Beauty & Modesty Reign of the Image Blind Master Captive of the World Seductions Stain in the Picture Body & Adornments
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Some shadow and some light…
THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE 2024 NLS CONGRESS
CLINIC OF THE GAZE
Over the last few months, 40 colleagues, all with a close link to the NLS, have been delving into the publications of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent. Numerous quotations have been extracted within these 9 rubrics:
there where it shows itself
The Gaze in Freud’s Case Histories
of the gaze, its clinic
what’s new in the social bond
Medical Gaze / Psychosomatic Phenomena
deeply rooted in the imaginary
Transparency, Intimacy, Surveillance
uses and costumes 21st century
Shame, Modesty and the Obscene
look at us enjoying
the dressing gaze
declensions of seeingness
what looks at you
So, no all-encompassing overview that would allow one to see it all. Instead, some hints and clues to help find one’s way, so that some shadow and some light can be shed on the theme of the Congress, through an article for the Blog or the presentation of a case at the parallel clinical sessions in Dublin.
We have opted for a double bibliography, one in English and the other in French, so as not to make it too cumbersome to use. However, these two versions are not mirror images of each other. Each retains its own particularity, depending on what is found in the two languages.
The bibliography is in movement, like everything that is caught up in the elan of the School's work: a second issue will be published later, some quotations may be added, others may vanish.
Don't delay in discovering it!
Thomas Van Rumst & Florencia F.C. Shanahan
1. The Gaze in Dreams
S. FREUD
During the night before my father’s funeral I had a dream of a printed notice, placard or poster - rather like the notices forbidding one to smoke in railway waiting-rooms - on which appeared either
‘You are requested to close the eyes’
or,
‘You are requested to close an eye.’
I usually write this in the form:
the
‘You are requested to close eye(s).’
an
Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different direction when the dream was interpreted. I had chosen the simplest possible ritual for the funeral, for I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies. But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to such puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced in the eyes of those who attended the funeral. Hence one of the versions: ‘you are requested to close an eye’, i.e. to ‘wink at’ or ‘overlook.’ Here it is particularly easy to see the meaning of the vagueness expressed by the ‘either-or.’ The dream-work failed to establish a unified wording for the dream-thoughts which could at the same time be ambiguous, and the two main lines of thought consequently began to diverge even in the manifest content of the dream.
Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams”, SE, Vol. V (1966): 317-318.
He dreamt that he saw my daughter in front of him; she had two patches of dung instead of eyes. No one who understands the language of dreams will find much difficulty in translating this one: it declared that he was marrying my daughter not for her ‘beaux yeux' but for her money.
Sigmund Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, SE, Vol. X (1966): 200.
The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me.— I think this was my first anxiety-dream. I was three, four, or at most five years-old at the time. From then until my eleventh or twelfth year I was always afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams.
Sigmund Freud, “From The History of an Infantile Neurosis”, SE, Vol. XVII (1966): p. 29.
He thought that the part of the dream which said that 'suddenly the window opened of its own accord' […] ‘must mean: "My eyes suddenly opened." I was asleep, therefore, and suddenly woke up, and as I woke I saw something: the tree with the wolves.' […] He had woken up and had seen something. The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point, therefore, a transposition has taken place […].
Ibid., 34-35.
I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, it's really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen–it's choking me’–I was alarmed and looked at her.
Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of dreams” (1900), SE, Vol. IV (1958): 107.
I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose.
Ibid., 107.
She looked pale and puffy. My patient always had a rosy complexion. I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her.
Ibid., 109.
Trimethylamin. I saw the chemical formula of this substance in my dream, which bears witness to a great effort on the part of my memory. Moreover, the formula was printed in heavy type, as though there had been a desire to lay emphasis on some part of the context as being of quite special importance. What was it, then, to which my attention was to be directed in this way by trimethylamin?
Ibid., 116.
The dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish. Thus much leapt to the eyes. But many of the details of the dream also became intelligible to me from the point of view of wish-fulfilment.
Ibid., 118-119.
After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don't you see I'm burning?’
Ibid., 509.
For a long time to come, no doubt, I shall have to continue to satisfy that longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be avoided for reasons of health. For instance, I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city.
Ibid., 193-194.
The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it.
Ibid., 194.
In a third dream I had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side of it were black cliffs and on the other meadows with big white flowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life.
Ibid., 194.
‘Company at table or table d’hôte . . . spinach was being eaten . . . Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand unresponsively. She then said: “But you've always had such beautiful eyes.” . . . I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles. …’
Ibid., 636-637.
If a person expects one to keep an eye on his interests without any advantage to oneself, his artlessness is apt to provoke the scornful question: ‘Do you suppose I’m going to do this or that for the sake of your beaux yeux [beautiful eyes]?’ That being so, Frau E. L.’s speech in the dream, ‘You’ve always had such beautiful eyes’, can only have meant: ‘People have always done everything for you for love; you have always had everything without paying for it.’ The truth is, of course, just the contrary: I have always paid dearly for whatever advantage I have had from other people.
Ibid., 638-639.
Incidentally, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often put me in his debt. Only recently I allowed an opportunity of repaying him to slip by. He has had only one present from me—an antique bowl, round which there are eyes painted: what is known as an ‘occhiale’, to avert the evil eye. Moreover he is an eye surgeon. The same evening I asked him after a woman patient, whom I had sent on to him for a consultation to fit her with spectacles.
Ibid., 639.
Soon afterwards he had a terrifying dream, in which he found himself in ancient Pompeii on the day of the eruption of Vesuvius and witnessed the city's destruction. ‘As he was standing at the edge of the forum beside the Temple of Jupiter, he suddenly saw Gradiva at no great distance from him. Till then he had had no thought of her presence, but now it occurred to him all at once and as though it was something natural that, since she was a Pompeian, she was living in her native town, and, without his having suspected it, living as his contemporary.’
Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907 [1906]), SE, Vol. IX (1959): 12.
Fear of the fate that lay before her provoked him to utter a warning cry, whereupon the figure, as she calmly stepped along, turned her face towards him. But she then proceeded on her way untroubled, till she reached the portico of the temple; there she took her seat on one of the steps and slowly laid her head down on it, while her face grew paler and paler, as though it were turning into marble.
Ibid., 12-13.
While he was thus animating the past with his imagination, he suddenly saw the unmistakable Gradiva of his relief come out of a house and step trippingly over the lava stepping-stones to the other side of the street, just as he had seen her do in his dream the other night, when she had lain down as though to sleep, on the steps of the Temple of Apollo.
Ibid., 16.
The delusion had now been conquered by a beautiful reality; but before the two lovers left Pompeii it was still to be honoured once again. When they reached the Herculanean Gate, where, at the entrance to the Via Consolare, the street is crossed by some ancient stepping-stones, Norbert Hanold paused and asked the girl to go ahead of him. She understood him ‘and, pulling up her dress a little with her’ left hand, Zoe Bertgang, Gradiva rediviva, walked past, held in his eyes, which seemed to gaze as though in a dream; so, with her quietly tripping gait, she stepped through the sunlight over the stepping-stones to the other side of the street.’
Ibid., 39-40.
A lady reported that she very often dreamt when she was a child that God wore a paper cocked-hat on his head. What can you make of that without the dreamer's help? It sounds completely nonsensical. But it ceases to be nonsense when we hear from the lady that she used to have a hat of that sort put on her head at meals when she was a child, because she could never resist taking furtive glances at her brothers’ and sisters’ plates to see whether they had been given larger helpings than she had. So the hat was intended to act like a pair of blinkers.
Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1917), SE, Vol. XV (1955): 118.
The interpretation of this element and at the same time of the whole short dream was easily made with the help of a further idea that occurred to the dreamer: ‘As I had heard that God was omniscient and saw everything’, she said, ‘the dream can only mean that I knew everything and saw everything, even though they tried to prevent me.’
Ibid.
The dreamer climbed to the top of a mountain, which commanded an unusually extensive view. This sounds quite rational and you might suppose that there is nothing to interpret in it and that all we have to do is to enquire what memory gave rise to the dream and the reason for its being stirred up. But you would be wrong. It turned out that this dream stood in need of interpreting just as much as any other, more confused one. For none of his own mountain climbs occurred to the dreamer, but he thought of the fact that an acquaintance of his was the editor of a ‘Survey’, dealing with our relations with the most remote parts of the earth. Thus the latent dream-thought was an identification of the dreamer with the 'surveyor'.
Ibid., 121.
Here is a reproduction of a picture by Schwind in the Schack Gallery in Munich [see Frontispiece], which shows how correctly the artist grasped the way in which dreams arise from the dominant situation. Its title is ‘The Prisoner's Dream’, a dream whose content is bound to be his escape. It is a happy point that he is to escape through the window, for it is the stimulus of the light pouring in by the window that is putting an end to the prisoner's sleep.
Ibid., 135.
But now, with the addition of ‘nymphs’ visible in the background of a ‘thick wood’, no further doubts could be entertained. Here was a symbolic geography of sex!
Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905 [1901]), SE, Vol. VII (1953): 99.
I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression made upon her must have been forcible, for there immediately appeared a piece of the dream which had been forgotten: ‘she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing-table.’
Ibid., 100.
Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window.
Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918 [1914]), SE, Vol. XVII (1955): 29.
The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me.
Ibid.
Moreover, as I have often been able to satisfy myself, a high tree is a symbol of observing, of scopophilia. A person sitting on a tree can see everything that is going on below him and cannot himself be seen. Compare Boccaccio's well-known story, and similar facetiae.
Ibid., 43, note under line.
They were looking at him with strained attention. This feature comes entirely from the primal scene, and has got into the dream at the price of being turned completely round.
Ibid.
[Quoting F. W. Hildebrandt] ‘There lies in dreams a marvellous poetry, an apt allegory, an incomparable humour, a rare irony. A dream looks upon the world in a light of strange idealism and often enhances the effects of what it sees by its deep understanding of their essential nature. It pictures earthly beauty to our eyes in a truly heavenly splendour and clothes dignity with the highest majesty, it shows us our everyday fears in the ghastliest shape and turns our amusement into jokes of indescribable pungency. And sometimes, when we are awake and still under the full impact of an experience like one of these, we cannot but feel that never in our life has the real world offered us its equal.’
Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), SE, Vol. IV (1955): 62-63.
I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant' Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it.
Ibid., 194.
One of my patients was presented in a dream with an almost undistorted reproduction of a sexual episode, which was at once recognizable as a true recollection. His memory of the event had, in fact, never been completely lost in waking life, though it had become greatly obscured, and its revival was a consequence of work previously done in analysis. At the age of twelve, the dreamer had gone to visit a school friend who was laid up in bed, when the latter, by what-was probably an accidental movement, uncovered his body. At the sight of his friend's genitals, my patient had been overcome by some sort of compulsion and had uncovered himself too and caught hold of the other's penis. His friend looked at him with indignation and astonishment; where upon, overcome by embarrassment, he let go. This scene was repeated in a dream twenty-three years later, including all the details of his feelings at the time. It was modified, however, to this extent, that the dreamer assumed the passive instead of the active role, while the figure of his school-friend was replaced by someone belonging to his contemporary life.
Ibid., 198.
The embarrassment of the dreamer [in dreams of being naked] and the indifference of the onlookers offer us, when taken together, a contradiction of the kind that is so common in dreams. It would after all be more in keeping with the dreamer's feelings if strangers looked at him in astonishment and derision or with indignation. But this objectionable feature of the situation has, I believe, been got rid of by wish-fulfilment, whereas some force has led to the retention of the other features; and the two portions of the dream are consequently out of harmony with each other.
Ibid., 243-244.
When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and were without shame in one another's presence; till a moment arrived when shame and anxiety awoke, expulsion followed, and sexual life and the tasks of cultural activity began. But we can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams. I have already expressed a suspicion that impressions of earliest childhood (that is, from the prehistoric epoch until about the end of the third year of life) strive to achieve reproduction, from their very nature and irrespectively perhaps of their actual content, and that their repetition constitutes the fulfilment of a wish. Thus dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting.
Ibid., 245.
A woman patient told me a dream in which all the people were especially big. 'That means', she went on, 'that the dream must be to do with events in my early childhood, for at that time, of course, all grown-up people seemed to me enormously big.' She herself did not appear in the content of this dream.— The fact of a dream referring to childhood may also be expressed in another way, namely by a translation of time into space. The characters and scenes are seen as though they were at a great distance, at the end of a long road, or as though they were being looked at through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses.
Ibid., 408.
Frau D. dreamt of seeing the eighty-year-old Viennese actor Blasel lying on a sofa in full armour ['in voller Rüstung']. He began jumping over tables and chairs, drew a dagger, looked at himself in the looking-glass and brandished the dagger in the air as though he was fighting an imaginary enemy.— Interpretation: The dreamer suffered from a long-standing affection of the bladder ['Blase'] . She lay on a sofa for her analysis; when she looked at herself in a looking-glass, she thought privately that in spite of her age and illness she still looked hale and hearty [‘rüstig'].
Ibid., 412.
J. LACAN
This fragmented body […] is regularly manifested in dreams when the movement of an analysis reaches a certain level of aggressive disintegration of the individual. It then appears in the form of disconnected limbs or of organs exoscopically represented, growing wings and taking up arms for internal persecutions that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch fixed for all time in painting, in their ascent in the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man.
