John asked me to talk to you about negation, foreclosure and the Real in reference to most remarkable Fritz Zorn's Mars. But although the function of negation or rather the absence, the lack of negation is quite remarkable in Zorn's upbringing; the peculiar structure or Zorn and the question he raises about his cancer cannot be really understood in reference to Negation (Verneinung) nor foreclosure (Vermeifung).

It can only be approached through the question of the function of the father, the paternel metaphore or, as Lacan finally called it Le Nom-du-Père.

Le Nom-du-Père cannot be translated into English since if his immediate meaning seems to be "the Name of the Father" it must also be heared as " The no-of-the-Father". So, as you can see, if I introduce the question of Le Nom-du-Père and its function in Fritz Zorn's structure, I will also raise the question of negation but through a rather less usual has than the one which would have consisted in commenting and expanding Freud's "Die Verneinung" and Lacan's and from Hyppolite's commentaries on Freud's text.

The function of the Father -- Le Nom-du-Père -- is absolutely crucial for the process of the oedipal structuration of the subject (in the Lacanian sense of the word) and for the fate of his desire in relation to his being alienated to and by language. As Dor summarises it in his reading of the sire first seminars of Lcan which were deeply influenced by Lacan's own reading of Hegel at that time under the guidance of Kajeve:

Now, don't be discouraged by this rather dense seminary of the questions I want to raise in relation to Fritz Zorn's Mars. My plan this afternoon is to follow the different steps of (l'avènement du sujet) the birth fo the subject from a Lacanian point of view, starting with the Mirror stage and on up to the introduction of Le Nom-du-Père, in order to show how this birth is in fact a progressive and irreversible intrication, or knotting together of desire, language and the Unconscious.

When we reach it, I'll underline the function of Negation: "The No-of-the-Father," the possible consequences of its failure and (may be during the discussion) the difference between this failure and the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.

There will be some tricky distinctions to be made.

At that point and last, but not least, I'll punctuate this rather didactive -- and therefore, as you shall see -- Imaginary and limited exposé, with my own reading of Fritz Zorn's text.

Fritz Zorn's discourse is particularly interesting because it illustrates in the most dramatic and tragic fashion, one of the possible consequences of the failure of Le Nom-du-Père especially when, at the same time, the mother seems to have no desire of her own, i.e the consequence in Fritz Zorn's case, was a psycho-sematic disorder: a Cancer - or a perversion at the cellulon level (I'll explain that later).

One may be a little puzzled by the fact that Cancer can be conceived of as a psychosomatic disorder, but this is the main assumption of Fritz Zorn himself, it is what he tries to demonstrate in his text and, as psychoanalysts, we have to take him at his words and let him be our guide in such difficult matters, exactly like Freud did with Schreber's Memoirs.

Since the paternal metaphore plays the fundamental role in the structuration of the "Psychic apparatus" of the Subject (and perhaps also in the structuration of the human being as a whole, genes included), we are entitled to try to find out if, in his Memoirs Fritz Zorn establishes, explicitely or not, a causal relationship between the function of the father (whatever it might hae been) on the psychic aspect of his disorder.

Wrong or Right I made the assumption that you have read Fritz Zorn's Mars and that John has rendered you familiar with Hegel's dialectic of consciousness and dialectic of desire and their important value as the primary source of Lacan's schema L. With his Schema L, Lacan presented with a remarkable graph of the subject's alienation to the Ego -- as a consequence of his access to language.

The structuration of the subject is also known in psychoanalysis as the structuration of he Oedipus complex. It take place in three steps or moments. But in order for the Oedipus complex to take place, it must be preceded by a primordial stage: the Mirror Stage.

The concept of "Mirror Stage" has been introduced by Lacan in psychoanalytic theory at the International Congress of Marienbad as early as 1936. The text published in the Ecrits was written ten years later.

I'll be brief on this issue because it is not what is at stake here.

The Mirror stage can be divided in three logical rather than chronological successive steps.

We do not find anything in Fritz Zorn's text which would lead us to believe that some traumatic experience might have happened to him during the Mirror Stage which might have created an unerasable psychic wound of a psychotic nature.

Once the primary identification has taken place, once the child is protected from the fragmenting power of the Real by its alienation to the Imaginary, then the Oedipian structuration can take place.

Lacan distinguishes three moments in the structuration of the Oedipus complex.

During the first moment, the mother is caught in a specular relationship with the child. As Winnicot remarked in his commentary of Lacan Mirror Stage in Game and Reality, the mother is, at that moment, the daily and lining mirror of the child.

