I have to suppose that you have read On Negation and, even more, that you have re-read it, since I do agree with Roland Borthes when he defined "reading -- i.e. structural reading -- as being always a re-reading." This is also what Lacan meant by his "reading Freud" in his return to Freud's text in which, says he: "each word deserves to be weighed according to its precise incidence, its emphasis, its particular turn." -- "each word deserves to be inserted in the closest analysis" (in the logical sense of the word).

Therefore, I shall focus directly on the paragraph which will constitute the germinal seed of what I wish to share with you today.

Freud began his text with some apparently casual clinical remarks on the way we -- analysts -- listen to negations: we simply discord them to get thus direct access to a repressed image. -- Unfortunately it does not always work in such a simple manner, but for the time being, never mind. Since to negate (and of course to affirm) the context of thoughts is the task -- at least in Freud's conception -- of the function of intellectual judgement, Freud is led - somehow "naturally" -- to examine this particular function. But, by doing so, as from Hyppolitte commenting this text in Lacan's seminar observed, Freud provided us with a "genesis" of everything which has a primary status -- i.e. the origin of judgement and thought as such.

Let us read the paragraph. I wish to start from:

We all know since Bruno Bettelheim has published his remarks and comments about James Strachey's translation of Freud's complete psychological work, how far from acceptable this translation is. There are several reasons for this mistranslation of Freud's texts into English. One of them is the use of abstract and sophisticated words to formulate concepts which have been introduced by Freud in an everyday life like language.

One of the most striking examples of this sort of mistranslation is the translation of German Das Ich into English: the "ego" -- as, for example, in Das Ich and das Es, translated as "the ego and the id." "The translation, says Bettelheuin, of these personal pronouns into their Latin equivalents -- the "ego" and the "id" -- rather than their English ones turned them into cold technical terms which arouse no personal associations. In German, of course, the pronouns are invested with deep emotional significance, for the readers have used them all their lives; Freud's careful and original choice of words facilitated on intuitive understanding of his meaning."

No words -- adds B.B. -- has greater and more intimate connotations thatn the pronoun "I". It is one of the most frequently used words in spoken language -- and, more important, it is the most personal word. To mistranslate Ich as "ego" is to transform it into jargon that no longer conveys the personal commitment we make when we say "I" or "we" -- not to mention our subconscious memories of the deep emotional experience we had when, in infancy, we discovered ourselves as we learned to say "I".

By contrast, an "ego" that uses clear -- out mechanisms, such as displacement and projection, to achieve its purpose in its struggle against the "id" is something that can be studied from the outside, by observing others. With this inappropriate and -- as far as our emtoional response to it is concerned -- misleading translation, an introspective psychology is made into a behavioral one, which observes from the outside. This, of course, is exactly how most Americans view and use psychoanalysis. So far so good, for Ego Psychology.

In other words if "ego" was to be maintained it should only be used to designate the mechanisms of defense, and of misunderstanding used by the individual to avoid the unconscious, whereas the "I" should be used to designate the subject as such, that which speaks in any kind of enunciation.

Therefore, what we are dealing with in On Ngation is not as much the birth of the ego, but the birth of the "I". And the two phases containing the word "ego" in our little paragraph should be restated thus:

This last sentence needs to be even more closely scrutinised. The German text runs as follows:

It has been translated into English by: what is bad, what is alien to the "I" what is external are, to begin with, "identical."

This phrase -- the understanding of which is quite crucial for the understanding of the primary processes leading to the structuration fo the "I" -- is not so clear as it may seem, because of Freud's elliptical construction = "ist ihrm gernachst identish," which leaves doubtful whether "ihm" is to be related to the verb "ist" -- therefore meaning fur ilh, for him, -- or to the adjective "identish" which is used with preposition "mit," "with" -- therefore meaning "identical with him."

and

The first translation refers to an "I" already constituted and entirely defined as a "pleasure-I," as opposed to whatever is non-pleasurable and which belongs therefore to the non-I, the exterior which is thus equivalent to the bad, the alien. There is a passage in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," to which Freud refers in the footnote attached to the end of the sentence, and which seems to confirm this translation and, therefore, this possible meaning.