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 78.
These phantasmagorias crop up constantly in dreams, especially when an analysis appears to reflect off the backdrop of the most archaic fixations. I will mention here a dream recounted by one of my patients, whose aggressive drives manifested themselves in obsessive fantasies. In the dream he saw himself in a car, with the woman with whom he was having a rather difficult love-affair, being pursued by a flying fish whose balloon-like body was so transparent that one could see the horizontal level of liquid it contained: an image of vesical persecution of great anatomical clarity.
Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” ibid., 86.
Another aspect of the movement of the recollection seems to me to converge on an idea that I will propose. It is the correction that the subject adds secondarily, namely, that the walnut tree involved in the narrative—and which is no less familiar to us than to him when he mentions its presence in the anxiety dream, the latter being in some sense the key piece of material in this case—is probably brought in from elsewhere, in particular, from another memory of an hallucination where it is from the tree itself that he makes blood seep.
Jacques Lacan, “Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s ‘Verneinung’”, ibid., 326
As soon as Freud enters into dialogue, the visual field shrinks.
Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book ii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 153.
That goes very far. Having got the patient to open her mouth - that is precisely what's at stake in reality, that she doesn't open her mouth - what he sees in there, these turbinate bones covered with a whitish membrane, is a horrendous sight. This mouth has all the equivalences in terms of significations, all the condensations you want.
Ibid., 154.
There's a horrendous discovery here, that of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety.
Ibid.
Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this - You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness. Freud comes upon a revelation of the type, Mene, TekeI, Peres at the height of his need to see, to know, which was until then expressed in the dialogue of the ego with the object.
Ibid., 154-.155.
Hence there's an anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which summarises what we can call the revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible mediation, of the ultimate real, of the essential object which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.
Ibid., 164.
Just when the hydra has lost its heads, a voice which is nothing more than the voice of no one causes the trimethylamine formula to emerge, as the last word on the matter, the word for everything. And this word means nothing except that it is a word.
Ibid., 170.
The phenomenology of the dream of Irma's injection led us to distinguish two parts. The first leads to the apparition of the terrifying anxiety-provoking image, to this real Medusa's head, to the revelation of this something which properly speaking is unnameable, the back of this throat, the complex, unlocatable form, which also makes it into the primitive object par excellence, the abyss of the feminine organ from which all life emerges, this gulf of the mouth, in which everything is swallowed up, and no less the image of death in which everything comes to its end ...
Ibid., 163-164.
In the dream of Irma’s injection, it is just when the world of the dreamer is plunged into the greatest imaginary chaos that discourse enters into play, discourse as such, independently of its meaning, since it is a senseless discourse. It then seems that the subject decomposes and disappears.
Ibid., 170.
In the first case, following a traumatic experience involving her father [at age six, she witnessed her parents having sexual intercourse and saw her father’s naked body; p.483], the father was no longer apprehended by the patient for anything other than his phallic value; but later on in the treatment, he appeared in her dreams with his complete image, except that this image was censured at the level of the genitals ‒ he appeared devoid of pubic hair [p.494]. All of Abraham’s examples run along these lines: partial love for the object ‒ that is, love for the object minus the genitals ‒ provides a foundation for the imaginary separation of the phallus, insofar as the latter intervenes henceforth as a central and exemplary function.
Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book viii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 379.
I need not remind you of everything that, in our past discussions, illustrates and confirms this way of envisioning things. Recall simply the dream related by Ella Sharpe that I commented on for you. Remember the little cough with which the subject alerted his analyst to his presence before entering her office, and everything that was hidden behind it, and which came out along with his usual reveries.
Ibid., 395.
It so happens that in dreams people see appearing, and in an unambiguous way, a pure, schematic form of the fantasy. This is the case in the dream from the study on The Wolf Man. This recurring dream takes on all its importance, and Freud chooses it as central, because it is the pure fantasy unveiled in its structure. This observation has an unexhausted and inexhaustible character because it essentially concerns, from beginning to end, the fantasy’s relation to the real.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 73.
Now, what can we see in this dream? The sudden opening ‒ these two terms are indicated ‒ of a window. The fantasy is beheld on the other side of a windowpane, and through a window that opens. The fantasy is framed.
Ibid.
It often happens that our subjects dream they’ve got the object in hand, either some gangrene has detached it, or some partner in the dream has taken it upon himself to perform the slicing operation, or else there’s been some mishap or other. These dreams, which are variously nuanced with uncanniness and anxiety, possess a character that is especially unsettling. The way that the object suddenly passes over into what could be called its Zuhandenheit, as Heidegger would say, its handiness in the sense of commonplace objects and utensils, comes to be designated in the observation on Little Hans by a dream, the dream of the tap fitter who will unscrew it, screw it back on again, and make the eingewurzelt, which either was or wasn’t well-rooted in the body, pass over into the register of the detachable.
Ibid., 90.
The trauma reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled. How can the dream, the bearer of the subject's desire, produce that which makes the trauma emerge repeatedly— if not its very face, at least the screen that shows us that it is still there behind?
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 55.
For it is not that, in the dream, he persuades himself that the son is still alive. But the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object. It is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can occur.
Ibid., 69.
When everybody is asleep, including the person who wished to take a little rest, the person who was unable to maintain his vigil and the person of whom some well intentioned individual, standing at his bedside, must have said, He looks just as he is asleep, when we know only one thing about him, and that is that, in this entirely sleeping world, only the voice is heard, Father, can't you see I'm burning? This sentence is itself a firebrand—of itself it brings fire where it falls—and one cannot see what is burning, for the flames blind us to the fact that the fire bears on the Unterlegt, on the Untertragen, on the real.
Ibid.
The fact remains that this split is still there only as representing the more profound split, which is situated between that which refers to the subject in the machinery of the dream, the image of the approaching child, his face full of reproach and, on the other hand, that which causes it and into which he sinks, the invocation, the voice of the child, the solicitation of the gaze—Father can't you see …
Ibid., 70.
[…] in the so-called waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the images is that it shows.
Ibid., 75.
It shows—but here, too, some form of ‘sliding away’ of the subject is apparent. Look up some description of a dream, any one—not only the one I referred to last time, in which, after all, what I am going to say may remain enigmatic, but any dream—place it in its co-ordinates, and you will see that this it shows is well to the fore. So much is it to the fore, with the characteristics in which it is co-ordinated—namely, the absence of horizon, the enclosure, of that which is contemplated in the waking state, and, also, the character of emergence, of contrast, of stain, of its images, the intensification of their colours—that, in the final resort, our position in the dream is profoundly that of someone who does not see.
Ibid.
In a dream, he is a butterfly. What does this mean? It means that he sees the butterfly in his reality as gaze. What are so many figures, so many shapes, so many colours, if not this gratuitous showing, in which is marked for us the primal nature of the essence of the gaze.
Ibid., 76.
Freud maintains the libido as the essential element of the primary process. This means—contrary to how it may seem in the texts in which he tries to illustrate his theory—that in hallucination, the simplest hallucination of the simplest of needs, the hallucination of food, as it occurred in the dream of little Anna when she speaks of tart, strawberries, eggs, and other delicacies, there is not purely and simply a making present of the objects of a need. It is only on account of the sexualization of these objects that the hallucination of the dream is possible—for, as you will notice, little Anna only hallucinates forbidden objects. One can argue over each case, but it is absolutely essential to map the dimension of signification in every hallucination if we are to grasp what the pleasure principle means. It is from the point at which the subject desires that the connotation of reality is given in the hallucination.
Ibid., 154-155.
In The Wolf Man, I would say, to give you the thread that will guide you through your reading, that the sudden appearance of the wolves in the window in the dream plays the function of the s, as representative of the loss of the subject.
Ibid., 251.
It is not only that the subject is fascinated by the sight of these wolves, which number seven, and which, in fact, in his drawing of them perched on the tree number only five. It is that their fascinated gaze is the subject himself.
Ibid.
You will recall that there is the beautiful wife and her husband, who loves a fuck, who is a perfect idiot, because of which she has to show him that she does not value what he wants to satisfy her to excess with, which means that nothing is settled as to what is essential, even though she has what is essential. There you have it. What she does not see, because she too has limits to her own little horizon, is that by leaving what is essential to her husband to another woman, she would obtain surplus jouissance, for this is what is at stake in the dream. She doesn't see it in the dream, that's all one can say.
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xvii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. R. Grigg (NewYork/London: Norton, 2007), 74.
What Dora is interested in is not the jewel, even indiscreet. Recall this observation that lasts for three months, and which is entirely meant for serving as a cupule for two dreams. The first dream, the one called the dream of the jewel box, bears this out—it isn't the jewel, it's the box, the envelope of the precious organ, there you have the only thing she gets jouissance out of.
Ibid., 96.
For his line of interpretation, which is that of a denial of death in the name of omnipotence, Conrad Stein makes clever use of Freud's analyses concerning a number of his major dreams, such as the famous request to close the eyes, with the ambiguity of this “an eye” under a bar, which he also produces as the product of an alternative. But it can also be read in another sense.
Ibid., 122.
It is inasmuch as the psychoanalysand dreams that the psychoanalyst has to intervene. Would this be a matter of waking the psychoanalysand? [...]There is what I shall pronounce to be, not a representation, but a presentation of the object. This presentation is what in such instance I call the object a. Its complexity is extreme.
Jacques Lacan, “Aristotle’s Dream”, The Lacanian Review 8, (2019): 17.
Between what occurs as if by chance, when everybody is asleep-the candle that overturns and the sheets that catch fire, the meaningless event, the accident, the piece of bad luck – and the element of poignancy, however veiled, in the words Father can’t you see I’m burning – there is the same relation to what we are dealing in repetition.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 69.
The fact remains that this split is still there only as representing the more profound split, which is situated between that which refers to the subject in the machinery of the dream, the image of the approaching child, his face full of reproach and, on the other hand, that which causes it and into which he skins, the invocation, the voice of the child, the solicitation of the gaze – Father can’t you see…
Ibid., 70.
Indeed, for imagos —whose veiled faces we analysts see emerge in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic effectiveness—the specular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world, if we take into account the mirrored disposition of the imago of one's own body in hallucinations and dreams, whether it involves one's individual features, or even one's infirmities or object projections; or if we take note of the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearance of doubles, in which psychical realities manifest themselves that are, moreover, heterogeneous.
Ibid., 77.
An enormous series of subjective phenomena revolve around this image [of one’s own body], running the gamut from the amputee's illusion to the hallucination of one's double, including the latter's appearance in dreams and the delusional objectifications that go with it.
Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality”, in Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 151.
[R]esistances […] are used as long as possible in the direction [sens] of the progress of the discourse. And when it is time to put an end to them, we manage to do so by giving in to them. For this is how the Rat Man is able to insert into his subjectivity its true mediation in a transferential form: the imaginary daughter he gives Freud in order to receive her hand in marriage from him, and who unveils her true face to him in a key dream—that of death gazing at him with its bituminous eyes.
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, ibid., 204.
To Freud, the vision of the dream seems like the reversal of the fascination of the gaze. It is in the gaze of these wolves, so anxiety-provoking in the account of it given by the dreamer. that Freud sees the equivalent of the fascinated gaze of the infant confronted with the scene which profoundly marked him in the imaginary and redirected his entire instinctual life.
Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book ii (1954-1955), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans, S. Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 176.
The real has to be sought beyond the dream—in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative.
Ibid., 60.
The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic—it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too. What does this mean, if not that, in the so-called waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In the field of the dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the images it that it shows.
Ibid., 75.
[I]n the final resort, our position in the dream is profoundly that of someone who does not see. The subject does not see where it is leading, he follows.
Ibid.
In a dream, he is a butterfly. What does this mean? It means that he sees the butterfly in his reality as gaze. What are so many figures, so many shapes, so many colours, if not this gratuitous showing, in which is marked for us the primal nature of the essence of the gaze. […] [I]t is when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity—that he was, and is, in his essence, that butterfly who paints himself with his own colours—and it because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu. […] [I]n the dream, he is a butterfly for nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others, and is caught in their butterfly net.
Ibid., 76.
J.-A. MILLER
The mental debility of the human being always resides precisely on two planes at the same time, the real and the imaginary, being and being of duty: he dreams his life with open eyes. The new technologies take hold of this anthropological given in order to manipulate your waking dream with a precision and a dexterity hitherto unprecedented. This is just the beginning.
Jacques-Alain Miller, Le Point Interview by Christophe Labbé and Olivia Recasens, published on 25/02/2010 N°1953 Le Point, trans. N. Wulfing, NLS-Messager 657.
E. LAURENT
To explain the dream, one surely has to draw on things that reach right back to “the very fabric of the unconscious.” Situating the unconscious as a fabric also means introducing that which forms a hole, namely the question of trauma.
Eric Laurent, “Speaking Through One’s Symptom, Speaking Through One’s Body”, Hurly-Burly 11 (2014): 140.
It is the link to a trauma that cannot be imaginarized in the writing of the dream and which comes to mark the order of 0&1, which comes to emerge, to mark itself as a hole in the body.
Eric Laurent, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”, The Lacanian Review 8 (2019): 129.