Within the field of the specular relationship with his mother, the child will try to identify himself with that which he supposes to be the object of her desire, in other words with what the mother lacks. In psychoanalytic theory and in Freud's own words that which the mother lacks has been named the phallus or the phallic object (although one should rather say the phallic thing at that time). The phallus, as you know is not the penis, but its imaginary nature is probably best illustrated by the actual lack of penis of the mother. Confronted with the lack of penis of the mother and supposedly unable to understand at a first glace the sexual difference, the child will suppose that the thing he does not see where he was expecting to see something must be elsewhere, i.e. in an Imaginary location. This Imaginary thing is the imaginary phallus.

During the first moment of the Oedipian structuration, the child identifies himself with the missing object. Lacan: "in order to please the mother it is both necessary and sufficient to be the phallus." But the phallus, from the oint of view of the child, could be imagined by anything the mother seems to desire: a cat, a case, a tree as well as a missing penis... all these can be for the child the signifiers of the desire of the mother with which he'll identify himself. Clinical example:

From this point of view the signifier "dog" for the little girl had no symbolic function but was only a thing to be, to identify with. "Dog" was somehow from the point of view of the desire of the mother a phallic signifier.

In fact the idea of a phallic signifier, is a didactic simplification, there are many phallic signifiers the ensemble of which is called -- theoretically speaking -- the imaginary phallus of the mother. In Lacan's terminology they are called S₁.

During this first moment of the Oedipian structuration, the child is alienated to the imaginary phallus according to the dialectic of being.

To be or not to be the phallus of the mother. This is the question! It allows the child to avoid castration.

This moment, clinically speaking, is a very important one because if the child remains booked to it due to failure or to ambiguity in the introduction of the function of the father, then, he remains trapped in the vast domain of so-called perversions.

One could find many literary examples of this situation, but I know none more striking than the sealing of Jean Genet's fate at the beginning of his life. It has been described in the most extraordinary fashion by Jean-Paul Sartre although he was far from being a Lacanian. Listen:

Caught with his hand in the cookie jar! Someone (his foster mother) has entered the room and looks at him. Under the glance, the child comes back to his senses. He was a nobody up until now, he suddenly becomes from Genet. He feels his glaring, deafening: he is a light sense, an alarm signal endlessly jongling. Who is Jean Genet? Shortly the whole village will be told although the child at ill ignores it. Suddenly

A voice declares publicly: "You are a thief." While the foster mother was absent, up then he had been the Saint she used to worship in church. From now on she will have to be simultaeneously a Saitn and a "Thief," in order to please -- forever -- the blamed foster-mother (anecdote about his will).

In the case of Fritz Zorn, the situation was slightly different to please the mother (who at this stage of the Oedipus does not differ yet from the father) Fritz had to be harmonious (in German Einklong).

"Harmony" is what seems to have been the object of the desire of the mother to which Fritz has identified accordingly to the dialectic of being:

This moment corresponds to what Freud described in die Verneinung as the period of acquisition of the attributive judgement accordingly to the laws of the pleasure principle. This thing, which is good, I introject it into myself, this other thing which is bad I throw it away, outside since at that moment that which is bad and the outside are quite alike. And things, although they have no name as yet, are thus verbally qualified, says Freud: i.e. phonemes, uttered by the child, have only a qualifying value.

To succeed in pleasing the mother by being the object of her desire is good and then the child introjects the goodness of being this object, but to fail to please the mother in not being the object of her desire is bad, then the child feels rejected outside, vorberwe, "absent" -- bad. This oscillation is essential in order to prepare the child for the acquisition of the judgement of existence, i.e. the possibility to name objects in their absence. Fritz Zorn seems to have remained stuck to this moment of imaginary identification to whatever pleased his mother, his specular other:

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a pause.

The oscillation between being or not being the phallus of the mother does not normally last forever insofar as the mtoher has indeed an object which she actually desire and which is not the child.

Although there are cases where the child is and remains the phallus of the mother, from the mother's point of view. This was the case for instance of little Hans whose father preferred very clearly his own mother to his wife...!

In fact, in most cases, it is precisely when the child desires to be the desire of his mother that he bitterly discovers he is not. There is another one. Another one who is all the more present than he is the other responsible for the absences of the mother: namely the father although it should be remembered that what is called father here is the object of the mother's desire.

Normally, the sudden intrusion of the father into the specular relationship between the child and the mother acts as a deprivation. On the one hand, the father deprives the child of his mother, causing thus what Lacan called the aphanisis of the subject (the child). But on the other hand, by doing so (and due to the art of reversing situations proper to the child at that time) he deprives also the mother of her child, of her phallus.

I don't know if you remember the very beginning of Proust La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The narrator remembers this particular night when his father forbode the mother to kiss him good-night as she used to do every night. The aphanisis of the subject is worse than death: suffering agonizing pain, the narrator must go to bed, deprived of his mother good-night kiss:

If the father's intrusion acts as a deprivation, it also acts as a frustration, since to begin with, and for a while, the child will anticipate, imaginarily speaking, the absence of the Real mother (definition of frustration).