Some Germanists -- like Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis -- have criticised and altogether rejected the second translation, the other possible meaning of this hinge-sentence:

But others -- and this is probably the case of philosopher Jean Hyppolite -- have maintained that due to Freud's ellipsis in the use of "ihm," there is a certain degree of un-decidability. Actually, in his commentary of the text, Jean Hyppolite, chose this second version.

The distinction between the "I" and "the non-I," is an act (a process), it is an expulsion (Ausstassung says Freud a bit further). This renders understandable a sentence which, at first, because it appears quite abruptly, may seem for a short while contradictory:

Since Freud has just said that one introjects and that one expulses, there logically must be -- therefore -- an expulsion without which the introjection could not take place. This expulsion -- this Ausstassung -- is the primordial process which constitutes the very ground of the judgement of attribution.

Thus the judgment of attribution is to be seen as a dissymetrical process, which is constituted in two steps, the first of which is the condition of the second:

1st) a primary expulsion;

2nd) an introjection.

A careful reading of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes would allow us to find a passage which corroborates Jean Hyppolite's understanding of Freud's hinge-sentence.

which implies clearly that it does not exist from the start and that the primary stage/logically speaking rather than genetically speaking since we deal with a myth, not with experimental data is a stage of total non-differentiation, within which there is no "I", no "non-I." Freud calls it then: a lining organism. "Let us imagine ourselves in the situation of an almost entirely helpless lining organism, as yet unorientated in the world, which is receiving stimuli in its nervous substance. This organism will very soon be in a positin to make a first distinction and a first orientation. On the one hand, it will be aware of stimuli which can be avoided by muscular action (for instance flight); this it ascribes to an external world. On the other hand, it will also be aware of stimuli against which such action is of no avail and whose character of constant pressure persists in spite of it; these stimuli are the signs of an internal world, the evidence of instinctual needs. The perceptual substance of the living organism will thus have found in the efficacy of its muscular activity or basis for distinguishing between an `ouside' and an `inside'."

This, says Freud, is athe experience which thrusts upon the individual organism the antithesis I non-I or subject/object.

But as you know, until late, due to its premature birth, there is no possible flight for the child, his only possible mean of muscular activity is to reject, to expel or to scream in order -- writes Freud -- "to silence external stimuli."

To expulse or, as we shall see, to scream is therefore the originary, the primary action which will create -- within the non-differenciated continuum -- a hole, a gap, an opening into which some objects will be rejected a non-I. And, on the other hand, as a result of this opening, an inside, an "I", can appear into which other objects will be incorporated. The double and dissymetrical movement of expulsion/introjection is the logical condition of the opening of the non-I (I'll call it the Real, which itself is the logical condition fo the birth of the Subject: i.e. of the I.

Before going any further in our minute examination of this crucial moment, the correct understanding of which is -- as you shall see - of paramount importance for the clinical approach of psychotic subjects as well as for the understanding of what could be the termination of an analysis, its goal. Allow me to give you a literary punctuation of what I just said. I'll read a few paragraphs of the beginning of William Golding's novel, Darkness Visible.

It is quite an interesting text because if on one hand it can be read as a dramatic metaphore of the birth of the I, who emerges from the destruction of the non-differenciated continuum which I call often Lacan -- the Real, if can also be read, from the point of view of the more standing on the edge of the five who when they first saw something meaning in the core of the Real, when they saw the Thing of which had first "to affirm or disaffirm the possession by this thing of a particular attribute": "is it alive or not," before they could recognize what it was in reality and name it: a child.

This Thing that the child has to deal first with is quite an interesting concept. Freud used the word das Ding to talk about it. In the small paragraph we are now commenting he wrote: "Sir (if, i.e.: the faculty of Judgement) sall (must) einsem Ding (for one Thing) eine Eigenschaft zuoder absprechen (affirm or disaffirm the possession of a particular attribute, says the English translation)."

The Thing is not a major concept in Freud's work and apart from Lacan I don't know anyone in the analytic community who has been interested in it.

