THE PROBLEM OF THE OBJECT RELATION

During the retreat of the vacation, I felt the need to make a little excursion into a certain domain within the treasure house of English and French liter- ature. "Quaerens," not "quem devorem," but rather "quod doceam vobis" - seeking what to teach you and how, on the subject that we are navigating towards under the title of the ethics of psychoanalysis. You can certainly sense that it must be leading us toward a problematic point, not only of Freud's doctrine, but also of what one might call our responsibility as ana- lysts.

It is a point that you haven't yet seen rise up on the horizon. And, my goodness, there is no reason why you should, since up till now this year I have avoided using the term. It is something that is so problematic for the theorists of analysis, as you will see from the testimony of the quotations I will cite; yet it is so essential. It is what Freud called Sublimierung, sublima- tion.

1

Sublimation is, in effect, the other side of the research that Freud pioneered into the roots of ethical feeling, insofar as it imposes itself in the form of prohibitions, of the moral conscience. It is the side that is referred to in the world in a manner that is so improper and so comical to a sensitive ear - I mean in the world outside the field of psychoanalysis - as the philosophy of values.

We who find ourselves, along with Freud, in a position to give a radically new critique of the sources and the incidence of ethical thought, are we in the same fortunate situation concerning its positive side, that of moral and spiritual elevation, that of the scale of values? The problem seems much more uncertain and more delicate there, but one cannot for all that say we may

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neglect it for the sake of the more immethate concerns of straightforward therapeutic action.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud uses two correlative terms concerning the effects of the individual libidinal adventure: Fixierarbeit is the fixation that is for us the register of explanation of that which is, in fact, inexplicable, and Haftbarkeit, which is perhaps best translated by "persever- ance" but has a curious resonance in German, since it means also "responsi- bility," "commitment." And that is what is involved here; it concerns our collective history as analysts.

We are caught up in an adventure that has taken a certain direction, a certain contingency, certain stages. Freud didn't finish at a stroke the trail he blazed for us. And it may be that, on account of Freud's detours, we are attached to a certain moment in the development of his thought, without fully realizing its contingent character, like that of every effect of our human history.

In accordance with a method you are familiar with - for if it isn't mine, it is at least known to me - let us try to take a few steps backwards, two, for example, before taking three steps forward. That way we may hope to gain one.

A step backward then: let us remember that psychoanalysis might seem at first to be of an ethical order. It might seem to be the search for a natural ethics - and, my goodness, a certain siren song might well promote a mis- understanding of that kind. And indeed, through a whole side of its action and its doctrine, psychoanalysis effectively presents itself as such, as tending to simplify some difficulty that is external in origin, that is of the order of a misrecognition or indeed of a misunderstanding, as tending to restore a nor- mative balance with the world - something that the maturation of the instincts would naturally lead to. One sometimes sees such a gospel preached in the form of the genital relation that I have more than once referred to here with a great deal of reservation and even with a pronounced skepticism.

A great many things immethately present themselves in opposition. It is in any case in just such a simple way that analysis leads us in the direction of what, for reasons that I do not believe are merely picturesque, one might call the domain of the pastoral.

The domain of the pastoral is never absent from civilization; it never fails to offer itself as a solution to the letter's discontents. If I use that name, it is because over the centuries that is how it has happened to present itself openly. Nowadays, it is often masked; it appears for example in the more severe and more pedantic form of the infallibility of proletarian consciousness - some- thing that has preoccupied us for so long, although in recent years it has receded a little. It appears also in the form of the somewhat mythical notion I referred to just now concerning the hopes, however vague, that were raised

by the Freuthan revolution. But it's the same old idea of the pastoral. And, as you will see, it concerns a very serious debate.

Perhaps we need to rediscover it, to rediscover its meaning. There is per- haps a good reason why we should reexamine the archaic form of the pastoral, reexamine a certain return to nature or the hope invested in a nature that you shouldn't imagine our ancestors thought of in simpler terms than we do. We will see whether the inventions that the ingenium of our ancestors attempted in this direction teach us something that needs to be elucidated for us, too.

Obviously, as soon as one takes a look at Freud's thought as a whole, one sees immethately that there is something that from the beginning resists being absorbed into this domain. And it is that through which I began to attack the problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis with you this year. Freud allows us, in effect, to measure the paradoxical character or practical aporia of some- thing that is not at all of the order of difficulties that an improved nature or a natural amelioration can present. It is rather something that introduces itself immethately as possessed of a very special quality of malice, of bad influence - that is the meaning of the French word mérchant. Freud isolates it increasingly in the course of his work up to Civilization and Its Discontents, where he gives it its fullest articulation, or in his stuthes of mechanisms such as the phenomenon of melancholia.