Just as the watchman over our sleep does not stop our awakening in anxiety dreams, the watchman over our life does not stop masochism from coming to light insofar as it is the privileged relation to the tendency toward the Nirvana principle. In this sense masochism is the component drive par excellence since it is the one that reveals that every drive has a dimension, an aspect of the death drive.
Eric Laurent, “Feminine Positions of Being”, The Later Lacan. An Introduction, ed. Véronique Voruz & Bogdan Wolf (New York: Albany, 2007), 235.
Lacan’s vision conjoins objects perceptible for the senses with objects that do not have to do with perception. Lacan retrieves here classical uses of vision, which includes the mystical meaning of supernatural vision, “intuitive, beatific vision and the way of knowing divine things outside the natural order, a vision of the mathematical object, a reminder of the experience of jouissance thereby noted…”
Eric Laurent, “A vision of the Streaming of the One”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38 (2021): 53.
2. The Gaze in Freudian Case Histories
S. FREUD
On that occasion she had been a stranger and had wandered about, not failing, of course, to visit the famous picture gallery. Another [male] cousin of hers, who was with them and knew Dresden, had wanted to act as a guide and take her round the gallery. But she declined and went alone, and stopped in front of the pictures that appealed to her. She remained two hours in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration. When I asked her what had pleased her so much about the picture she could find no clear answer to make. At last she said: ‘The Madonna.’
Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905 [1901]), SE, Vol. VII (1953): 96.
After we had gone through a series of the severest resistances and bitterest vituperations on his part, he could no longer remain blind to the overwhelming effect of the perfect analogy between the transference phantasy and the actual state of affairs in the past. I will repeat one of the dreams which he had at this period, so as to give an example of his manner of treating the subject. He dreamt that he saw my daughter in front of him; she had two patches of dung instead of eyes. No one who understands the language of dreams will find much difficulty in translating this one: it declared that he was marrying my daughter not for her 'beaux yeux' but for her money.
Sigmund Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909), SE, Vol. X (1955): 199-200.
On May 2nd Hans came to me in the morning. “I say,” he said, “I thought something today.” At first he had forgotten it; but later on he related what follows, though with signs of considerable resistance: “The plumber came; and first he took away my behind with a pair of pincers, and then gave me another, and then the same with my widdler. He said: ‘Let me see your behind!' and I had to turn round, and he took it away; and then he said: ‘Let me see your widdler!’ “ ’Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), SE, Vol. X (1955): 98.
Another time he was looking on intently while his mother undressed before going to bed. 'What are you staring like that for?' she asked.
Hans: 'I was only looking to see if you'd got a widdler too.'
Sigmund Freud, “Two Case Histories” (1909), SE, Vol. X (1955): 9.
Everything he [Hans] says shows that he connects what is strange in the situation with the arrival of the stork. He meets everything he sees with a very suspicious and intent look, and there can be no question that his first doubts about the stork have taken root.
Ibid., 10.
Hans sat down beside them, while they, in the consciousness of their mature age, looked down on the little urchin with a good deal of contempt; he gazed at them with admiration, though this proceeding made no great impression on them. In spite of this Hans always spoke of them afterwards as “my little girls.” “Where are my little girls? When are my little girls coming?”
Ibid., 15.
Of course Hans fell in love with her on the spot. He keeps constantly turning round in his chair to take furtive looks at her; when he has finished eating, he stations himself in her vicinity so as to flirt with her, but if he finds he is being observed, he blushes scarlet. If his glances are returned by the little girl, he at once looks shamefacedly the other way.
Ibid., 18.
His [Hans’] fear of horses became transformed more and more into a compulsion to look at them. He said: “I have to look at horses, and then I'm frightened.
Ibid., 29.
I [Father]: “Why did you want Berta to make you widdle?”
He [Hans]: “I don't know. Because she looked on at me.”
Ibid., 61.
Hans: “At Gmunden I lay down in the grass -no, I knelt down- and the children didn't look on at me, and all at once in the morning I said: 'Look for it, children; I laid an egg yesterday.' And all at once they looked, and all at once they saw an egg, and out of it there came a little Hans. Well, what are you laughing for? Mummy didn't know about it, and Karoline didn't know, because no one was looking on, and all at once I laid an egg, and all at once it was there …”
Ibid., 85-86.
Hans: “This morning I was in the W.C. with all my children. First I did lumf and widdled, and they looked on. Then I put them on the seat and they widdled and did lumf, and I wiped their behinds with paper. D'you know why? Because I'd so much like to have children; then I'd do everything for them- take them to the W.C., clean their behinds, and do everything one does with children.”
After the admission afforded by this phantasy, it will scarcely be possible to dispute the fact that in Hans's mind there was pleasure attached to the excretory functions.
Ibid., 97.
The pleasure which a person takes in his own sexual organ may become associated with scopophilia (or sexual pleasure in looking) in its active and passive forms, in a manner which has been very aptly described by Alfred Adler (1908) as 'confluence of instincts'. So little Hans began to try to get a sight of other people's widdlers; his sexual curiosity developed, and at the same time he liked to exhibit his own widdler. One of his dreams, dating from the beginning of his period of repression, expressed a wish that one of his little girl friends should assist him in widdling, that is, that she should share the spectacle [p. 19]. The dream shows, therefore, that up till then this wish had subsisted unrepressed, and later information confirmed the fact that he had been in the habit of gratifying it. The active side of his sexual scopophilia soon became associated in him with a definite theme. He repeatedly expressed both to his father and his mother his regret that he had never yet seen their widdlers; and it was probably the need for making a comparison which impelled him to do this. The ego is always the standard by which one measures the external world; one learns to understand it by means of a constant comparison with oneself.
Ibid., 106-107.
At this juncture it is as well to emphasize at once the fact that during his [Hans’] phobia there was an unmistakable repression of these two well-developed components of his sexual activity. He was ashamed of micturating before other people, accused himself of putting his finger to his widdler, made efforts to give up masturbating, and showed disgust at 'lumf' and 'widdle’ and everything that reminded him of them. In his phantasy of looking after his children he undid this latter repression.
Ibid., 108.
'When I [Rat Man] was six years old I already suffered from erections, and I know that once I went to my mother to complain about them. I know too that in doing so I had some misgivings to get over, for I had a feeling that there was some connection between this subject and my ideas and inquisitiveness, and at that time I used to have a morbid idea that my parents knew my thoughts; I explained this to myself oy supposing that I had spoken them out loud, without having heard myself do it. I look on this as the beginning of my illness. There were certain people, girls, who pleased me very much, and I had a very strong wish to see them naked. But in wishing this I had an uncanny feeling, as though something must happen if I thought such things, and as though I must do all sorts of things to prevent it.
Ibid., 161-162.
The child, as we have seen, was under the domination of a component of the sexual instinct, the desire to look [scopophilia], as a result of which there was a constant recurrence in him [Rat Man] of a very intense wish connected with persons of the female sex who pleased him-the wish, that is, to see them naked.
Ibid., 162-163.
We must also consider in the same connection his [Rat Man’s] curious behaviour at a time when he was working for an examination and toying with his favourite phantasy that his father was still alive and might at any moment reappear [p. 174]. He used to arrange that his working hours should be as late as possible in the night. Between twelve and one o'clock at night he would interrupt his work, and open the front door of the flat as though his father were standing outside it; then, coming back into the hall, he would take out his penis and look at it in the looking-glass. This crazy conduct becomes intelligible if we suppose that he was acting as though he expected a visit from his father at the hour when ghosts are abroad. He had on the whole been idle at his work during his father's lifetime, and this had often been a cause of annoyance to his father. And now that he was returning as a ghost, he was to be delighted at finding his son hard at work. But it was impossible that his father should be delighted at the other part of his behaviour; in this therefore he must be defying him. Thus, in a single unintelligible obsessional act, he gave expression to the two sides of his relation with his father […]
Ibid., 204.
The histories of obsessional patients almost invariably reveal an early development and premature repression of the sexual instinct of looking and knowing [the scopophilic and epistemophilic instinct]; and, as we know, a part of the infantile sexual activity of our present patient was governed by that instinct [p. 160 ff.].
Ibid., 245.
What he [Rat Man] has already told me shows that this was connected with a wish to see her defenceless, because of her having resisted him by rejecting his love; and it corresponds crudely to a necrophilic phantasy which he once had consciously but which did not venture beyond the point of looking at the whole body.
Ibid., 278.
He [Rat Man] described a scene in which he actually showed his mother an erection. He summed up his sexuality as having been content with merely looking at [Fraulein] Peter and other women.
Whenever he thought of an attractive woman without any clothes on he had an erection. A clear recollection of being in the women's swimming-bath and seeing two girls of twelve and thirteen whose thighs pleased him so much that he had a definite wish for a sister with such lovely thighs. Then followed a homosexual period with male friends; but there was never mutual contact but only looking and at the most pleasure from it. Looking took the place of touching for him.
Ibid., 309-310.
She went for a walk with her one day in a part of the town and at an hour at which she was not unlikely to meet her father on his way from his office. So it turned out. Her father passed them in the street and cast a furious look at her and her companion, about whom he had by that time come to know. A few moments later she flung herself into the railway cutting.
Sigmund Freud, “The psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920) SE, Vol. XVIII (1955): 161.
J. LACAN
The third dialectical reversal, the one that would reveal to us the real value of the object that Frau K is for Dora. Frau K is not an individual, but a mystery, the mystery of Dora’s own femininity, by which I mean her bodily femininity—as it appears undisguised in the second of the two dreams whose study makes up the second part of the case history, dreams I suggest you reread in order to see how greatly their interpretation is simplified by my commentary.
Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Transference,” in Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 180.
As is true for all women, and for reasons that are at the very crux of the most elementary social exchanges (the very exchanges Dora names as the grounds for her revolt), the problem of her condition is fundamentally that of accepting herself as a man's object of desire, and this is the mystery that motivates Dora’s idolization of Frau K. In her long meditation before the Madonna and in her recourse to the role of distant worshipper, this mystery drives Dora toward the solution Christianity has offered for this subjective impasse by making woman the object of a divine desire or a transcendent object of desire, which amounts to the same thing.
Ibid., 181.
For this is how the Rat Man is able to insert into his subjectivity its true mediation in a transferential form: the imaginary daughter he gives Freud in order to receive her hand in marriage from him, and who unveils her true face to him in a key dream—that of death gazing at him with its bituminous eyes.
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” ibid., 250.
‘…since I reminded you last time of the structure that is specific to the visual field, the simultaneous sustentation and occultation of the object a in this field, I can do no less than come back to it, when this is the field in which the phallic presence is first approached, and in a way we know to be traumatic. This is what is knows as the primal scene. […]
Moreover, I will only need to bring up the mode of apparition of this primal scene in its exemplary form, along with the anxiety that comes with it, in the Wolf man’s story. […]
In the revelation of what appears to the Wolf Man through the gap and the frame – pre-figuring what I turned into a function – of the open window, and which can be identified in its form with the function of the fantasy in its most anxiety-provoking mode, where lies the crux? Clearly it doesn’t lie in the fact of knowing where the phallus is. It is […] everywhere – identical to what I could call the catatonia of the image of the tree and the perched wolves that […] hold the subject in their gaze. There’s no need to go looking for it in the five furry tails of the five animals. It is there in the very reflection of the image, which it supports with a catatonia that is nothing but the subject’s own, the child turned to stone by what he sees, paralyzed by this fascination to the point that one may conceive of what gazes back at him in the scene, and which is invisible on account of being everywhere, as nothing but the transposition of the arrested state of his own body, here transformed into a tree, […]
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 259-260.
[…] the Rat Man’s famous nocturnal conduct when, in having obtained by himself an erection in the looking-glass, he goes to open the hallway door to the imagined phantom of his dead father, in order to present, to the eyes of this spectre, the state of his member.
Ibid., 95.
To understand how the passage a l’ acte occurred, it is not enough to say that the father cast an irrated glance […]
What occurs then is the subject’s absolute identification with the a to which she is reduced. Here, it is a matter of the confrontation between the father’s desire, upon which her entire conduct is built, and the law that is presentified in the father’s gaze. This is what leads her to feel definitely identified with a and, by the same token, rejected, evacuated, from the stage.
Ibid., 110-111.
If this special image we have facing us, which is our stature, our face, our two eyes, allows the dimension of our gaze to emerge, the value of the image starts to change – above all if there’s a moment when this gaze that appears in the mirror starts not to look at us any more. There’s and initium, an aura, a dawning sense of uncanniness which leaves the door open to anxiety.
This passage from the specular image to the double that escapes me is the point at which something occurs whose generality, whose presence within the entire phenomenal field, can be shown through the articulation we have been giving to the function of the a.
Ibid., 88.
[…] the problem of the conversion of phantasy and reality converge, namely, in something irreducible, non-sensical, that functions as an originally repressed signifier […] In the Wolf Man […] the sudden appearance of the wolves in the window in the dream plays the function of the s, as representative of the loss of the subject. It is not only that the subject is fascinated by the sight of these wolves […] It is that their fascinated gaze is the subject himself.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 251.
There are others that do see it. For example, Dora does. Through the adoration of the object of desire that woman has become on her horizon—the woman she envelops herself in and who in the case study is called Frau K., the woman she is going to contemplate in the figure of the Dresden Madonna — through this adoration, she plugs her penile claims [revendications]. And this is what makes it possible for me to say that the butcher’s beautiful wife does not see that, like Dora, she would ultimately be happy to leave this object to another woman.