Before saying a few words about the Thing, we must underline the fact that there are two words in German to say a thing whereas there is only one in English or in French for that matter. There is das Ding and there is die Sache. Die Sache is the word which is used as a component for Sachvorstellung which you may know in English as "thing presentation," as opposed to Wort Vorstellung which has been translated as "word presentation." And you may also know, of course, that in a paper on the unconscious written in 1915, Freud says something to the effect that Thing presentations (Sachvorstellungen) are to be found in the unconscious whereas word presentations (Wortvorstellungen) are to be found in the pre-conscious. This distinction has been used by American, as well as some French psychoanalysts to challenge Lacan's statement that the Freudian unconscious is structured like a language. The critics thus based their charge on the alleged fact that word presentations are only to be found in the pre-conscious not in the unconscious. But Lacan showed, and I think that this distinction is absolutely crucial if one wishes to follow Lacan's argumentation, that die Sache cannot be properly understood if it is not opposed to its counterpart das Ding, both meaning thing, but in very different ways -- Die Sache, (the component of Sachvorstellung) is the thing which is produced by human industry and which, therefore, has already been named, is already taken in a system of oppositions and differences proper to human language. It is the thing which can be perceived because it already has a name, the thing which plays of definite role in the exchanges between human beings, in human affairs; whereas das Ding as we will see shortly, is that which cannot be named. It is the Thing the emergence of which, the apparition of which, the confrontation with which, produces awe, an uncanny feeling, and even a nameless terror. Freud never spoke of Digvostellung but of Sachvorstellung, giving, therefore, to the unconscious the structure of a language, which doesn't mean the function of language.

Freud introduced das Ding in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, in the chapter entitled "Remembering and Judging." He is then studying in detail the first encounter of the Subject-to-be with an altogether unknown aspect of the outside world. Although this first encounter with das Ding is what creates the distinction between inside/outside, by opening the gap of the Real in the non-differenciated continuum of the beginning.

Freud names this aspect the Nebenmensch; it has been translated into English by "a fellow creature." What is it? Let us say that it is not necessarily a totally alien person but, rather, an unknown aspect of a well-known person, of a person of a similar kind, says Freud -- of the mother, for instance, but of the mother but seen in a very unusual appearance. In this case, Freud wrote: "The perceptual complexes arising from this Nebenmensch will, in part, be new and noncomparable... but other visual perceptions will coincide in the subject with his own memory of quite similar impressions of his own body." Then Freud gives a more precise example: "If the Nebenmensch screams, the memory of the subject's own screaming will be aroused and will consequently revive his own experience of pain. Thus, the complex of the Nebenmensch falls into two portions. One of these gives the impression of being a cosntant structure and remains as a coherent `thing' [which is a bad translation]; while the other can be understood by the activity of memory" (p. 393-394). Actually, "coherent thing" is altogether a misconstruction. The German text says als Ding beisamenbleibt, which means a "thing that stands as a whole," but cannot be understood. That thing, das Ding, is that which remains outside, that somehow creates the outside, where it will appear alien, cruel and bad -- in reference to the pleausre principle. Das Ding is that which is radically alien to the subject, it is the absolute other. It is nothing else but the object that can exist (and allow all the other objects to exist) only because it is last from the start, because it has never been possessed from the start and because it dispossesses the human being of its oceanic feeling of non-differenciation, since the only trace it leaves behind is the trace of its disappearance, of its absolute otherness, which can only be actualized by a movement or a scream and/or by the memory of pain associated to its screams (the Thing) which woke up the memory of the child's own screams of pain.

Lacan stresses vigorously that this particular nameless object, das Ding, is the same object which Freud defined, in the Three Essays on Senility, as the primary object on which is grounded all possible object relations. It is an object which has to be found again, but never will be, in comparison with which all other objects will be more unsatisfactory substitutes. This is quite a threatening and unpleasant conception of desire, since, from this point of view, desire, if we define it as the quest for the object, can never be fulfilled.

All this reconstruction of the acquisition of the judgement of attribution has led us, quite necessarily, to introduce the mother, as the absolute Other (letter 52), the mother as das Ding, i.e. the mother when she is not maternal and wish-fulfilling, but the mother -- as Ding -- the Ding-mother would I dare to say if it did not sound a little peculiar. The mother as responsible for the very first expulsion which the child will immediately master while being expulsed by the screams of the Ding-mother from the non-differenciated continuum of the beginning, by expulsing in his turn what is, bad, alien etc., so that he can incorporate that part of the object which is good, which is the mother as Freud used to worship her.

