The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV

by Jacques Lacan, Adrian Price (Translator)

'The unfulfilled and unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other unfulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, quaerens quem devoret. What the child once found as a means of quashing the symbolic unfulfilment is what he may possibly find across from him again as a wide-open maw [...] To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents. We find it again when we look at the fears of Little Hans [...] With the support of what I have shown you today, you will better see the relationships between phobia and perversion [...] I shall go so far as to say that you will interpret the case better than did Freud himself [...]'
Extract from Chapter XI

'[...] it's no accident that what has been perceived but dimly, yet perceived nevertheless, is that castration bears just as much relation to the mother as to the father. We can see in the description of the primordial situation how maternal castration implies for the child the possibility of devoration and biting. In relation to this anteriority of maternal castration, paternal castration is a substitute [...]'
Extract from Chapter XXI

'[In the case of little Hans] The initial transformation, which will prove decisive, is [...] the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the bathtub, which is something utterly different, in particular for the relationship between the protagonists. Voraciously to bite the mother, as an act or an apprehension of her altogether natural signification, indeed to dread in return the notorious biting that is incarnated by the horse, is something quite different from unscrewing, from ousting, the mother, and mobilising her in this business, bringing her into the system as a whole, for this first time as a mobile element and, by like token, an element that is equivalent to all the rest.'
Extract from Chapter XXIII

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, 20th Century

336 pages, Hardcover

Published April 26, 2021

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Objectivity? Whose? How?

http://www.lacan.com/seminars1.htm#4

The neglect, or obscurity, of this seminar is scandalous. There is a restoration effort being undertaken but it appears to have been tabled for almost a year:

http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=11980

Hence acolytes must peruse a bizarre manuscript barely wrested from ruin but not spared error, absence, or sundry errata:

https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Semi...

It is a shame and a great good fortune. At least there is this, this is the least there could be, and it is, typically, surprisingly, more than enough. Because of the scandalous neglect, I expected it to be "bad": dull, rote, incomprehensible, turgid, stupid, something that would justify the neglect. I can't, there's nothing. There are textual errors galore, two or three missing pages, and after a while the void spaces where graphs or drawings are supposed to be becomes hilarious. ...Or-worse are the cloying, intrusive, ineradicable stains of an other's marginalia ("thank you for your service"): just fucking see for yourself. For 500+ pages. Unbearable in anticipation, retroactively they pose no obstacle once the flow of the text takes hold. They never disappear but they become irrelevant. In spite of everything, Lacan. Surplus-Lacan, actually, since by all indications this is an expendable document. Are there translation discrepancies? Probably. It doesn't matter, nothing does: for any level of Lacanian, this is essential listening. Here, because it's nowhere else, is the track list:

1. Introduction – The Z-shaped schema / The object, lost and refound / Pearls / The object, anxiety, the hole / The fetish and the phobic object
2. The Three Forms of Lack of the Object – What is an obsessional? / The imaginary triad / Phallicism and the imaginary / Reality and Wirklichkeit / Mr. Winnicott’s transitional object
3. The Signifier and the Holy Spirit – The image of the body and its signifier / The factory of the id / The signifier, the signified and death / The transmission of the object by signifier / Its imaginary discordance
4. The Dialectic of Frustration – Frustration is the true center of the mother-child relation / A return to the Fort-Da / The mother, from the symbolic to the real / The child and the phallic image / The phobia of the little English girl
5. On Analysis as Bundling, and its Consequences – The drive under the naked eye / The true nature of the anaclitic relation / The fetishist solution / The paroxysm of perversion / The transitory perversion of a phobic patient
PERVERSE PATHS OF DESIRE
6. The Primacy of the Phallus and the Young Homosexual Girl – Freud, the girl, and the phallus / The signifier Niederkommt / The lies of the unconscious / The service of The Lady / The beyond of the object
7. Someone is Beating a Child and the Young Homosexual Girl – Intersubjectivity and desubjectivization / The image, mill of perversion / The symbolic and the gift / Frustration, love, and jouissance / A permutative schema of the case
8. Dora and the Young Homosexual Girl – The symbolic insistence of the transference / Potent father, impotent father / Love, lack, and the gift / Dora between question and identification / Perverse metonymy, neurotic metaphor
THE FETISH OBJECT
9. The Function of the Veil – The symbolic phallus / How to realize the lack / The screen memory, an arrest at the image / The alternation of perverse identifications / The structure of reactionary exhibitionism
10. Identification with the Phallus – Transvestism and the use of clothing / Showing ≠ exposing to view / Girl = Phallus / The object and the ideal in Freud / Frustration of love and satisfaction of need
11. The Phallus and the Unsatiated Mother – The gift replies to the call / The substitution of satisfactions / The erotization of need / The mirror, from jubilation to depression / The role of the imaginary phallus as signifier
THE STRUCTURE OF MYTHS IN THE OBSERVATION OF THE PHOBIA OF LITTLE HANS
12. On the Oedipus Complex – The equation Penis=Child / The monogamous ideal in woman / The Other, between the mother and the phallus / The symbolic father is unthinkable / Masculine bigamy
13. On the Castration Complex – A critique of aphanisis / The imaginary father and the real father / “Being loved” / Anxiety / On the lure of the moving penis / The animals in phobia
14. The Signifier in the Real – The network of The Purloined Letter / All alone with Mariedl / The child as metonymy / Something black in front of the mouth / Phobia structures the world
15. The Uses of Myth – The functions and structure of myths / The Krawall and the child’s orgasm / The fantasy of the two giraffes / Rooted, perforated, removable / The transposition of the imaginary into the symbolic
16. …
17. The Signifier and Wit – The golden rule / The combinatory value of the signifier / Hans in Wonderland / Raillery and naïveté / What goes down the hole
18. Circuits – Why the horse? / From horse to train / Hans coming and going / Wegen and Wägen
19. Permutations – Don’t run away from me! / The horse that takes off / Be a real father / Pliers
20. Transformations – The phallus dentatus / Discharge of the signifier / Anxiety over movement / Falling and biting / The pocketknife in the doll
21. The Mother’s Culottes and the Father’s Deficiencies – The loumf and clothing / Unscrewing the bathtub / Fuck her a little more / A substitute for the father / Infertile maternal castration / The Idea of Anna
22. Essay at a Logic in Rubber – The father in the Frigidaire / The sheaf and the sickle / The paternal metaphor / The mother, doubled / An imaginary paternity
23. “Will Give Me Progeny Without a Wife” – From intersubjectivity to discourse / The object as signifier / The phobic metaphor / From the bite to unscrewing / Anna, mistress of the horse
24. ENVOI – From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Looking-Glass – Exit via the maternal ideal / Hans, daughter of two mothers / The vulture was a kite / The Other becomes little other / The imaginary inversion of Leonardo

COMING SOON!!! Objet petit a. It was here the whole time, it just needed a name.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

June 7th, 2022:
My second review of this book. The second time I went through the seminar in French. My understanding of it now is probably a tad different (I hope).

At this point in time, Lacan is in the structural phase of his thought. He is currently devoted to Kojeve, and has also been dabbling in Levi-Strauss and is profoundly influenced by the Saussure. So all these elements are playing into how he conceives the myth making capacity of Little Hans with respect to the dialectic between himself and the Other. In Seminar III, he introduced the Schema L, and gained momentum in his understanding of narcissism... and in Seminar V he will, (although I haven't read it yet), put away the ego and really talk about the Formations of the Unconscious.

What's fascinating for me, is the Little Hans case is such a profoundly important work for the understanding I have, and I imagine Lacan has, of the Oedipal conflict with regards to his theory. Even though late Lacan, no longer discusses the Oedipal conflict but retains the idea of the phallus, I wonder if it's possible to understand late Lacan without understanding the important work he's done in this seminar.

Anyway, it was quite a fun time I have had over the past 9 months studying this text, if I do go through it again, it may not be in the same detail, but in an attempt to read through the entire seminars in order (don't know if that task is insane).

5 stars forever. Maybe 6 stars.


January 16, 2022:
Whew... made my first trip through this book.

This is an awesome book, and offers an opportunity for the reader to join Lacan and reread Freud with him to discover the dialectic of the object through a Lacanian lens.