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xvii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. R. Grigg (New York/London: Norton, 2007), 74.
The astonishing thing is that form offers up nothing more than the bag, or, if you like, the bubble, because it’s something that inflates.
The obsessional is more stricken by this than anyone else because […] he belongs to the same register as the frog who wanted to be as big as an ox. […] It’s particularly difficult, as we know, to wrench the obsessional away from the stranglehold of the gaze.
Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xxiii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 9.
There is a centrifugal dynamic of the gaze, that is to say, one that starts off from the seeing eye but also from the blind spot. It starts off from the instant of seeing, and maintains it as its prop. Indeed, the eye beholds instantaneously. This is what one calls intuition, whereby it duplicates what is known as space in the image.
Ibid., 70.
E. LAURENT
I would like therefore for my invitation to read Gabrielle and Richard through Hans to have this meaning: to note what comes back to the symbolic order in what might appear as a shimmering, a mask of the imaginary. lt is in this way that we may approach the real of the symptom.
Eric Laurent, “Reading Gabrielle and Richard with Little Hans,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 28 (2014): 70.
The Freudian case study initially adopted the form of Goethe’s novels. Dora’s suffering owes a lot, in the way in which it is expressed, to the suffering of the young Werther living through German Idealism. Yet these case-studies set a model: the dream and its associations, derived from the original form established by Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams to give an account of the initial analytic experience. Freud succeeded in giving a narrative form to structure, freed from the constraints of the ideal. He succeeded in integrating the analytic session — fundamentally knotted in the dis-symmetry between the analyst and the analysand — into one and the same continuous narrative of the subject’s dialogue with his unconscious.
Eric Laurent, “The Case, From Unease to A Lie,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 22 (2011): 82.
In the reading he makes of Freud’s cases, Lacan “elevates the case to the paradigm”, to the rank of “the example that shows” the formal properties, in the broadest sense, of the manifestations of the Freudian unconscious. The paradigm brings forth structure and indicates the symptom’s place in a class just as well as the elements of substantiality in a subject’s life which recur and alternate, or again the modes of declension of the repetition of the same. In this way, the logical and topological structure of the Freudian cases appear within an unforgettable clarity. The logical structure of the circuits that Little Hans makes around the void of phobia is revealed in the reading of the case. Schema R shows the bare bones of Schreber’s psychosis, starting from the signifiers isolated by Freud. The quartet in Dora converges with that of the “Young Homosexual Woman” by indicating the group of the transformation of feminine sexuality around the signifier of desire. In the Rat Man, he emphasises the “general combinatory” of the form of the obsessional labyrinth.
Ibid., 84.
In Freud's historical example, we meet this kind of approach at its most evident when the Rat Man, telling Freud about his fascination with the torture in which rats are introduced into the anus of a poor condemned subject, stops and states that, "as I was telling you of this horror, I had the idea that it could happen to one of my loved ones”. Freud notes on the face of the Rat Man a jouissance unknown to himself. That's how Lacan translates it, which makes it resonate for us. It indicates that jouissance in the Rat Man has a kind of enormous presence. It can also have a discreet presence, as in the pun between la tante and l’attente. But it's always unknown to the subject.
Eric Laurent, “Private Language, Private Jouissance,” Hurly Burly 6 (2011): 160.
So, both with Dora, where the accent lies more on truth, which fits with the hysteric's position, and with the Rat Man, where the accent lies more on jouissance, which fits more with the obsessional position, beyond the signification established by common language, we can see them giving voice to the articulation of their private relationship with jouissance.
Ibid., 161.
Jouissance is the real substance involved, the only one, the one that it is impossible to reduce and impossible to empty out. It is the ineluctable remainder that is at stake after the operation of emptying-out that happens within the subject.
To obtain this impossible, this remainder, it is first necessary to connect the subject to his jouissance. In a deeper sense, this is the operation that Lacan calls “subjective rectification”; the operation that Lacan describes in speaking of Freud's approach to Dora: my dear Dora, you complain about the state of the world, but you participate in this state of the world, you are building it, you are an agent of it. According to Lacan, this is a Hegelian reference to the law of the heart. Hegel was playing the ironist, considering the romantic complaints he had to live with in the 1820s to be the intellectual’s way of participating in the order of the world. Lacan takes up this law of the heart by stating that, yes, it has to be recognised as a truth, but Dora's truth underlies its jouissance in metaphor.
Ibid., 162.
He [Schreber] becomes this subject who experiences the mystery of seeing himself as the repository for all the little experiences of jouissance of the souls of the universe, which allows Lacan to add “[…] which will allow us to come up with a more precise definition of paranoia as identifying jouissance in the locus of the Other as such”.
Eric Laurent, “Three Enigmas: Meaning, Signification, Jouissance,” Psychoanalytic Notebooks 12 (2003): 36.
Lacan for example, often referred to Freud’s formulation of the fetish in the case of the man who in order to become interested in a woman had to detect a certain “shine of the nose” (in German, Glanz auf der Nase). Freud traced this back to the fact that the patient had had an English nurse. Out of sexual curiosity, he tried to “glance” at her, but she told him that somehow his nose would be punished if he tried to look at her when he was not allowed to. Hence Glanz and glance were linked to the nose. In this way one can make sense of something that, in its deeper aspects, made no sense at all. That is just the way it is.
Eric Laurent, “Alienation and Separation (I),” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus (State University of NY Press, 1995): 31-32.
He was a gaze, and what structured his relationship with the Other was the fact that he identified with that gaze, that is a partial drive. His jouissance was once and for all fixated within that gaze. It was a necessary condition for him to attain an erection, to take into account his phallic situation. The Glanz auf der Nase was a fetish.
Ibid., 32.
3. Envy and the Evil Eye
S. FREUD
As regards the eye, we are in the habit of translating the obscure psychical processes concerned in the repression of sexual scopophilia and in the development of the psychogenic disturbance of vision as though punishing voice was speaking from within the subject, and saying: 'Because you sought to misuse your organ of sight for evil sensual pleasure, it is fitting that you should not see anything at all any more', and as though it was in this way approving the outcome of the process. The idea of talion punishment is involved in this, and in fact our explanation of psychogenic visual disturbance coincide with what is suggested by myths and legends.
Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision" (1910), SE, Vol. XI (1957): 217.
One of the most uncanny and wide spread forms of superstition is the dread of the evil eye, which has been exhaustively studied by the Hamburg oculist Seligman (1910-11). There never seems to have been any doubt about the source of this dread. Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people's envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that this envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power of its command.
Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), SE, Vol. XVII (1964): 240.
After several days of resistance the patient reported that she had felt very much snubbed because a young man whom she met regularly near the doctor's house, and who used as a rule to look at her admiringly, had on the last occasion looked contemptuously at her feet. In fact she had no reason to be ashamed of her feet. She produced the explanation herself after admitting that she had regarded the young man as the doctor's son, who thus (by way of the transference) stood for her elder brother. There now followed a memory of having been in the habit of accompanying her brother to the lavatory when she was about five years old and of watching him micturate. She was overcome with envy at not being able to do it in the same way as he did and one day tried to copy him (envy for the penis). But in doing so she wetted her shoes and got very angry when her brother teased her about it. For a long time afterwards her anger recurred whenever her brother looked contemptuously at her shoes with the object of reminding her of her misfortune. She added that this experience had determined her later behaviour at school. If she was unsuccessful in anything at the first attempt she could never bring herself to try again, so that in many subjects she failed completely. —This is a good example of the way in which sexual life acts as a model and influences character.
Sigmund Freud, “Observations and examples from analytic practice,” (1913), SE, Vol. XIII (1957): 196.
J. LACAN
Look at this drawing by a schizophrenic woman. What is there on the tip of the branches? For the subject in question, the role that the wolves play for the Wolf Man is fulfilled by signifiers. Beyond the tree’s branches she's written out the formula of her secret, Io sono sempre vista. It's what she'd never been able to say until then. I´m always in view. I still have to pause to make you see that in Italian, as in French, vista is ambiguous. It's not only a past participle, it's also view, with its two meanings, subjective and objective, the function of viewing, of sight, and the fact of being a view, as one says a countryside view, the view that’s taken as an object on a postcard.
What I simply want to accentuate today is that the dreadful, the shady, the disturbing, everything by which we translate, as best we can in French, the magisterial German Unheimliche, presents itself through little windows. The field of anxiety is situated as something framed. Thus, you’re coming back to what I introduced the discussion with, namely, the relationship between the stage and the world.”
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014): 73-75.
The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977),118.
How could this showing something, if there is not some appetite of the eye on the part of the person looking? This appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value of painting. For me, this value is to be sought on a much less elevated plane than might be supposed, namely, in that which is the true function of the organ of the eye, the eye filled with voracity, the evil eye.
Ibid., 115.
It is striking, when one thinks of the universality of the function of the evil eye, that there is no trace anywhere of a good eye, of an eye that blesses. What can this mean, except that the eye carries with it the fatal function of being in itself endowed — if you will allow me to play on several registers at once— with a power to separate. But this power to separate goes much further than distinct vision. The powers that are attributed to it, of drying up the milk of an animal on which it falls — a belief as widespread in our time as in any other, and in the most civilized countries — of bringing with it disease or misfortune — where can we better picture this power than in invidia?
Ibid.
In order to understand what invidia is in its function as gaze it must not be confused with jealousy. What the small child, or whoever, envies is not at all necessarily what he might want — avoir envie, as one improperly puts it.
Ibid., 116.
Such is true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself; before the idea that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction, Befriedigung.
Ibid.
For it is in so far as all human desire is based on castration that the eye assumes its virulent, aggressive function, and not simply its luring function as in nature. One can find among these amulets forms in which a counter-eye emerges—this is homeopathic. Thus, obliquely, the so-called prophylactic function is introduced.
Ibid., 118.
4. Medical Gaze / Psychosomatic Phenomena
J. LACAN
The psychosomatic is something which nevertheless, fundamentally, profoundly rooted in the imaginary.
Jacques Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom,” Analysis 1 (1989): 23.
The question should be assessed at this level-what is the son of enjoyment [jouissancel that's found in psychosomatics? If I used a metaphor likefioten, it's indeed because there certainly is that species of fixation. It is not for nothing, either, that Freud uses the term Fixierung - it's because the body lets itself go to write something of the order of the number.
Ibid.
…The imaginary structuration of the ego forms around the specular image of the body itself, of the image of the other. Now, the relation of looking and being looked at does indeed involve an organ, the eye, to give it its name. Some very surprising things can happen here. How are we to approach them, when all aspects of psychosomatics are plunged in the greatest confusion?
Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book ii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 95.
If, then, the gaze is that underside of consciousness, how shall we try to imagine it? (…) The expression is not inapt, for we can give body to the gaze.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 83.
J.-A. MILLER
In this distinction between body and flesh, the body shows itself to be something that is able to flesh out the locus of the Other of the signifier as a surface of inscription. For us, the Cartesian mystery of psychosomatic union is displaced. What is mysterious, but which remains indubitable, is what results from the symbolic’s purchase on the body. To put it in Cartesian terms, the mystery is rather that of union between speech and the body.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” Hurly-Burly 12 (2015): 125.
If we wish to pursue our research in this domain, it seems to me essential to assert from the outset that the psychosomatic phenomenon differs from the symptom.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Some Reflections on the Psychosomatic Phenomenon,” Hurly-Burly 12 (2015): 133.
It is certainly essential, crucial, to distinguish the symptom, especially that of the hysteric, from the psychosomatic phenomenon, precisely in that this relation to the Other is constitutive of the hysteric symptom, which is in no way the case with the psychosomatic phenomenon, if it exists.
Ibid., 135.
The psychosomatic phenomenon is a hieroglyph in the desert – what is written and not cried out. And we must not forget that Lacan defined what is written fundamentally as ‘not to be read’. In this conference, he does evoke reading, but the heart of what he speaks about is, rather, the written as not to be read, quite distinct from any appeal to the Other, it being fundamental that this be of the order of the imprinted. The passage from the letter to number, that can be noted here, has a certain importance.
Ibid., 136.
E. LAURENT
If the principal post-Freudian currents diverged on the question of anxiety, they were on the same side with respect to a second Freudian indication that also differs from the medical position: the subject’s guilt-feelings must not be relieved. The psychoanalytic position thus must be clearly distinguished from any position that pleads for the relief of the subject’s quilt-feelings for humanitarian reasons.
Eric Laurent, “Relieve Anxiety?” (2003): 6.
Why should guilt-feelings not be relieved? It is not only because Freud was very prudent about the unlocking of the barriers of civilization. It is because the division of the subject must be attained through his feelings of guilt. Psychoanalysis has remarked that the neurotic subject is always guilty of partaking in jouissance and existing, that is what Freud designated as unconscious feelings of quilt. In this way Freud separated psychoanalysis from psychotherapy when the latter reunited with the medical ideal in trying to reduce feeling of quilt.
Ibid., 7.
5. Transparency, Intimacy, Surveillance
S. FREUD
It would not surprise us if we were to find a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with the end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal. If such an agency does exist, we cannot possibly come upon it as a discovery - we can only recognize it; for we may reflect that what we call our 'conscience' has the required characteristics. Recognition of this agency enables us to understand the so called 'delusions of being noticed' or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases and which may also occur as an isolated form of illness, or intercalated in a transference neurosis.
Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914), SE, Vol. XIV (1957): 95.
The idea of the 'double' does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego's development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our 'conscience'. In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician's eye.
Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), SE, Vol. 17, (1964): 235.
J. LACAN
Let us once again take up, under another aspect, the relation to the gaze. We are at war. I am moving forward over a plain, and I assume myself to be under a gaze lying in wait for me. If I am assuming that, it is not so much that I am afraid of some sign of my enemy, some attack, because as soon as that happens the situation becomes more relaxed and I know who I am dealing with. What matters the most to me is knowing what the other imagines, what the other detects of these intentions of mine, I who am moving forward, because I must screen my movements from him. It is a matter of ruse.
The dialectic of the gaze is maintained on this plane. What counts is not that the other sees where I am, but that he sees where I am going, that is to say, quite precisely, that he sees where I am not. In every analysis of the intersubjective relation, what is essential is not what is there, what is seen. What structures it is what is not there.
Jacques Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book i, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 224.
The gaze is not necessarily the face of our fellow being, it could just as easily be the window behind which we assume he is lying in wait for us.
Ibid., 220.
To see what cannot be seen it has to be seen behind a veil, that is, a veil that has been held in front of the inexistence of what is to be seen. It is precisely behind the theme of the veil, of the pair of drawers, of this garment, that the essential fantasy of the relationship between mother and child lies hidden. This is the fantasy of the phallic mother.
Jacques Lacan, The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book iv, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2020): 347.
So, at a higher degree than mere seeing and being seen, the imaginary dialectic culminates in offering to view and being surprised by an unveiling. This dialectic is the only one that enables us to comprehend the fundamental sense of the act of seeing.
Ibid., 264.
Io sono sempre vista […] I’m always in view […] In Italian, as in French, vista is ambiguous. It’s not only a past participle, it’s also view, with its two meanings, subjective and objective, the function of viewing, of sight, and the fact of being a view, as one says a countryside view, the view that’s taken as an object on a postcard.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Polity: Cambridge, 2014), 73-74.
If this specular image we have facing us, which is our stature, our face, our two eyes, allows the dimension of our gaze to emerge, the value of the image starts to change – above all if there’s a moment when this gaze that appears in the mirror starts not to look at us anymore. There’s an initium, an aura, a dawning sense of uncanniness which leaves the door open to anxiety.
Ibid., 88.
In space, however – and the whole scope of this remark lies in this however – nothing in appearance is separated. Space is homogenous […] It bears a certain relation, not to the mind, but to the eye.
Ibid., 252.
But this form hides from us the phenomenon of the occultation of the eye, which thereafter will gaze on us from everywhere, will place us under the universality of seeing.
Ibid., 271.
But this is going too far, for that eye is only a metaphor of something that I would prefer to call the seer’s “shoot” (pausse) – something prior to his eye. What we have to circumscribe, by means of the path he [Maurice Merleau-Ponty] indicates for us, is the pre-existence of a gaze – I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 72.
The spectacle of the world […] appears to us as all-seeing.
Ibid., 75.
The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic — it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.
Ibid.
[…] the gaze […] leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance […].
Ibid., 77.
This means that the level of reciprocity between the gaze and the gazed at is, for the subject, more open than any other to alibi. That is why we should try to avoid, by our interventions in the session, allowing the subject to establish himself on this level. On the contrary, we should cut him off from this point of ultimate gaze, which is illusory.
Ibid.
The correlative of the picture, to be situated in the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of gaze, while that which forms the mediation from the one to the other, that which is between the two, is something of another nature than geometral, optical space, something that plays an exactly reverse role, which operates, not because it can be traversed, but on the contrary because it is opaque — I mean the screen.
Ibid. 96.
Generally speaking, the relation between the gaze and what one wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as object a, that is to say, at the level of the lack (- ф).
Ibid., 104.
I must, do begin with, insist on the following: in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture […] Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which […] I am photo-graphed.
What is at issue here is not the philosophical problem of representation.
Ibid., 106.
But the opposite example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it.
Ibid., 112.
It was a case of one of those shared delusions [délires à deux] – the typical case of which is the mother/daughter couple, as I showed long ago – in which a feeling of being intruded upon, that had developed into a delusion of being watched, was but the development of the defense characteristic of an affective binary relation, open as such to every alienation.
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink (London/New York: Norton, 2006), 447.
We now understand what the invisible obstacle [obstacle de verre] was that prevented her from knowing, even though she cried out that she did, that she loved all these persecutory women: they were nothing but images.
Jacques Lacan, “Motives of Paranoiac Crimes: The Crime of the Papin Sisters,” The Lacanian Review 10 (2020): 29.
They tore out their eyes just as the Bacchae castrated their victims.
Ibid., 31.
Whence the unconscious…reminds us that to the side of meaning that fascinates us in speech – in exchange for which being – this being whose thought is imagined by Parmenides – acts as speech’s screen…
Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. J. Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990), 8.
A gaze, that of Beatrice – that is to say, three times nothing, a fluttering of the eyelids and the exquisite trash that results from it – and there emerges that Other whom we can identify only through her jouissance: her whom he, Dante, cannot satisfy, because from her, he can have only this look, only this object, but of whom he tells us that God fulfils her utterly; it is precisely by receiving the assurance of that from her own mouth that he arouses us.
Ibid., 23.
[…] I have gone so far as to punctuate the function of petit a at the level of the scoptophilic drive. Its essence is realized in so far as, more than elsewhere, the subject is captive of the function of desire. It is here that the object is strange.
Ibid., 86.
[…] the scoptophilic drive, in which the subject encounters the world as a spectacle that he possesses. He is thus the victim of a lure, through which what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the true petit a, but its complement, the specular image: i (a).
Ibid.
[…] in the phenomenon of the Unheimlich […] through some accident more or less fomented by the other, that image of himself within the Other appears to the subject as shorn of his recourse. Here the entire chain in which the subject is held captive by the scoptophilic drive comes undone.
Ibid.
That man likes to look at his image so much, well there you are, one only has to say - lt's like that. What is so astonishing is that this allowed God's commandment to slip in. At any rate, man is more of a neighbor to himself in his being than in his image in the mirror. So, what is this story of the commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thou loves thyself, if it is not based on this mirage, which is all the same something rather odd?
Jacques Lacan, “The Third,” The Lacanian Review 7, (2019): 96-97.
J.-A. MILLER
That the eye may observe without being seen – that is the most cunning thing about the Panopticon. If I can observe the watcher who spies upon me, I can control my surveillance, I can spy in turn, I can learn the watcher's ways, his weaknesses, I can study his habits, I can elude him. If the eye is hidden, it looks at me even when it is not actually observing me.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Device,” October, Vol. 41 (1987): 4.
By concealing itself in the shadows, the eye can intensify all its powers…
Ibid.
Being hidden means that it escapes any descriptive phenomenology, that it is not enough to let it be, to let be what is there, in order to access it.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Milanese Intuitions,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 34 (2019): 108.
Therefore, paradoxically, the most intimate is not a point of transparency but rather a point of opacity.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,” Prose Studies 3 (1988): 122.
Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other – like a foreign body, a parasite.
Ibid., 123.
We only have to go to the end of the text of ‘Joyce the Symptom I’: the symptom, ‘its opaque jouissance of excluding sense.’ […] One must try to distinguish two jouissances here: transparent jouissance, the jouissance which is sense, the jouissance of what makes sense, and opaque jouissance.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Detached Pieces,” Lacanian Ink 28 (2006): 35.
Moreover, in its definition, the gaze is properly speaking what is ‘without image.’ Through it, we find a representation, a supplement […] The gaze is en plus, something extra, but it is not a sovereign image.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Sovereign Image,” The Lacanian Review 5 (2018): 44.
It is this surplus jouissance that provokes the censorship. The very beauty of the image, which contains the surplus jouissance, hides the gaze of the father.
Ibid., 47.
But Lacan maintains that if I see the gaze, I do not see the space from where I am being looked at. This is why the point of the gaze always seems to come from another dimension.
Ibid., 51.
E. LAURENT
The ideology of evaluation consists in a will to render every social activity transparent to itself. It consists in a permanent, parasitic, time-consuming self-observation.
Eric Laurent, “The Black Hole of Vanities,” NLS-messager 172 (2005): 2.
The paradoxical effect obtained by the jouissance of the transparency of an omnipresent gaze is to push towards the excessive production of images of the public space and of the intimate. They can be security-oriented, or statistical, reveal the functioning of the brain or of sexuality. From the neuro- image to pornography, from virtual reality to the uses of video games in order to treat post-traumatic syndromes, from questionnaires concerning the evaluation of the morale of the French to surveillance cameras, there is always something more to be done, a step further to go. The subject must deliver all his secrets.
Ibid.
Freud underlines that the essential point lay in the new status of the subject, and not in the role of the object. In his 1915 text [Mourning and Melancholia], he thus introduces a new identification, which he presents with the following words: “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object”.
Eric Laurent, “Melancholia, the Pain of Existence and Moral Cowardice,” Hurly-Burly 12 (2015): 148.
6. Shame, Modesty and the Obscene
S. FREUD
We shall be plunged deep into psychological riddles if we inquire into the origin of the unpleasure which seems to be released by premature sexual stimulation and without which, after all, a repression cannot be explained. The most plausible answer will appeal to the fact that shame and morality are the repressing forces and that the neighborhood in which the sexual organs are naturally placed must inevitably arouse disgust during sexual experiences.
Sigmund Freud, “Draft K. The Neuroses of Defence from Extracts from the Flies Papers (A Christmas Fairy Tale),” (1887-1904), SE, Vol. I (1966):.163.
There is an interesting dream of wandering about among strangers, totally or half undressed and with feelings of shame and anxiety. Oddly enough, it is the rule that the people do not notice it-for which we have to thank wish-fulfilment.
Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud, "Extracts from The Fliess Papers - Letter 66," (1897), SE, Vol. I (1966): 257.
He feels ashamed in front of anyone who sees him walking in this way and he regards that as natural.
Sigmund Freud, " Extracts from The Fliess Papers- Letter 97," (1898), SE, Vol. I (1966): 275.
Do you know why our friend E., whom you know, turns red and sweats as soon as he sees one of a particular category of acquaintances, especially at the theatre? He is ashamed.
Sigmund Freud, "Extracts from The Fliess Papers- Letter 105" (1899), SE, Vol. I (1966): 278-279.
Dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers sometimes occur with the additional feature of there being a complete absence of any such feeling as shame on the dreamer's part. We are only concerned here, however, with those dreams of being naked in which one does feel shame and embarrassment and tries to escape or hide, and is then overcome by a strange inhibition which prevents one from moving and makes one feel incapable of altering one's distressing situation.
Sigmund Freud, "Interpretation of Dreams" (1900), SE, Vol. IV (1966): 242.
It is only in our childhood that we are seen in inadequate clothing both by members of our family and by strangers —nurses, maid-servants, and visitors; and it is only then that we feel no shame at our nakedness.
Ibid., 244.
When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and were without shame in one another's presence; till a moment arrived when shame and anxiety awoke, expulsion followed, and sexual life and the tasks of cultural activity began. But we can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams.
Ibid., 245.
The people in whose presence one feels ashamed are almost always strangers, with their features left indeterminate. In the typical dream it never happens that the clothing which causes one so much embarrassment is objected to or so much as noticed by the onlookers.
Ibid., 261.
The core of a dream of exhibiting lies in the figure of the dreamer himself (not as he was as a child but as he appears at the present time) and his inadequate clothing (which emerges indistinctly, whether owing to superimposed layers of innumerable later memories of being in undress or as a result of the censorship). Added to these are the figures of the people in whose presence the dreamer feels ashamed. I know of no instance in which the actual spectators of the infantile scene of exhibiting have appeared in the dream; a dream is scarcely ever a simple memory.
Ibid., 263-264.
The comic of sexuality and obscenity would deserve more detailed consideration; but we can only touch upon it here with a few comments. The starting-point would once more [as in the case of obscene jokes, be exposure. A chance exposure has a comic effect on us because we compare the ease with which we have enjoyed the sight with the great expenditure which would otherwise be required for reaching this end. Thus the case approaches that of the naïvely comic, but is simpler. Every exposure of which we are made the spectator (or audience in the case of smut) by a third person is equivalent to the exposed person being made comic. […] the spheres of sexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comic pleasure alongside pleasurable sexual excitement; for they can show human beings in their dependence on bodily needs (degradation) or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind the claim of mental love (unmasking).
Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and their relation to the unconscious”, SE, Vol. VIII (1957): 221-222.
The force which opposes scopophilia, but which may be overridden by it (in a manner parallel to what we have previously seen in the case of disgust), is shame.
Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), SE, Vol. VII (1955):157
Small children are essentially without shame, and at some periods of their earliest years show an unmistakable satisfaction in exposing their bodies, with especial emphasis on the sexual parts. The counterpart of this supposedly perverse inclination, curiosity to see other people's genitals, probably does not become manifest until somewhat later in childhood, when the obstacle set up by a sense of shame has already reached a certain degree of development.
Ibid., 192.
J. LACAN
From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.