But curiously enough, the father of the narrator La Recherche, will fail to maintain his interdiction. Later this same night, the narrator gets out of his funeral bed when he hears his parents coming up the stairs in a desperate attempt to get his necessary good-night kiss from his mother, risking thus everything: to lessen his parents' affection or to be sent away to a boarding school and so on...! When his parents discover him hagard and trembling at the top of the stairs, the father mellows, and he said to his wife: "Look how sad your son looks!... Do you want to make him sick? Why don't you sleep in his room tonight and ask Françoise (the maid) to prepare the big bed for you?... Good night you two, since I am not as nervous as you are, I'll go to bed right now!"

The narrator will never forget that he owed his nervousness the reversal of his father's interdiction to remain any longer the mother's phallus. He will remain "nervous" for the rest of his life -- asthma -- a psychosomatic disorder! and will eventually die from it. In fact, this very evening, his victory has been a bitter one since the ambiguity of the No of the Father has condemned him to be far ever the forever threatened phallus of the mother: Commenting about the vents of this night, many years later, the narrator remarked:

And indeed because of the failure of the No of the father Proust remained trapped in the field of perversions -- not his homosexuality which is not quite a perversion, but sado-masochism -- and as an additional gift, suffering of a terrible psychosomatic condition.

The case of Fritz Zorn is even more illuminating of the failure of Le Nom-du-Père -- and its consequences.

On the one hand, Fritz was not even in fact identified with the phallus of his mother since the mother had no desire of her own except -- perhaps the secret desire that Fritz would die -- and not only was she deprived of any desire of her own but all differences between the two parents have been, from the start, constanly erased.

A few signifiers of the family discourse are used to erase any difference and, therefore, of any possible lack.

"Difficult" was the one most often used by the mother:

"Simply could not be compared"

was the parental equivalent for "difficult."

And if none of these two signifiers was sufficient to erase the rising difference, a third one was called upon to the rescue:

From Fritz' point of view, the constant erasure of difference altered event he functioning, the attributive judgement since the "good" finally always had to prevail on what was "bad," so that even at that level, the dialectic of pleasure of good or bad was rendered impossible. It is remarquable to notice, though, that the younger brother seems to have escaped this fate.

Whatever the case might have been for the younger brother, Fritz, while trying to be harmonious -- i.e. to be what he thought might have been the desire of his mother -- was caught in a deadly rap since it even seemed that the mother, as I already said, had no desire of any kind or at least was unable to maintain any desire without instantly erasing it by its contrary: My mother was much given to the word "or." She would make a statement and then immediately retract it: This is so or that is so. My poor mother used to say things like "I am going to 2 mich next Friday at 10:30 or I am staying home." Or she would say, "We'll have spaghetti for supper tonight, or we'll have wurst salad."

And Fritz adds here a very fine comment of his own:

The possibility to reach the third moment of the Oedipus Complex or as it is sometimes called: its decline is grounded first on the No of the Father which concludes the second moment, then on the assumption of the Name-of-the-Father.

The third moment is also the moment of requisition of the judgement of existence (described by Freud in die Verneimung) that is to say the possibility of naming things in their absence and the possibility -- through negation -- to think about things which are excluded from our conscious thoughts and were at first considered as bad.

But the acquisition, by the child, of negation, seems to rest entirely on the No-of-theFather and the support it gets from the mother.

I have shown you how the narrator's father failed to sustain the No-of-the-Father at a very crucial point, at the very beginning of la recherche du temps perdu.

In the case of Fritz Zorn the absence of "No" is even more staggering.

We shall see, while examining the third moment of structuration of the Oedipus complex, the consequences of the absence of the No-of-the-Father, in the case of Fritz Zorn.

Normally, at the end of the second moment of the Oedipus complex, the father becomes the phallus in the place of the child, He possesses it. He therefore does not deprive the mother of her imaginary phallus when he deprives her of her child, as much as he reinstalls the phallus in the only place where the mother is allowed to desire it: the locus of the Other, the locus of the law (i.e. the taboo of incest).

As we have already said, the child will feel this negation of his being-the-phallus of the mother as a time unbeing (Desêtre!). The child has to learn to unbe the phallus and when he does so he is confronted with a terrifying anxiety, as strong as a death anxiety also to unbe if not to die. It is -- if one may say so -- a necessary Imaginary death which is the very condition for the child to have access to the symbolic order.

By avoiding only differences, by avoiding the No-of-the-Father, Fritz could not unbe the imaginary phallus of the mother and therefore the bad had no access to the symbolic order which is defined, as you know, as a system of values and of differences.

