approximate Greekness I will ask you to forgive, it is the causa pathomenon, the cause of the most fundamental human passion.
Luther writes of the following – God’s eternal hatred of men, not simply of their failures and the works of their free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world was created. You see that there are reasons why I advise you to read religious authors from time to time; I mean good ones, of course, not those who are all sweetness and light, although even they are sometimes rewarding. Saint François de Sales on marriage is, I assure you, better than Van de Velde on ideal marriage. But in my opinion Luther is much more interesting. That hatred which existed even before the world was created is the correlative of the relationship that exists between a certain influence of the law as such and a certain conception of das Ding as the fundamental problem and, in a word, as the problem of evil. I assume that it hasn’t escaped your attention that it is exactly what Freud deals with when the question he asks concerning the Father leads him to point out that the latter is the tyrant of the primitive horde, the one against whom the original crime was committed, and who for that very reason introduced the order, essence, and foundation of the domain of law.
Not to recognize the filiation or cultural paternity that exists between Freud and a new direction of thought – one that is apparent at the break which occurred toward the beginning of the sixteenth century, but whose repercussions are felt up to the end of the seventeenth century – constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of the kind of problems Freud’s intellectual project addresses.
I have just finished a digression of some twenty-five minutes. And it was designed to tell you that, just after 1914 with the Einführung, Freud introduces us to something that dodges the issue again by articulating things that are, of course, essential, but of which one must know the context, namely, the problem of the object relation.
This problem of the object relation has to be read “Freudianly.” You can, in fact, see it emerge in a narcissistic relation, an imaginary relation. At this level the object introduces itself only insofar as it is perpetually interchangeable with the love that the subject has for its own image. 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.
In a short note in the Three Essays, Freud gives us a kind of brief summary in the style of an essay on the difference that strikes us between the love life of antiquity, of pre-Christians, and our own. It resides, he says, in the fact that in antiquity the emphasis was on the instinct itself, whereas we place it on the object. The Ancients feted the instinct, and, through the intermediary of the instinct, were also ready to honor an object of lesser, common value, whereas we reduce the value of the manifestation of the instinct, and we demand the support of the object on account of the prevailing characteristics of the object.
Moreover, Freud wrote a great many other pages where he discussed disparaging commentaries on love life – commentaries made in the name of what? In the name of an incontestable ideal. You can read the following in Civilization and Its Discontents: “Among the works of that sensitive English author, Galsworthy, whose worth is universally acknowledged nowadays, I once really enjoyed one story. It was called The Apple Tree, and it shows how there is no room anymore in contemporary civilized life for the simple, natural love of two human beings of the pastoral tradition.”5
The whole passage flows forth spontaneously in a way that I call excessive. How does Freud know that we emphasize the object, whereas the Ancients put the accent on the instinct? You will respond that there is no example of ideal exaltation in any Greek tragedy, unlike our own classical tragedies. Yet Freud hardly explains the question.
Next time we will have to compare our ideal of love with that of the Ancients by referring to some works of history and to a given historical moment that will also have to be defined. It is no more or less than a structuralization, a historical modification of Eros. It is, of course, of great importance that courtly love, the exaltation of woman, a certain Christian style of love that Freud himself discusses, mark a historical change. And I will be leading you into that territory.
It is nevertheless true, as I will show you, that in certain authors of antiquity – and interestingly enough in Latin rather than Greek literature – one finds some and perhaps all the elements that characterize the cult of an idealized object, something which was determinative for what can only be called the sublimated elaboration of a certain relationship. Thus what Freud expresses over-hastily and probably inversely, concerns a kind of degradation which, when one examines it closely, is directed less at love life than at a certain lost cord, a crisis, in relation to the object.
To set out to find the instinct again is the result of a certain loss, a cultural loss, of the object. That such a problem exists at the center of that mental crisis from which Freudianism emerged is a question that we will have to ask ourselves. The nostalgia expressed in the idea that the Ancients were closer than we are to the instinct perhaps means no more, like every dream of a Golden Age or El Dorado, than that we are engaged in posing questions at the level of the instinct because we do not yet know what to do as far as the object is concerned.
At the level of sublimation the object is inseparable from imaginary and especially cultural elaborations. It is not just that the collectivity recognizes in them useful objects; it finds rather a space of relaxation where it may in a way delude itself on the subject of das Ding, colonize the field of das Ding with imaginary schemes. That is how collective, socially accepted sublimations operate.
Society takes some comfort from the mirages that moralists, artists, artisans, designers of dresses and hats, and the creators of imaginary forms in general supply it with. But it is not simply in the approval that society gladly accords it that we must seek the power of sublimation. It is rather in an imaginary function, and, in particular, that for which we will use the symbolization of the fantasm ($ ♢ a), which is the form on which depends the subject’s desire.
In forms that are historically and socially specific, the a elements, the imaginary elements of the fantasm come to overlay the subject, to delude it, at the very point of das Ding. The question of sublimation will be brought to bear here. That is why I shall talk to you next time of courtly love in the Middle Ages, and, in particular, of Minnesang.
In an anniversary way, since last year I talked to you about Hamlet, I shall speak about the Elizabethan theater, which is the turning point in European eroticism, and civilized as well. It is at that moment, in effect, that the celebration of the idealized object occurs that Freud talks about in his note.
Freud left us with the problem of a gap once again at the level of das Ding, which is that of religious men and mystics, at a time when we could no longer rely on the Father’s guarantee.
January 13, I960
1 A play by Terence usually translated in Englsh as The Self-Tormentor.
2 S.E., XV, p. 345.
3 S.E., XIV, p. 94.
4 In English in the original.
5 S.E., XXI, p. 105, Note 2.