Jacques Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book i, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 215.
The gaze [...] must on no account be confused with the fact, for example, of seeing his eyes. I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straightaway a gaze. The entire phenomenology of shame, modesty, of prestige, of the specific fear engendered by the gaze, is [...] described [...] in Sartre’s book.
Ibid.
[…] it is not for nothing that I mentioned shame. Were we to analyse prestige in a more subtle manner, we would also come upon its derisory forms, upon for example the way it appears in children, for whom it is a form of excitation, etc.
Ibid., 216.
[…] in the gaze of the being whom I torment, I have sustain my desire with an act of defiance, a challenge at every instant. If it does not rise above the situation, if it is not glorious, desire sinks into shame. This is equally true of the scopophilic relation. According to Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis, for anyone surprised in the middle of looking, the entire colour of the situation changes, in one swerving moment, and I become a pure thing, a maniac.
Ibid., 220.
Perversion is an experience, which allows one to enter more deeply into what one call [...] the human passion [...] that is to say what there is in man which is open to this division from himself which structures the imaginary, namely, between 0 and 0’, the specular relation. It becomes a profound experience, on account of the fact that within this gap of human desire, all manner of nuances are called forth, rising up in tires from shame to prestige, from buffoonery to heroism, whereby human desire in its entirely is exposed, in the deepest sense of the term, to the desire of the other.
Ibid., 221.
And to consider first what she projects before us, doesn't it seem that she is protected by a sort of sublime figure of modesty, which is based on the fact that, since she is unable to see herself being seen, she seems to be sheltered from the sole gaze that unveils?
Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book viii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. B. Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 306.
The sin of Oedipus is cupido sciendi. He wants to know, and this is paid for by the horror I described - what in the end he sees are his own eyes, a, cast to the ground. They have been given eyes, that they should not see. They don’t need to tear them out. This is precisely why the human drama is not tragedy, but comedy.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 332.
The gaze sees itself-to be precise, the gaze of which Sartre speaks, the gaze that surprises me and reduces me to shame, since this is the feeling he regards as the most dominant.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 84.
A gaze surprises him in the function of voyeur, disturbs him, overwhelms him and reduces him to a feeling of shame. The gaze in question is certainly the presence of others as such.
Ibid.
I who look, the eye of him who sees me as object. In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me and, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears.
Ibid.
You grasp here the ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scopic drive. The gaze is this object lost and suddenly refound in the conflagration of shame, by the introduction of the other.
Ibid., 182.
Opposed to this pole of desire is traditional ethics - not completely, of course, for nothing is new, or everything is new, in human thought. That's something I wanted to make you feel by choosing the example of the antithesis of the tragic hero in a tragedy, an antithesis who nevertheless embodies a certain heroic quality, and that is Creon. With reference to this example, I spoke to you of the service of goods that is the position of traditional ethics. The cleaning up of desire, modesty, temperateness, that is to say, the middle path we see articulated so remarkably in Aristotle; we need to know what it takes the measure of and whether its measure is founded on something.
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book vii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. D. Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 314.
I should like to introduce here, as a parallel to the function of the beautiful, another function. […] It is with your permission what I shall call (...) a sense of shame. The omission of this barrier, which prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the center of sexual union, seems to me to be at the origin of all kinds of questions that cannot be answered, including notably the matter of feminine sexuality.
Ibid., 298.
After all, any sign can fall under the suspicion of being a pure sign, that is to say, obscene (obscène), Vincennes (vinscène), dare I say, a good example to make you laugh.
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xvii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. R, Grigg (New York: Norton, 1991), 180.
People have been quiet about this for a long time. Speaking about it, in effect, is to open this redoubt, which is not the last, the only one that what can be said honestly of the honest partakes in, "honest," which stems from the honour - that is all shame and companion-of making no mention of shame. Precisely, of the fact that it is impossible for the honest to die of shame. You know from me that this means the real.
Ibid.
There has been a lack of truth up above for three centuries. The service has arrived nevertheless, reheating on demand, even as the musician has from time to time, as you know, don't make such a long face, you are being served, you can say that there is no longer any shame.
Ibid., 182.
You will say to me, “What’s the use of shame? If that is what the other side of psychoanalysis is, we don't want any.” My reply to you is, “You've got enough to open a shop.” If you are not yet aware of this, then do a bit of analysis, as they say. You will see this vapid air of yours run up against an outlandish shame of living.
Ibid.
Be a bit serious and you will notice that this shame is justified by the fact that you do not die of shame, that is, by your maintaining will your force a discourse of the perverted master - which is the university discourse.
Ibid.
Being ashamed of not dying from this would perhaps introduce another tone to it, that with which the real is concerned. I said the real and not the truth for, as I already explained to you last time, it’s a temptation to suck the milk of truth, but it’s toxic. It will put you to sleep, and that’s all that is expected of you.
Ibid., 183.
Today I have brought you the dimension of shame. It is not a comfortable thing to put forward. [...] This is perhaps what it really is, the hole from which the master signifier arises.
Ibid., 189.
If […] there are some slightly less than ignoble reasons for your presence here in such numbers, […] it is because I happen to make you ashamed, not too much, but just enough.
Ibid., 192-193.
This shows that jouissance is that by which Sadean experience is modified. For it only proposes to monopolize a will after having already traversed it in order to instate itself at the inmost core of the subject whom it provokes beyond that by offending his sense of modesty [pudeur]. For modesty is an amboceptor with respect to the circumstances of being: between the two, the one’s immodesty by itself violating the other’s modesty.
A connection that could justify, were such justification necessary, what I said before regarding the subject's assertion in the Other's place.
Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Ecrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 651.
[...] it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon [...] Shame [...] is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone: the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed - its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.
Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book viii, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. B. Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 176.
Here, the ambiguous mortification presents itself in the form of veil, one that we see reproduced every day in the form of the hysteric’s jacket. This is the fundamental position of woman in relation to man where desire is concerned, namely that above all don’t take a look there, inside her jacket, because of course there is nothing there, there is nothing but signifier. But it is nothing other than the signifier of desire. Behind this veil, there is, or there is not, something that must not be shown, and this is why the demon I was talking about concerning the unveiling of the phallus in the sacred Mysteries is called the demon of shame. “Shame” has a different meaning and significance in man and woman, whatever its origin, whether it is the horror of it that a woman has, or something that quite naturally arises from the oh-so delicate souls of men.
Jacques Lacan, Formations of the Unconscious: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book v, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. R. Grigg (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 363.
J.-A. MILLER
[...] shame is a primary affect in relation to the Other. By saying that it is primary, one is no doubt seeking to differentiate it from guilt. […] guilt is the effect on the subject of an Other that judges […] shame is related to an Other prior to the Other that judges, that it is primordial Other […] one that only sees or lets be seen.
Jacques- Alain Miller, “On Shame,” Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Clemens and R. Grigg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 13.
Nudity can thus be taken to be shameful and covered up, partially if the shame bears upon this or that organ, independently of anything of the order of misdeed.
Ibid.
[…] guilt is related to desire, whereas shame is related to the jouissance […]. He (Lacan) refers to this in relation to Sadean jouissance, insofar as it traverses the subject’s wish and establishes itself in what is for him most intimate, that which is more intimate than his will, and provokes him to go beyond his will and beyond good and evil, attacking him on the point of modesty - a term that is the antonym of shame.
Ibid.
Lacan describes this modesty [...] as being “amboceptive of the conjunctures of being” Amboceptive means that modesty is attached [...] on the side of both the subject and the Other. [...] As for the “conjuntures of being”, the relationship to the Other constitutes the essential conjuncture of the subject’s being and demonstrates itself as such in shame.
Ibid.
In Seminar XI, Lacan refers to a celebrated episode for the appearance of shame [...] with respect to the look or the gaze. [...] The first moment: “I am looking through a keyhole.” The second moment: “I hear the sound of footsteps in the hallway, I am being looked at. And so I become ashamed.” It is an account of the emergence of the affect of shame as a collapse of the subject. [...] He attempts to describe for us a moment of the subject’s fading, which we could write with its Lacanian symbol, $.
Ibid., 14.
The look that one solicits today by turning reality into a spectacle - and all television is a reality show- is a gaze castrated of its power to shame. As if the mission, or at least the unconscious consequence, of this capture of the television spectacle was to demonstrate that shame is dead.
Ibid.
If one can imagine that Lacan evokes this “Look at them enjoying!” in 1970 as an attempt to reactive the gaze that shames, one can no longer think this is the case for reality shows. The gaze that is distributed there [...] is a gaze that carries no shame. It is certainly no longer the gaze of the Other that might judge. What is transmitted in this shameful universal practise is the demonstration that your gaze, far from conveying shame, is [...] a gaze that enjoys as well.
Ibid., 15.
[...] the disappearance of shame alters the meaning of life. It changes the meaning of life because it changes the meaning of death.
Ibid., 18.
The disappearance of shame means that the subject ceases to be represented by signifier that matters. This is why Lacan presents [...] the Heideggerian term of being-towards-death as “visiting card by which a signifier represents a subject for another signifier.” He gives this S1 the value of a visiting card, “the being-towards-death.” It is death that is not pure and simple, death conditioned by value that outclasses it, and once this card is torn up, he says, it is a shame.
Ibid.
The honest person is evidently one who has already renounced honour, renounced its emblem, and who who would like it to be the case that shame did not exist- one who enrobes and veils the real of which this shame is the affect.
Ibid., 25.
Lacan never ceases telling the students of the day that they represent a world in which there is no shame anymore. [...] Having censured this absence of shame, he shows them that there is nevertheless shame at being, alive behind the absence of shame. This is what psychoanalysis is able to point out, that the shameless are shameful.
Ibid.
[...] we are in a system that produces impudence and not shame […] that annuls the function of shame. We no longer apprehend it except in the form of insecurity [...] that is imputed to the subject, who is no longer under the domination of master signifier. The present moment of civilization is permeated by an authoritarian and artificial return of the master signifier.
Ibid., 26.
We are at a point where the dominant discourse enjoins one not to be ashamed of one’s jouissance anymore. Ashamed of all the rest, yes, of one’s desire, but not of one’s jouissance.
Ibid., 27.
E. LAURENT
Lacan sets off from a level where there is no I, he uses a partitive case: “LOM has a body”. It is an attribution that precedes any having. Lacan wants to define this attribution as prior to the mirror stage, prior to the relationship with the gaze, prior to the relationship with the point of view, the point from which one is seen. […] It’s the same point Lacan aims at in Radiophonie with the object a as the incorporeal that founds the corporal, and in the following text which we have read, with “it can be felt” [ça s’y sent]. No matter from where. Before any coming into play of the gaze and of the “point of view,” the body is the product of an operation of the impact of the utterance. Lacan’s choice is underscored by the equivocation in the word “point.” The French expression “point de vue”, if it is split, exposes the equivocation of “point” between the point as a place “a little piece of” and the word point used in the second element of a negation [meaning none or not at all]. This is where Jacques-Alain Miller’s perspective is crucial. “The stepladder is sublimation, inasmuch as it is founded on the first, I don’t think of the speaking-being.”
Eric Laurent, “Speaking with one's body-stepladder [corps-escabeau],” Radio Lacan (2015), online.
7. Rapture
S. FREUD
Hysterical excessively intense ideas strike us, on the contrary, by their oddity, they are ideas which in other people have no consequences and of whose importance we can make nothing. They appear to us as intruders and usurpers, and accordingly as ridiculous.
Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), SE Vol. I (1950): 348.
When, in the prime of life, Leonardo once more encountered the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him, he had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore for he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures (whether he in fact executed them himself or had them done by his pupils under his directions) – to Leda, to John the Baptist and to Bacchus.
Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood" (1910), SE, Vol. XI (1957): 117
J. LACAN
The scene of which the novel is but entirely the rememoration, this is properly the ravishment of two in one dance that solders them, and under the eyes of Lol, third, with the whole ball, there to submit to the rooting if her finacé by she who had but of a sudden to appear. […]
Jacques Lacan, “Homage Done to Marguerite Duras, For the Ravishment of Lol V. Stein,” The Lacanian Review 13 (2022):19
This is on viewing widely how it is recognizable in this lookout where to Lol thenceforth shall many times return, onto a couple of lovers in which she has found again as though haphazardly a friend who was close to her before the drama, and abide by the same in her very time: Tatiana.
It's not some eventfulness, but a knot re-wrought right there. And it’s what this knot hems in that properly speaking ravishes, but, more fully fleshed out, whom?
Ibid.
But what then is this vacuity? The same now takes on a sense: you were, yes, for one night till first light when something in that place came loose: regarded as the center.
What cache is this locution? The centre is not on a par on every surface. Unique on a plateau, all-over on a sphere, upon a more complex surface it can make for the drollest of nodes. This one is ours.
For you can sense that what is being agitated is an envelope no longer having either within or without, and that in the inseam of its centre every regard turns back into yours, that they are your own which saturates them and that forever, Lol, for them you shall clamor from each passer-by. Follow Lol seizing in passing from one to another this talisman each offloads in haste like a danger: the regard.
Ibid., 22.
Above all do not deceive yourselves about the place here of the regard. Lol is not the regardful one, were it but that she beholds nothing. She is no voyeur. What comes to pass realises her.
Ibid., 25.
