In frustration, the lack can only be understood on the imaginary plane as an

imaginary injury. In privation, the lack is purely and simply in the real, a real
limit or gap..
When I say that in privation, the lack is in the real, that does not mean that it
is in the subject.--For the subject to accede to privation, he must conceive the
real as being: other than it is, that is, he must already have symbolized it. The
reference to privation as it is put forth here consists in posing the symbolic
before -- before we can say things that are reasonable. It is thus opposed to
the genesis of the psychic system which is usually given to us.
In the psychogenesis currently given to us in analysis, everything happens as
in an idealistic dream -- each subject is like a spider and must draw from
himself, the thread of his web. He is there to envelop himself in the silk of his
cocoon, and his whole conception of the world must be drawn from himself
and from his images. One thus sees the subject secrete from himself
successive relations in the name of I do not know what pre- established
maturation, with objects which will end by being the objects of the human
world that is our own. One gives oneself up to such an exercise because there
is in fact every appearance that psychoanalysis makes it possible. But that is
because, in this experience, one wants to retain only the aspects that tend in
this direction, while each time that one gets enmeshed, one thinks one is
dealing only with a difficulty in language, whereas it is a manifestation of the
error into which one has wandered. Somatognosia, the image of the body as a
signifier, shows this very well.
We cannot pose the problem of the object relation correctly unless we begin
with a certain framework that must be considered as fundamental to
understanding. This framework, or the first of these frameworks, is that in the
human world, the lack of the object provides the structure as well as the
beginning of objectal organization. This lack of the object must be conceived
at its different stages in the subject -- with regard to the symbolic chain,
which escapes him in its beginning as in its end -- at the level of frustration,
where he is in fact instaleed in a lived experience that is unthinkable for him -
- but we must also consider this lack in the real, for

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when we speak here of privation, it is not a matter of a privation that is fully
2
conscious. Privation is the center of reference that we need. These days
everyone uses it, the trick being simply at a certain moment, and that is how
Mr. Jones proceeds. To make privation the equivalent of frustration. Privation
is in the real, entirely outside the subject. For the subject to apprehend
privation, he must first symbolize the real. How is the subject led to
symbolize it?
How is frustration introduced into the symbolic order? That is the question
we are asking and we shall see that the subject is neither isolated nor
independent, and it is not he who introduces the symbolic order.
It is striking that no one spoke last night of a major passage in what Mme
Dolto brought us, which is that, according to her, the only children of either
sex who become phobic are those whose mother had to deal with some
trouble in the object relation tying to her parent—her own, the mother’s—of
the opposite sex. That an idea which surely makes something other than the
relation of the child and the mother intervene, and that is why I have posited
the trio of the mother, the child and the phallus.
There is always in the mother, apart from the child, the demand for the
phallus, which the child symbolizes or realizes, more or less. The child, who
has his relation with the mother, knows nothing about this. When we spoke
yesterday evening of the image of the body with regard to the child, there was
one thing that must have been apparent to you -- this image of the body, if it
is effectively the child, if it is even accessible to the child, is it, for all that,
thus that the mother sees her child? That is a question that was not asked at
all.
Similarly, at what moment is the child capable of perceiving that what
his mother desires in him, what saturates and satisfies her in him, is his
phallic image for her, the mother? What possibility does the child have of
acceding to this relational element? Is it on the order of a direct effusion, or
indeed, by a projection? Is that not to suppose that every relation
2
...ressentie.

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