I have chosen a clinical illustration which does not belong to my own practice, but one which was presented by Rasine Lefort at Lacan's Seminar shortly after Jean Hyppolite presented his reading of die Verneinung. As you will see it is closely related to what I have talked about until now.

This is the case of Robert. He was a boy of three years and nine months old when he began his analysis with R.L.

Here are the five phases of his life before he met with R.L.:

"During this period his physical and sematic aspect improved while the psychological aspect was deteriorating" says R.L.

This remark is to be understood as the tangible sign of the fact that Robert was not listened to by people who took care of his body. While his physical boyd was repaired, he was silenced and his subjective structure was destroyed. Because it seems that there had been the beginning of a subjective structuration -- perhaps up to the beginning of the acquisition of the judgement of existence the beginning of an access to the Symbolic since two words survived: "Madam" and "Woolf" which seem to be the remains of a more elaborate use of language, but which somehow more only used -- when he met R.L. -- as more verbal attributes of good or bad objects.

It seems also that although she had mostly been a disastrous mother -- mostly a Ding-mother -- this last woman, on the verge of falling into sheer madness -- has also, been nevertheless, a good-enough matter to allow Robert to begin to have access to language and, therefore, to desire and its movements toward the last object.

One should always examine carefully the very complex relationships between a child and his mother when the latter is insane and when -- as it was the case for Robert's mother -- she is aware of her increasing insanity and of her inability to take proper care of her child on a material level but who nevertheless is able as she was to use whatever was left of her libido to give him access to the dimensions of desire and language before she completely rejected him, because she was brunt out and also to avoid dragging him down within her own insanity. The contrast, during the first part of Boert's life, between his deteriorated physical aspect and the beginning of his structuration as a subject was striking and totally opposite to the state he was in when he first met R.L.

The state of Boert at the beginning of his analysis

Without these two words one could have considered that Robert had been studying the very beginning of the acquisition of the judgement of attribution: when the distinction between inside/outside is taking place without being definitive. "With adults, says R.L., he was hyperagitated, non-differenciated, unable to establish any kind of contact."

But, in fact, he had not been stuck at this point, since he was still using two words he had previously required. Rather than an archaic fixation without depth it could be seen as a massive re-actualisation of a structural stage logically anterior to the one he had reached sometimes in his past life with his mother. I suppose it was the re-actualisation of the period of acquisition of the judgment of attribution. A dramatic re-actualisation which manifested itself most violently in special occasions: anything that had to do with emptying, throwing away or out, holes (an open door), the expulsion of oneself by going in front of him from one room to the other, and especially the screams of others.

It is undoubtedly -- in my opinion -- because it was a re-actualisation, that R.L. could undertake Robert's treatment. This is also because it was a re-actualisation that one can speak of psychosis in the case of Robert, rather than antism, if psychosis can be defined as the way of thinking proper to the gap between the acquisition of the judgment of attribution and the acquisition of the judgment of existence.

Hallucinatory psychosis, says Lacan in the discussion which followed jRosine Lefort's exposé -- that is to say characterised by the agglutination of the Real and the Imaginary, in consideration of which there is no symbolic speech, but only, what Lacan calls: a stamp of speech i.e. Signifiers, indeed, but signifiers reduced to their Imaginary function, as verbal qualifiers (good or bad). But this "stump of speech" was strong enough to allow Rosine Lefort to help Robert to reconstruct his subjective structure, to have access again to the symbolic order through the acquisition of the judgment of existence.

We could stop here. But I can summarize briefly part of the eight phases of Robert's psychoanalysis. It might bring some more light on our subject. These phases are my invention in order to make my exposé clearer.

During the first four phases, R.L. assured Robert of the permanence, and from imaginary other become the Other: the locus from which new signifiers could come back toward Robert which could then master them.

The second half of the treatment was more strictly psychoanalytic. It allowed -- within transference -- the re-actualisation of the most archaic moments of Robert's past, i.e. the reconstruction of his own history and its symbolisation at the same time.

We shall only see here the first half of Robert's treatment, in four steps.

The following phases were dedicated to the reconstruction of a primary Imaginary. A strictly corporal Imaginary which was built by enacting all the possible variations of the relationship between a container, a content and the various activities of filling and emptying.

I shall stop here since the following part of the treatment would require a detailed examination of the acquisition of the judgment of existence, but this is another story.