What is this paradox? It is that the moral conscience, as he says, shows itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueller and crueller even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of our impulses or desires. In short, the insatiable character of this moral conscience, its paradoxical cruelty, transforms it within the individual into a parasite that is fed by the satisfactions accorded it. Ethics punishes the individual relatively much less for his faults than for his misfortunes.

This is the paradox of the moral conscience in what I hesitate to call its spontaneous form. Rather than speak of the investigation of the moral con- science functioning in a natural state - we would never find our way through that - let us choose the other dimension covered by the meaning of the term "natural"; and let's call it the critique, by means of psychoanalysis, of wild, uncultivated ethics, such as we find it functioning all alone, especially in those whom we deal with as we explore the level of affect or pathos, and of pathology.

It is here that analysis sheds some light, and it does so, in the end, on that which in the depths of man might be called self-hate. It is something that is suggested by the classical comedy whose tide is He Who Punishes Himself.'

It is a little comedy which belongs to the New Comedy taken over from

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Greece by Latin literature. I don't especially recommend that you read it, for after that fine title you would only be disappointed by the text. You would only find, like everything else, a concrete satire of character traits, precise notations of forms of the ridiculous. But don't forget that the function of comedy is only apparently without profundity. Through the very fact of the play of the signifier, through the simple force of signifying articulation, we find ourselves going beyond something that is simply depiction or contingent description, to the revelation of what lies below. Comedy makes us rediscover what Freud showed was present in the practice of nonsense.

We see the depths emerge, we see something that detaches itself beyond the exercise of the unconscious, there where Freuthan research invites us to recognize the point where the Trieb is unmasked - the Trieb and not the

Instinkt. For the Instinkt is not far from the field of das Ding in relation to

which I invite you to recenter this year the way in which the problems around us are posed.

The Triebe were discovered and explored by Freud within an experience founded on the confidence he had in the play of signifiers, in the play of substitutions; the result is that we can in no way confuse the domain of the

Triebe with a reclassification of human beings' associations with their natural

milieu, however new that reclassification may seem. The Trieb must be trans- lated insofar as possible with some ambiguity, and I like sometimes to say

derive in French, "drift." It is in any case "drive" that is used in English to

translate the German word. That drift, where the whole action of the pleasure principle is motivated, directs us toward the mythic point that has been artic- ulated in terms of an object relation. We have to be precise about the meaning of this and to criticize the confusions introduced by ambiguities of significa- tion that are much more serious than the signifying kind.

We are now getting close to the most profound things Freud had to say about the nature of the Triebe, and especially insofar as they may give satis- faction to the subject in more than one way, notably, in leaving open a door, a way or a career, of sublimation. Within psychoanalytic thought, this domain has remained until now almost undisturbed; only the boldest spirits have dared to approach it, and even then not without expressing the dissatisfaction or unassuaged thirst Freud's formulations left them with. I will be referring here to a few texts found at more than one point in his work, from the Three

Essays on the Theory of Sexuality to Moses and Monotheism, and including Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud invites us to reflect on sublimation or, more exactly, he proposes - in a way that enables him to define the field - all kinds of difficulties that merit our attention today.

Drives and lures 91

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Since the problem of sublimation is situated for us in the field of the Triebe, I would like first to look for a moment at a passage taken from the Introductory

Lectures, that is to say a work that has been translated as Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. It is on page 358, Volume XI, of the Gesammelte Werke2_:

Therefore, we have to take into consideration the fact that the drives [Triebe], the pulsating sexual excitements, are extraordinarily plastic. They may appear in each others' places. One of them may accumulate the intensity of the others. When the satisfaction of one is denied by reality, the satisfaction of another may offer total compensation. They behave in relation to each other like a network, like commu- nicating channels that are filled with water.

We can see there the metaphor that is no doubt at the origin of that surre- alist work which is called Communicating Vases.

Freud goes on, and I paraphrase, "They behave, therefore, in that way; and this is true in spite of the fact that they may have fallen under the domi- nation or the supremacy of the Genitalprimat. Thus the latter must not be thought to be so easy to gather into a single Vorstellung, representation."