Thenceforth it is legible that, doomed to realize Lol’s fantasy, they’ll be less and less one and the other. Or is not, manifest in Jaques Hold, His subject division that will retains us any longer, it's what he is in the being unto three wherein Lol suspends herself, plastering over her emptiness the “I think” of a bad dream with which the matter of the book is wrought. Yet, so doing, the same is content to afford her a consciousness of being that sustains itself outside of her, in Tatiana. This being unto three even so, it is fairly Lol who arranges it. And it's for as much as Jacques Hold´s “I think” comes to haunt Lol with too proximate concern, at the end of the novel on the road down which he accompanies her by way of a pilgrimage in the stead of the event, - that Lol goes mad.
Ibid.
J.-A. MILLER
This is a hole in the universe of rules and classes. It is this hole that Lacan designates by the matheme S(A): A, the universe of discourse designated at the point where it collapses, and where a signifier floats disjoined from any order and from any chain. It is at this point that the invention of the rule and the class is summoned. The clinic, if it is a clinic of the subject, settles in such a place.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Signature of the Symptoms”, The Lacanian Review 11 (2021): 41.
E. LAURENT
He affirms, in this practice, the phallic value he had for his mother. Which explains why he could rapturously don the same raincoat that had appeared as an object of disgust and rebellion before, thus testifying that he was his mother’s phallus.
Eric Laurent, “Relieve Anxiety?” (2003): 10.
8. The Grammar of the Gaze
S. FREUD
It must, however, be admitted that infantile sexual life, in spite of the preponderating dominance of erotogenic zones, exhibits components which from the very first involve other people as sexual objects. Such are the instincts of scopophilia, exhibitionism and cruelty, which appear in a sense independently of erotogenic zones; these instincts do not enter into intimate relations with genital life until later, but are already to be observed in childhood as independent impulses, distinct in the first instance from erotogenic sexual activity.
Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality,” (1905), SE, Vol. VII (1955): 191-192.
At about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research. […] Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia.
Ibid.,194.
The figure of the child who is producing the beating-phantasy no longer itself appears in it. In reply to pressing enquiries the patients only declare: “I am probably looking on.”
Sigmund Freud, “’A Child is Being Beaten’ A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” (1919), SE, Vol. XVII (1957): 185-186.
J. LACAN
The gaze is not located just at the level of the eyes. The eyes may very well not appear, they may be masked. The gaze is not necessarily the face of our fellow being, it could just as easily be the window behind which we assume he is lying in wait for us. It is an x, the object when faced with which the subject becomes object.
Jacques Lacan, Freud's Papers on Technique: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book i, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 216.
The fact that the eye is a mirror already implies its structure in some way […] This element that fascinates in the structure of the gaze, where all subjective subsistence seems to get lost, to be absorbed, and to leave the world behind, is in itself enigmatic.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 241.
If this specular image we have facing us, which is our stature, our face , our two eyes, allows the dimension of our gaze to emerge, the value of the image starts to change - above all if there’ s a moment when this gaze that appears in the mirror starts not to look at us anymore.
Ibid.,88.
He sees what he has done, which brings with it the consequences of what he sees - this is the word I come against - a moment after, his own eyes, their vitreous humous stolen, lying on the ground in a sorry heap of waste. Having torn them from their sockets, he has clearly lost his sight, and yet he is not without seeing them, seen them as such, finally unveiled as object-cause of the last, the ultimate, not guilty but uncurbed, concupiscence, that of having wanted to know.
Ibid.,162.
After all, what he wanted was not so much for me to look at her as for my gaze to replace hers. The gaze, my gaze, is insufficient when it comes to capturing everything that sends to be absorbed from the outside. It is not about watching me do something, it’s about doing it for me.
Ibid.,189.
We have here, however, the point of irradiation that allows us to examine that field of vision reveals in the function of desire.
Ibid., 241.
It is precisely through this that the real finds itself, in the subject, to a very great degree the accomplice of the drive – which we shall come to last, because only by following this way will we be able to conceive from what it returns.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 69.
La Phénoménologie brings us back, then, to the regulation of form, which is governed, not only by the subject's eye, but by his expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular and visceral emotion — in short, his constitutive presence, directed in what is called his total intentionality.
Ibid., 71.
What we have to circumscribe, by means of the path he indicates for us, is the pre-existence of a gaze —I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.
Ibid., 72.
The split that concerns us is not the distance that derives from the fact that there are forms imposed by the world towards which the intentionality of phenomenological experience directs us —hence the limits that we encounter in the experience of the visible.
Ibid.
The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the thrust of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety.
Ibid., 73.
The eye and the gaze —this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field.
Ibid.
In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree it —that is we call the gaze.
Ibid.
Similarly, in that order, which is particularly satisfying for the subject, connoted in psycho-analytic experience by the term narcissism — in which I have striven to reintroduce the essential structure it derives from its reference to the specular image — in the satisfaction, not to say that diffuses from it, which gives the subject a pretext for such a profound meconnaissance — and does its empire not extend as far as this reference of the philosophical tradition represented by plenitude encountered by the subject in the mode of contemplation — can we not also grasp that which has been eluded, namely, the function of the gaze?
Ibid., 74.
That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as x. Is there no satisfaction in being under that gaze of which, […] I spoke just now, that gaze that circumscribes us, and which in the first instance makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing this?
Ibid., 75.
At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seeing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.
Ibid.
[…] in so-called waking state, there is an elision of the gaze, and an elision of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows.
Ibid.
The gaze may contain in itself the object a of the Lacanian algebra where the subject fall, and what specifies the scopic field and engenders the satisfaction proper to it is the fact, for structural reasons, the fall of the subject always remains unperceived, for it is reduced to zero.
Ibid., 76-77.
Read, for example, the note concerning what he calls the turning inside-out of the finger of a glove, in as much as it seems to appear there-note the way in which the leather envelops the fur in a. Winter glove-that consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself seeing itself, finds its basis in the inside-out structure of the gaze.
Ibid., 82.
The gaze may contain in itself the objet a of the Lacanian algebra where the subject falls, and what specifies the scopic field and engenders the satisfaction proper to it is the fact that, for structural reasons, the fall of the subject always remains unperceived, for it is reduced to zero.
Ibid., 76.
In so far as the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration, and in so far as it is an objet a reduced, of its nature, to a punctiform, evanescent function, it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance.
Ibid., 77.
The split between gaze and vision will enable us, you will see, to add the scopic drive to the list of the drives.
Ibid., 78.
What isolates this apprehension of thought by itself is a sort of doubt, which has been called methodological doubt, which concerns whatever might give support to thought in representation. How is it, then, that the I see myself seeing myself remains its envelope and base, and, perhaps more than one thinks, grounds its certainty?
Ibid., 80.
The phenomenologists have succeeded in articulating with precision, and in the most disconcerting way, that it is quite clear that I see outside, that perception is not in me, that it is on the objects that it apprehends. And yet I apprehend the world in a perception that seems to concern the immanence of the I see myself seeing myself. The privilege of the subject seems to be established here from that bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me.
Ibid., 81.
Consciousness, in its illusion of seeing itself seeing itself, finds its basis in the inside-out structure of the gaze.
Ibid., 82.
In the scopic relation, the object on which depends the phantasy from which the subject is suspended in an essential vacillation is the gaze. Its privilege — and also that by which the subject for so long has been misunderstood as being in its dependence — derives from its very structure.
Ibid., 83.
From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure.
Ibid.
Of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependence in the register of desire, the gaze is specified as unapprehensible. That is why it is, more than any other object, misunderstood (méconnu), and it is perhaps for this reason, too, that the subject manages, fortunately, to symbolize his own vanishing and punctiform bar (trait) in the illusion of the consciousness of seeing oneself see oneself, in which the gaze is elided.
Ibid.
As the locus of the relation between me, the annihilating subject, and that which surrounds me, the gaze seems to possess such a privilege that bit goes so far as to have me customized, I who look, the eye of him who sees me as object. In so far as I am under the gaze, Sartre writes, I no longer see the eye that looks at me, if I see the eye, the gaze disappears.
Ibid., 84.
The gaze I encounter is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.
Ibid.
Vision is ordered according to a mode that may generally be called the function of images. This function is defined by a point-by-point correspondence of two unities in space.
Ibid., 86.
That which is of the mode of the image in the field of vision is therefore reducible to the simple schema that enables us to establish anamorphosis, that is to say, to the relation of an image, in so far as it is linked to a surface, with a certain point that we shall call the 'geometral' point. Anything that is determined by this method, in which the straight line plays its role of being the path of light, can be called an image.
Ibid.
But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture.
Ibid., 89.
This picture is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze. In any picture, it is precisely in seeking the gaze in each of its points that you will see it disappear.
Ibid.
The geometral dimension enables us to glimpse how the subject who concerns us is caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision.
Ibid., 92.
In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap.
Ibid., 93.
The essence of the relation between appearance and being, which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, so easily masters, lies elsewhere. It is not in the straight line, but in the point of light—the point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which reflections pour forth.
Ibid., 94.
If what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated — and I am not speaking metaphorically.
Ibid., 95.
The correlative of the picture, to be situated in the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of gaze, while that which forms the mediation from the one to the other, that which is between the two, is something of another nature than geometral, optical space, something that plays an exactly reverse role, which operates, not because it can be traversed, but on the contrary because it is opaque — I mean the screen.
Ibid., 96.
What is painting? It is obviously not for nothing that we have referred to as picture the function in which the subject has to map himself as such.
Ibid., 100.
When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that —You never look at me from the place from which I see you.
Ibid., 103.
By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (Tromper l'œil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye.
Ibid.
The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself; has separated itself off as organ.
Ibid.
At the scopic level, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other.
Ibid., 104.
What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze .is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which—if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form -I am photo-graphed.
Ibid., 106.
There is something whose absence can always be observed in a picture—which is not the case in perception. This is the central field, where the separating power of the eye is exercised to the maximum in vision. In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole — a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze.
Ibid., 108
In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way —on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them.
Ibid., 109.
What is it that attracts and satisfies us in Trompe-l'œil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us? At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze, we are able to realize that the representation does not move with the gaze and that it is merely a Trompe-l'œil.
Ibid., 112.
“What we see here, then, is that the gaze operates in a certain descent, a descent of desire, no doubt. But how can we express this? The subject is not completely aware of it — he operates by remote control. the formula I have of desire as unconscious— man's desire is the desire of the Other — I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir).
Ibid., 115.
This appetite of the eye that must be fed produces the hypnotic value of painting.
Ibid.
You grasp here the ambiguity of what is at issue when we speak of the scope drive. The gaze is this object lost and suddenly rebound in the configuration of shame, by the introduction pop the other. Up to this point, what is the subject trying to see? What he is trying to see, make no mistake, is the object as absence. What the voyeur is looking for and finds is merely a shadow, a shadow behind the curtain.
Ibid., 182.
What have seeing and being seen in common? Let us take the schaulust, to look to an alien object, an object in the strict sense and beschaut warden, being look at by an alien person”
Ibid., 194.
Whereas making oneself seen, is indicated by an arrow that really comes back toward the subject, making oneself heard goes towards the other. The reason for this is a structural one.
Ibid., 195.
As a specula mirage, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of the pleasure reference, or that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective, centered on the Ideal point, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.
Ibid., 268.
He believes he desires because he sees himself desired, and because he doesn’t see that what the other wants to snatch from him is his gaze.
Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990), 86.
A gaze, that of Beatrice - that is to say, three times nothing, a fluttering of the eyelids and the exquisite trash that results from it-and there emerges that Other whom we can identify only through her jouissance; her whom he, Dante, cannot satisfy, because from her, he can have only this look, only this object, but of whom he tells us that God fulfils her utterly, it is precisely by receiving the assurance of that from her own mouth that he arouses us.
Ibid., 23.
It is not that I'm hoping that outside of here the transference will cease being viewed as a return-to-sender... If I've talked of annoyance, of moroseness, in connection with the "divine" approach of love, how can one not recognize that these two affects are betrayed-through speech, and even indeed - in those young people dedicated to relations without repression -the most extraordinary thing being that the analysts whom they claim as their impetus stare back at them tight-lipped.
Ibid., 29-30.
That man likes to look at his image so much, well there you are, one only has to say - lt's like that. What is so astonishing is that this allowed God's commandment to slip in. At any rate, man is more of a neighbor to himself in his being than in his image in the mirror. So, what is this story of the commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thou loves thyself, if it is not based on this mirage, which is all the same something rather odd?
Jacques Lacan, “The Third,” The Lacanian Review 7, (2019): 96-97.
J.-A. MILLER
Let’s say that the sovereignty of the image, if it exists, stems from a signifying capture of jouissance. Is it an ultimate sovereignty? These images are without a doubt under dominion, the dominion or empire of the gaze. I am saying empire because the gaze is not a sovereign image. Moreover, in its definition, the gaze is properly speaking what is “without image.” Through it, we find a representation, a supplement. (…) The gaze is “en plus”, something extra, but it is not a sovereign image.”
Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Sovereign Image”, The Lacanian Review 5 (2018): 44.
Before Lacan, the field of perception had always appeared as the very model of homeostasis, and this involved a certain blindness about jouissance.
Ibid., 49.
