- For Freud’s notion of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz,see especially the articles “Repression” and
“The Unconscious,” both contained in SE, XIV. Lacan will explicitly discuss and origi-
nally appropriate this notion in his detailed comments on Freud’s Entwurfin the first—
and usually underestimated—part of Seminar VII (see J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960[London: Routledge, 199 2], pp.57‒62). I shall return
to this notion in Chapter 4.
19 4. These issues are only introduced here. I shall analyze the notion of the fundamental fan-
tasy in detail in Chapter 5 below.
- Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis,pp.203‒204.
19 6. Freud, “Repression,” p.14 8.
197 .Écrits: A Selection,p. 286.
198 .Le séminaire livre IV,p. 119.
“The Name-of-the-Father is the binary signifier that is primally repressed” (B. Fink, The
Lacanian Subject[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 ], p. 74 ).
See The Seminar. Book III,pp.179‒180, p. 172 ; “Becoming a woman and wondering what
a woman is are two essentially different things. I would go even further—it’s because
one doesn’t become one [because of an incomplete resolution of the Oedipus com-
plex] that one wonders [becomes an hysteric] and, up to a point, to wonder is the con-
trary of becoming one” (ibid., p. 178 ).
Neurotics are not satisfied with these answers: insofar as we are all not fully satisfied
with them, we are also all neurotics. At this stage, however, Lacan still believes that the
phallic answer satisfies most of us. The two great categories of neurotics, hysterics and
obsessionals, are not satisfied with the answers given apropos female sexuality and
death respectively.
See Le séminaire livre V,p. 231.
These are substitutes for the standard phallic fantasy and, as such, remain phallic.
204 .Le séminaire livre V,p. 253.
- Against the background of Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten” case study (see SE, XVII),
in Seminar V, Lacan offers a paradigmatic example of such a disturbance which we
could schematize in the following way: ( 1 ) the “imaginary place where the desire of
the mother is located... is occupied” by a sibling; ( 2 ) a lack of maternal love corre-
sponds to the impossibility of the child’s beginning to symbolize: if the mother is al-
ways absent, her absence cannot trigger the process of symbolization that follows
frustration; ( 3 ) the child finds himself a compensation, a “phantasmatic solution” that
functions as a “symbolic act”: the lack of love/presence of a rival is itself symbolized
through an imaginary signifier (hieroglyphic) such as a stick or a whip; ( 4 ) the child
actively enters the symbolic order on the basis of a “so-called masochistic fantasy of
fustigation” (see Le séminaire livre V,pp.240 ‒241). “The sign of the stick... or of what-
ever else hits... is an element thanks to which even a disagreeable effect may become
a subjective distinction.... What is at the outset a means to annihilate the rival reality
of the brother, later becomes that through which the subject finds himself distin-
guished, recognized” (ibid., p. 253 ).