What was completely short-circuited here by the mother and the father as well as by Fritz himself is the threat of castration.

Commenting abouthis fear of blood, of pain and of being wounded, Fritz Zorn concludes:

Normally, when the phallus is located in the place which has been assigned to it by the law (the No-of-the-Father, the taboo of incest), the child can find a consolation in coveting it where it now seems to be. How? Either by taking a feminine position or by identifying with the Father.

When the Father finally appears as the one the mother prefers to the child, a substitution takes place: The Name-of-the-Father S₂ is substituted for the phallus fo the S₁ which he now possesses but the signifiers of which are repressed. The substitution of one signifier for another one is a metaphore. The Name-of-the-Father is a metaphore of the repressed phallic signifiers. This is primal repression.

In the case of Fritz Zorn there has been a sort of law of the father:

But as you can see this law has been totally worthless and non-operative:

Instead of a substitution of the Names-of-the-Father for the repressed phallic signifiers of the mtoher, instead of metaphorisation, it seems that a holophrastic condensation occurred of both series of signifiers S₁ S₂. Unfortunately, I did have the opportunity to verify it on the German text. But let us say here that the establishment of a holophrase instead of a metaphore has been considered by Lacan, along with the resulting absence of relation to the object, as a possible cause of the psychosomatic condition.

What happens, normally, when the child realizes, through his unbeing, that the father possesses this object that the child thought he was: namely the mysterious object of the mother's desire? Actually, the familial discourse does not explicitely mentions the signifiers of the mother's desires, it does it in a metaphorical manner. The child can only grope some signifying marks which have supposedly rendered -- at least in the roman familial (the family romance) -- the father desirable for the mother. "It's because of his blue eyes!" Or as my own mother would say: "It's because of the way he used to tie his boot laces!" As you can see: it really is metaphorical! And I may tell you she was no fetichist.

One could give an example of the symbolising process of what one cannot be nor possess, with the Fort/Da Genne described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: while the mother is absent (an absence which is all the more threatening that the mother might be with the father) the child plays with a spool attached to a rope. He throws the spool over the edge of the cradle within which it disappears and the child says O (Ferb) with sadness. Then he pulls it back and says a joyous "a" (da) when it reappears.

By doing so, the child:

He get thus access to the symbolic order which is fundamentally constituted of a system of signifiers, a system of pure differences (o/a) in which each term gets its own value depending of its place amongst the others within the system and according to a series of laws.

You can understand better, now, why the symbolic order was totally inaccessible to Fritz Zorn, since the crucial notions of difference, of value, of relationship were bound, buried by the feunilical discourse from the start. Words, for him, always were merely signs of a qualifying nature -- which is probably why he failed to achieve anything in terms of a therapeutic symbolisation of the causes of his cancer while writing fars. He failed to re-introduce the fundamental difference between the signifiers of the mother and of those the father which remained caught, frozen in the holophrase which replaced the paternal metaphore.

While symbolising the absent mother first by a spool then by a phonemic opposition o/a, the child, in fact, kills her according to the law of symbolism: "If one cannot possess the thing, one kills it by symbolizing it with words (Lacan). You remember how indifferent Hans tended to become toward his mother and how easily he took her death."

Similarly, if one cannot possess the "phallic-thing" the father possesses, one kills it, inside the father, by symbolising it with words: these very words Lacan named The Names-of-the-Father which from then on will be used to metaphorise the phallic thing.

It is here that the child is confronted with the dimension of the murder of the Father which is nothing else but the murder of the phallic thing by its symbolisation, its metaphorisation byt he signifiers of the Names-of-the-Father.

Here again, one can understand why Fritz Zorn's father's death almost went unnoticed and seemed totally unreal. It had been exactly as if "the father had always been dead or as if he had never at all."

If the father had always been dead, then his mourning was unpassible, tears could never flow and this is perhaps also why Fritz Zorn described his Cancer as made of repressed or foreclosed tears.

One can also understand why naming seemed such an important and unpassible occupation, along with writing, since he never had access to the judgement of existence, to symbolisation and since he was even unable to receive and hear and sign with the Name of his Father which was not Zorn but Augst.

During this third moment of structuration of the Oedipus complex, the signifiers of the Name-of-the-Father inaugurates the alienation of desire by and in language.

That is to say that the child's desire to have the repressed phallic object drives him toward the chain of the objects substituted for the last object (the phallus) which has been repressed in the Other, prohibited by law but which, nevertheless, insists in the Other due to repetition automatism.

And that's the truth.

Tranen paronymie Krahe (crow)

Ingestion of Kreide, of K (R)

K(R) to be found often

Korb Karcinaure of God

hate of god = image of an octopus = Krake

Himself feeling like an (Einsiedler Krebs).