E. LAURENT
The subject has to be driven through yet another labyrinth, not that of his identifications, but that of the ways he obtains jouissance — the ways he transforms the other he loves into an object. […] Does he treat a woman like a breast, setting the tone for his love affairs: clinging, demanding, being rejected, and always coming back? That would be an oral-style love affair, the woman’s love being transformed into a breast one clings to. Or does he adopt an anal approach to women, falling in love, and the fleeing like a madman once the object he loves is reduced to an anal object that smells? Or sceptic approach, never seeing, in the object he loves, how that object deceives him blatantly, openly; not seeing the impasse into which he always falls; always falling in love instantly; placing great importance on the moment of being love-struck? Or does he reduce his loved one to a voice, a voice that gives him orders or leaves him with a compulsion to hear from her once more?
Eric Laurent, “Alienation and Separation (I),” Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Januus (State University of NY Press, 1995): 28.
One must always find that other lack — the fact that as authentic as one’s love is, one is always confronted with that same remainder — a remainder in the true sense of the term: one that reminds him of the fact that he is not represented, that there is a limit, that there is only partial representation. It reminds him of the jouissance he experienced through his oral demands and anal demands, and what he tried to obtain from his mother — her gaze or voice — which is not directly linked with need. You need to eat, you need to shit. You don’t apparently need the Other’s gaze or voice, but you nevertheless desire it more than you know.
Ibid.
Lacan for example, often referred to Freud’s formulation of the fetish in the case of the man who in order to become interested in a woman had to detect a certain “shine of the nose” (in German, Glanz auf der Nase). Freud traced this back to the fact that the patient had had an English nurse. Out of sexual curiosity, he tried to “glance” at her, but she told him that somehow his nose would be punished if he tried to look at her when he was not allowed to. Hence Glanz and glance were linked to the nose. In this way one can make sense of something that, in its deeper aspects, made no sense at all. That is just the way it is.
Ibid., 31-32.
He was a gaze, and what structured his relationship with the Other was the fact that he identified with that gaze, that is a partial drive. His jouissance was once and for all fixated within that gaze. It was a necessary condition for him to attain an erection, to take into account his phallic situation. The Glanz auf der Nase was a fetish.
Ibid., 32.
Whereas in the unifying project of Krafft-Ebing, who is the most systematic exponent of it, we have one sexual instinct and then deviations in relation to the instinct that allow for a regrouping, a definition of a complete nosographic system, for Freud we have at least four instincts, at least four fragments of the sexual instinct that are impossible to unify. We have the oral and anal, and though Freud adds neither the scopic nor the voice, he does add voyerism and exhibitionism, masochism and sadism. It will fall to Lacan to unify these four fragments of the sexual instinct under the single rubric of object; a particular object, since the gaze had to be recognised as having the status of drive-object.
Eric Laurent, “Feminine Positions of Being,” The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. V. Voruz, B. Wolf (New York: Sunny Press, 2007): 223.
There [in the second phase of “a child is being beaten”] where the pleasure is intense, there is no representation, if one closely follows the consequences, because this phase must be reconstructed, the phase of intense pleasure, and then in the third this pleasure disappears.
Ibid., 228.
The analyst marks the place of this hole at the same time as he veils it.
Eric Laurent, “The Pass and Reminders of Identification,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 37/38 (2021): 192.
[…] what it is in the object that resists connection and grammar. Geert Hoornaert was able to find correspondences in the Seminar IV and XVI that show the two aspects of the object a, on the one hand metonymic, on the other corporal consistency.
Eric Laurent, “Metamorphosis and Extraction of the Object a in the Pragmatic of the Cure,” Bulletin of the NLS 4 (2008): 12.
It is body substance functioning of the body. It places it outside in something that can be returned to it. It is the reintegration within the body of an object that feigns to function as a living being. The body will look for it outside in order to make of it an instrument with which it can enjoy itself (se jouir).
Ibid.,14.
He gave more and more prominence to the logic of alienation and separation, which puts the object a in play, a mixture between the imaginary and the real.
Eric Laurent, “The Unconscious and The Body Event,” The Lacanian Review 1 (2016): 179.
As for the obsessional neurosis Jacques-Alain Miller stressed that Lacan considered the obsessional to be someone who cannot detached themselves from the gaze.
Ibid., 181.
This is an imaginary that furnishes us with fundamental coordinates for living in this world. Getting along with the image is what allows us, just about, to get along with our sexual partner. Here the imaginary is placed in continuity with the real.
Eric Laurent, “Speaking Through One’s Symptom, Speaking Through One’s Body,” Hurly-Burly 11 (2014): 148
But money can also resonate with the oral, scopic or invocatory circuit.
Eric Laurent, “Immanent Money”, Hurly-Burly 11 (2014): 164.
Desire is not the metalinguistic interpretation of a previous indictive drive. Desire is its interpretation. Both things are situated at the same level.
Eric Laurent, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”, The Lacanian Review 8 (2019): 115.
But pay attention, the logic of creationist speech must produce an effect of surprise. It does not have to do with plodding attention and constant surveillance.
Eric Laurent, “The Logic and Surprises of Supervision at the Time of the Parlêtre”, The Lacanian Review 2 (2016): 131-132.
What the symptom of the great neuroses reveal is the embarrassment of the subject with their partner. This is what the Seminar … or Worse brought out, still in its lesson on the norm. Phallic jouissance cannot be said to be sexual jouissance.
Eric Laurent, “Laughing at norms”, The Lacanian Review 13 (2022): 123.
9. The Function of the Stain
S. FREUD
When repression of these inclinations sets in, the desire to see other people’s genitals (whether of their own or opposite sex) persists as a tormenting compulsion, which in some cases of neurosis later affords the strongest motive force for the formations of symptoms.
Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality,” (1905) SE, Vol. VII (1955): 192.
J. LACAN
Above all do not deceive yourselves about the place here of the regard. Lol is not regardful one, were it but that she beholds nothing. She is no voyeur. What comes to pass realizes her.
Right there where the regard is, being demonstrated when Lol makes it surge up in the state of a pure object, with the words it takes, for Jacques Hold, still innocent.
“Bare, bare beneath her black hair,” these words from Lol’s lips generate the passage: the beauty of Tatiana into the intolerable stain function that appertains to this object.
Jacques Lacan, “Homage Done to Marguerite Duras, For the Ravishment of Lol V. Stein,” The Lacanian Review 13 (2022): 25.
I’ve been teaching that vision lies asunder between image and regard, that the first model of regard is the stain whence derives the radar offered by the eye’s dish cross-sectioned unto extension.
By the way of regard, it spreads with brush across canvas, to make you lower your own before the painter’s brushwork.
They say it’s regarding you, of what requires your attention.
Yet it’s sooner the attention of what regards you that it’s a matter of obtaining. For when it comes to what regards you regardless, you are unacquainted with its anguish.
Ibid., 23.
To reveal what is mere appearance in the satisfying character of form as such, even in the idea in so far as it is rooted in the visual eidos to see what is mere illusion being torn away, all it takes is for a stain to be brought into the visual field and you can see where the point of desire is truly tethered.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book x, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price, (Cambridge: Polity, 2014): 253.
Now, remember what I told you about the stain at the level of the visual field. With the stain there appears, or there is prepared, the possibility of the resurgence, within the field of desire, of what lies behind, overshadowed, on this occasion the eye whose relation to this field must necessarily be elided so that desire can remain there, with this ubiquitous, even roaming possibility that allows it to evade anxiety.
Ibid., 278.
There is no need for us to refer to some supposition of the existence of a universal seer. If the function of the stain is recognized in its autonomy and identified with that of the gaze, we can seek its track, its thread, its trace, at every stage of the constitution of the world, in the scopic field. We will then realize that the function of the stain and of the gaze is both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xi, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 74.
[…] it is a fact that they [the eyes] have this effect on the predator or on the supposed victim that looks at them […] this distinctive example, chosen as such-for its location, for its facticity, for its exceptional character-is for us simply a small manifestation of the function to be isolated, the function, let us say the word, of the stain. This example is valuable in marking the pre-existence to the seen of a given-to-be-seen.
Ibid.
I shall show that it is at the level that I call the stain that the tychic point of the scopic function is found. This means that the level of reciprocity between the gaze and the gazed at is, for the subject, more open than any other to alibi. That is why we should try to avoid, by our interventions in the sessions, allowing the subject to establish himself on this level. On the contrary, we should cut him off from this point of ultimate gaze, which is illusory.
Ibid., 77.
The essence of the relation between appearance and being, which the philosopher, conquering the field of vision, so early masters, lies elsewhere. It is not in the straight line, but in the point of light – the point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which reflections pour forth.
Ibid., 94.
It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. and Petit-Jean said to me – You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!
Ibid., 95.
It is always that gleam of light-it lay at the heart of my little story-it is always this which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen, from making the light appear as an iridescence that overflows it. In short, the point of gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel.
Ibid., 96.
And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.
Ibid., 97.
There are facts that can be articulated only in the phenomenal dimension of the overview by which I situate myself in the picture as stain - these are the facts of mimicry […] how important is the function of adaptation in mimicry?
Ibid., 98.
It becomes a stain, it becomes a picture, it is inscribed in the picture. This, strictly speaking, is the origin of mimicry. And, on this basis, the fundamental dimension of the inscription of the subject in the picture appear infinitely more justified than a more hesitant guess might suggest at first sight.
Ibid., 99.
In every picture, this central field cannot but be absent, and replaced by a hole-a reflection, in short, of the pupil behind which is situated the gaze.
Ibid., 108.
I have given you the elements in order to understand it, adding that the objet a may be identical with the gaze. Well, Freud precisely indicates the nodal point of hypnosis when he formulates that the object is certainly an element that is difficult to grasp in it, but an incontestable one, namely the gaze of the hypnotizer. Remember what I articulated for you about the function of the gaze, of its fundamental relations to the ink-blot, of the fact that there is already in the world something that looks before there is a view for it to see, that the ocellus of animal mimicry is indispensable as a presupposition to the fact that a subject may see and be fascinated, that the fascination of the ink-blot is anterior to the view that discovers it.
Ibid., 272-273.
This imaginary captation (captation of and by the image) is the essential constituent of any imaginary "reality," to the extent that we consider the latter as instinctive […] It is when, in analysis, the patient places himself in a narcissistic posture that we recognize we have struck the resistance. And what experience in analysis proves (and meets) is precisely that, instead of giving reality to the symbol, the patient attempts to constitute hic et nunc, in the experience of the treatment, that imaginary point of reference which we call bringing the analyst into his game.
Jacques Lacan & Wladimir Granoff, “Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real,” Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, (New York: Random-House, 1956): 269-270.
E. LAURENT
Let’s at least mention this: lightning is not part of the “all”. Lightning is not a being [etant]. It is not counted among being(s) and does not add to it. It is light that allows it to be distinguished.
Eric Laurent, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”, The Lacanian Review 8 (2019): 118.
The fundamental polarity is no longer between meaning and truth as a hole, but between the two sides of jouissance: that which is an empty place in discourse and makes a hole in it, but which imposes itself in fullness of opacity.
Ibid., 121.
That intentionality can be recognized; but what is the answer, what doesn’t s/he find? S/he doesn’t find the object. S/he finds the place or places where the object was - the place already numbered, and that place, the response is something that cannot be named.
Eric Laurent, “The Oedipus complex”, in Reading Seminar I and II Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. R. Feldstein, B. Fink, M. Jaanus (State University of New York, 1996): 72.
Here [in Family Complexes], Lacan approaches it in a very classical way, as a problem of narcissism, in so far as it comes to make up for what he calls a “specific insufficiency in human vitality.” At this time, jubilation before the mirror appeared to him to compensate for the prematurity of the organism.
Eric Laurent, “Melancholia, the Pain of Existence and Moral Cowardice”, Hurly-Burly 12 (2015): 145.
10. Contributors to the establishment of this Bibliography
English
Angel Angelov (Bulgaria), An Bulkens (USA), Florencia Cinquemani (Denmark), Anna De Filippi (USA), Jose Armando Garcia (USA), Julio Garcia Salas (Norway), Wardi Haj (Israel), Danuta Heinrich (Poland), Tzvetelina Ivanova (Bulgaria), Miles Link (Ireland), Tatiana Lubimova (Ukraine), Aino-Marjatta Mäki (Finland), Susan Mc Feely (Ireland), Tom Ryan (Ireland), Hila Shamir (Israel), Karina Tenenbaum (USA), Mariela Vitto (The Netherlands), Florencia F.C. Shanahan (Ireland).
French
Katia Vartzbed (Suisse), Dominique Rudaz (Suisse), Lynn Gaillard (France), Flavio Ungarelli (Suisse), Glenn Strubbe (Belgique), Peter Decuyper (Belgique), Stefanie Roux (Belgique), Joachim Cauwe (Belgique), Danaé Toyas (Grèce), Dossia Avdelidi (Grèce), Amal Wahbi (Québec), Mariela Vitto (Pays-Bas), Clémentine Benard (Autriche), Elena Petrova (France), Nikita Moshkin (France), Olina Chizhova (Russie), Sergio Myszkin (Israel), Renata Texeira (USA), Cristina Gonzalez de Garroni (USA), Nelson Hellmanzik (France), Julie Baicry (Germany), Thomas Van Rumst (Belgique).