dividual level, and which accounts for the extraordinary importance he attaches
to the mythical examples of symbolic death, is a temporaryseparation from the
Symbolic—a momentary desubjectivizing permanence in the Real/void-of-
the-Symbolic, an undoing of the fantasy—which is logically followed by a new
symbolic reinscription.^46 This process should be considered as the ultimate ethical
achievement of psychoanalysis.
Before embarking upon a close investigation of the “components” of the fantasy
(S, the object a,and the precise way in which they are related to each other through
desire), let us focus on its overall functioning by way of a simile. Here I expand
upon an example that Lacan himself provides as early as 1957 :
With fantasy we are in the presence of something that fixes and reduces to the sta-
tus of a snapshot the course of memory, stopping it at a point called screen mem-
ory. Think of a cinematographic movement that takes place rapidly and then
suddenly stops at one point, freezing all the characters. This snapshot is distinc-
tive of a reduction of the full scene... to what is immobilized in fantasy which
remains loaded with all the erotic functions included in what [the full scene] ex-
pressed and of which [fantasy] is the witness and the support, the last support that
remains.^47How should we interpret this dense passage? What do we actually obtain from the
“reduced” phantasmatic snapshot? Two straightforward issues that remain implicit
in Lacan’s account should be made clear: first, the film in question is inevitably, for
all of us, a horrorfilm; secondly, we all want to watch horror films even if initially
nobody likes them. To put it bluntly, when the child freezes the shocking scene of
the film he is accidentally watching unaware of its traumatic content—when he
originally organizes the unbearable encounter with the Real of the desire-of-the-
(m)Other which causes anxiety—he both obtains a still that protects him from the
trauma (through the imaginary objectification of the scene) andlets himself be
partially traumatized (through the real scene which underlies its imaginary objec-
tification). In other words, thanks tothe mitigation of the screen/veil that “fixes”
what Lacan calls “the full scene,” the child ends up “enjoying” what he has seen,
and wants to watch it over and over again. If, in the meantime, his parents confis-
cate the film, he will try to refind a similar scene in other films.... (To grasp what
Lacan is saying, think also about the way supposedly frightened children cover
their eyes with their hands while, simultaneously, peeping out avidly through the
gaps between their fingers....)
The most important point to emphasize here is that the traumatic scene can be
formed only retroactivelyby the imaginary fixation of the still frame. The “course of