That dialectic consists of frustration, privation and castration. The unfulfilled mother and the phallus are central. In these lectures, which took place in 1956-1957 you will hear Lacan's views on The Three Essays on Sexuality, the Little Hans story, Leonardo da Vinci among others and how the subject of language finds itself in the dialectic of desire by the (m)Other.

I will be reading it again this year, as I also begin to read Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious. Where he introduces the nodal point... and really delves in the Nom-du-Père.

LOVED IT, AND LEARNED A LOT. 6/5 stars.

[Rob]

He first introduces his mathematical formulations of the psychoanalytical concepts. I found them to be interesting enough and helpful in positing my own experience with the traversal of the Oedipal and castration complex.

I had a brief phobia of ticks around the same time as my “wiwimacher” started speaking to me too much and I too, like little Hans, had an “evirated” father figure who never slept in the same bed as my mother and I often did instead. The tick phobia (like little Hans’ horse phobia) came up around the same time I first learned of Lyme’s disease from the same figure that was serving to castrate me from my mother (a family friend who was always more like the symbolic prohibitive Father than my own); he was very against me sleeping in the same bed as my mum (as I guess I would be as well today) and said he’d be sleeping outside my door to stop me from going out there. I pissed the bed that night because I was afraid to go outside and after that, even though I knew he wasn’t outside anymore, I developed this great fear of ticks being in my bed. The phobic object, according to this seminar, serves as a metaphor in the place of the symbolic Father that is lacking and who I am supposed to identify with when I adapt to the order that says a young boy that now gets boners shouldn’t sleep in his mum’s bed. On top of that, as I know my mother refers to my dad as a parasite on her hard earned money, I can’t help but make a connection to the tick as phobic object standing in for the gap of the Father figure and as the locus for all my anxieties connected to what my “wiwimacher” was reacting to: my own newly burgeoning sexual impulses - Little Hans’ fear of horses was also connected to his fear of them biting his winky off, and my phobia was also a biting creature. I was coming to terms with the fact that my mother couldn’t be the love object anymore, but since she was the phallus in the family and my father was posited as a miserable weakling I developed a strange phobia of the parasitic tick.

I’d really have to dig deeper into all this to actually make a real discovery and I’d probably have an easier time doing it with a psychoanalyst instead of my goodreads account. I turned out better than Little Hans, thank goodness, as I did have the castrating father figures in my uncle and the above referenced family friend - the lack of this can lead to a womanizing disposition.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Lacan’s most explicit refutation of object relations analysts. Here he also gives an account of perversion, phobia, and fetishism as well as a thorough explication of the Oedipus complex through a close reading of the case of little Hans. The one thing I would recommend to other readers before reading this text for the first time would be to familiarize yourself with that particular case study before reading the latter half of this seminar. It’ll make following his interpretation of the case that much more clear.

[Ian Szabo · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely important text from Lacan, the sections on the female homosexual case and Dora are incredibly helpful for understanding the structure of both perversion and hysteria, however, half of the text is an absolute trudge through the Hans case- which is both helpful for understanding phobias and garden variety obsessional neurosis but does get incredibly difficult to parse even when you’re familiar with the Hans case.

If you’re really interested in Lacan, this text is mandatory

[Billie Pritchett]

Lacan takes Freud's Oedipus complex and builds a narrative around how it becomes the Ur-family drama that he and Freud both believed shapes our life. Most of the seminar is related to Freud's case study of Little Hans whose primary phobia concerned his developing sexuality vis-a-vis his father and mother.

Is there anything here? Sometimes the stuff seems laughable. And maybe sometimes in the absence of religion, people seek new myths, and this one here does something for them.

[Kato Jaspers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Na 2 volle jaren eindelijk voor de eerste keer dit boek doorploetert.

[Lamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

前期真是字字珠玑

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intense, close reading of the case of Little Hans that sheds early light on the knotted nature of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and the Real.

[Juanma · Rating 4 out of 5]

La satisfacción del principio del placer, la superación del objeto parece darse en un continuo retorno de la alucinación. Ya ni siquiera es el objeto, sino lo que llena su significante.

[Unentschieden]

Das war schlimm, weil schwer. Verstanden habe ich eigentlich nichts; dann kommt jetzt wohl bald eine Einführung, seufz.