Freud warns us in this passage - and there are plenty of others - that even when the whole Netz der Triebe has fallen beneath the Genitalprimat, it is not so easy to conceive of the latter structurally as a unitary Vorststellung, a reso- lution of contradictions.

We know only too well that that in no way eliminates the communicating or fleeting, plastic character, as Freud himself puts it, of the economy of the

Triebregungen. In short, as I have been teaching you for years, that structure

commits the human libido to the subject, commits it to slipping into the play of words, to being subjugated by the structure of the world of signs, which is the single universal and dominant Primat. And the sign, as Peirce put it, is that which is in the place of something else for someone.

The articulation as such of the possibilities of Verschiebbarkeit, or the dis- placement of the natural attitude, is elaborated at length and ends up in this passage with the elucidation of the Partiallust in the genital libido itself. In short, an approach to the problem of Sublimierung must begin with a recog- nition of the plasticity of the instincts, even if one acknowledges subse- quendy, for reasons to be explained, that complete sublimation is not possible for the individual. With the individual - and as long as it is a question of the individual with all that that implies concerning internal dispositions and external actions - we find ourselves faced with limits. There is something that cannot

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be sublimated; libidinal demand exists, the demand for a certain dose, of a certain level of direct satisfaction, without which harm results, serious dis- turbances occur.

But our point of departure is the relationship of the libido to that Netz, that Fliissigkeit, that Versckiebbarkeit of the signs as such. It is to this in any case that we are always brought back whenever we read Freud with an atten- tive eye.

Let me posit another essential point of articulation, necessary if we are to move forward once more.

It is obvious that the libido, with its paradoxical, archaic, so-called pregen- ital characteristics, with its eternal polymorphism, with its world of images that are linked to the different sets of drives associated with the different stages from the oral to the anal and the genital - all of which no doubt con- stitutes the originality of Freud's contribution - that whole microcosm has absolutely nothing to do with the macrocosm; only in fantasy does it engen- der world. That's Freud's doctrine, contrary to the direction in which one of his disciples, namely Jung, wanted to take it - this schism within Freud's entourage occurring around 1910.

This is important particularly at a moment when it is obvious that, even if one once located them there, there is no point now in seeking the phallus or the anal ring in the starry sky; they have been definitely expelled. For a long time even in scientific thinking, men seemed to inhabit cosmological projec- tions. For a long time a world soul existed, and thought could comfort itself with the idea that there was a deep connection between our images and the world that surrounds us. This is a point whose importance does not seem to have been noticed, namely, that the Freuthan project has caused the whole world to reenter us, has definitely put it back in its place, that is to say, in our body, and nowhere else. Let me remind you in this connection to what extent, in the period which immethately preceded the liberation of modern man, both scientific and theological thought were preoccupied by something that Freud did not hesitate to mention and to call by its name, but about which we never speak anymore, namely, the figure who was for a long time known as the prince of this world, Diabolus himself. The symbolic here is united with the diabolic, with all those forms that theological preaching has so powerfully articulated.

Read a little Luther; not just the Table Talk, but the Sermons as well, if you want to see to what extent the power of images may be affirmed, images that are very familiar to us because they have been invested with the quality of scientific authentication on a daily basis through our psychoanalytic expe- rience. It is to those images that the thought of a prophet refers whose influ- ence was such a powerful one, and who renewed the very basis of Christian teaching when he sought to express our dereliction, our fall in a world where

93 we let ourselves go. His choice of words is in the end far more analytic than all that modern phenomenology has been able to articulate in the relatively gende terms of the abandonment of the mother's breast; what kind of negli- gence is that which causes her milk to dry up? Luther says literally, "You are that waste matter which falls into the world from the devil's anus."

That is the essentially digestive and excremental schema forged by a though! that draws the ultimate consequences from the form of exile in which man finds himself relative to any good in the world whatsoever.

That's where Luther leads us. Don't imagine that these things didn't have an effect on the thought and the way of life of people of the time. One finds articulated here precisely the essential turning point of a crisis from which emerged our whole modem immersion in the world. It is to this that Freud came to give his approval, his official stamp, when he made that image of the world, those fallacious archetypes, return once and for all there where they belong, that is in our body.

Henceforth we are to deal with the world where it is. Do these erogenous zones, these fundamental points of fixation, open onto rosy possibilities and pastoral optimism? Does one find here a padi that leads to freedom? Or to the strictest servitude? These erogenous zones that, until one has achieved a fuller elucidation of Freud's diought, one can consider to be generic, and that are limited to a number of special points, to points that are openings, to