Hysteria

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (364)

1. #01

   Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.139

   The Act and Evil in Literature > The case of Valmont > The case of Don Juan

   Theoretical move: Zupančič reads Molière's Don Juan as an embodiment of "diabolical evil" in the Kantian sense—not as transgression or atheism, but as a principled refusal to repent despite full knowledge of God's existence, which paradoxically hystericizes the big Other (Heaven) and exposes the breakdown of its authority, while also linking Don Juan's logic of conquest to Lacan's not-all (pas-toute).

   By so doing, he provokes what we might call a hystericization of the Beyond, of the Other, God.

2. #02

   Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.37

   <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Mode of production**

   Theoretical move: The passage develops a Marxist theory of the mode of production as a formal-structural concept that determines culture through overdetermination and relative autonomy, arguing that naming capitalism as one contingent "mode" opens cognitive and political space for imagining alternative modes of social organization.

   In Studies on Hysteria, Freud uses 'overdetermined' (uberdeterminiert) to insist that hysteria has multiple causes that are social and psychological, not merely physiological.

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: This passage is largely non-substantive editorial and prefatory material — translation notes, edition prefaces by Freud, and a translator's preface by Brill — with only incidental theoretical content touching on the dream as paradigm for psychopathology and the role of the unconscious in dream-work.

   the dream proves to be the first link in a chain of abnormal psychic structures whose other links, the hysterical phobia, the obsession, and the delusion must, for practical reasons, claim the interest of the physician.

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: Freud surveys the clinical and analogical relations between dream life and mental disturbances, positioning wish-fulfilment as the shared key to a psychological theory of both, and arguing that elucidating the dream is simultaneously an elucidation of the psychosis.

   the affecting dream was accompanied by light hysterical attacks, which in their turn were followed by an anxious, melancholic state. Féré (cited by Tissié) refers to a dream which caused an hysterical paralysis.

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream***

   Theoretical move: Freud establishes dream interpretation as a legitimate scientific procedure by arguing that dreams, like hysterical symptoms, have a hidden meaning recoverable through a method of free, uncritical self-observation — thereby positioning the dream as a psychic formation continuous with pathological symptoms rather than a mere somatic process.

   For several years I have been occupied with the solution of certain psychopathological structures in hysterical phobias, compulsive ideas, and the like, for therapeutic purposes.

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream***

   Theoretical move: Freud establishes the methodological foundation of psychoanalytic dream interpretation—proceeding fragment by fragment rather than en masse—and justifies using his own dreams as primary material, framing self-analysis as both a methodological necessity and an ethical obligation of the analyst-as-subject.

   I was at that time not yet sure of the criteria marking the final settlement of a hysterical case

7. #07

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: This passage performs the foundational Freudian move of demonstrating that dream-content is systematically overdetermined wish-fulfillment: through layered free association to each dream element, Freud shows that the manifest dream condenses multiple latent wishes (chiefly exculpation from medical responsibility) and displaces blame onto patients, colleagues, and circumstance, while also illustrating the composite/condensed nature of dream-figures.

   My treatment, of course, removes only hysterical pains. It seems to me, in fact, that I wish to find an error in the diagnosis; in that case the reproach of being unsuccessful would be removed.

8. #08

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: Through the completed analysis of the "Irma's injection" dream, Freud establishes wish-fulfilment as the fundamental principle of dream-work: the dream's content is shown to be a disguised realisation of the dreamer's wish to be acquitted of responsibility, demonstrating that interpretation reveals latent dream-thoughts condensed behind manifest content.

   derision for those colleagues who are ignorant of hysteria is contained in this part of the dream

9. #09

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-disfigurement is produced by a psychic censorship mechanism: a "second instance" suppresses wish-content from the "first instance" by distorting or inverting it before it can reach consciousness, making wish-fulfilment the universal motor of dream formation even where the manifest content is disagreeable.

   They are partly dreams of hysterical subjects, which require long preliminary statements, and now and then also an examination of the psychic processes which occur in hysteria.

10. #10

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

    Theoretical move: Freud defends the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams against patient objections by introducing hysterical identification as a mechanism whereby an apparently unfulfilled wish in a dream actually fulfils a different (often unconscious) wish, demonstrating that the theory is more nuanced than simple surface-content opposition implies.

    Identification is most often used in hysteria to express a common sexual element. An hysterical woman identifies herself most readily—although not exclusively—with persons with whom she has had sexual relations.

11. #11

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(B) INFANTILE EXPERIENCES AS THE SOURCE OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that infantile experiences serve as the primary sources of latent dream content, using autobiographical material (the Hannibal identification and anti-Semitic humiliation) and clinical dream analyses to demonstrate how childhood scenes are either directly reproduced or allusively encoded in manifest dream content, requiring interpretation to extricate them.

    This aroused in her the old sensitiveness, which is the chief characteristic of children who are to be hysterical. Their desire for love is insatiable.

12. #12

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(B) INFANTILE EXPERIENCES AS THE SOURCE OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud uses clinical dream analyses—both a female hysterical patient's dream and his own autobiographical dreams—to demonstrate that infantile experiences function as latent sources of dream content, while also illustrating the mechanisms of condensation, displacement, and associative chain-building that connect childhood memory to manifest dream elements.

    we are in every case dealing with neurotic, particularly with hysterical persons; and the part played by childhood scenes in these dreams might be conditioned by the nature of the neurosis

13. #13

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(B) INFANTILE EXPERIENCES AS THE SOURCE OF DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that infantile experiences are not merely historical residues but remain constitutively active as the latent content of dreams, and that the apparent completion of a dream's interpretation always conceals a deeper stratum reaching back to the earliest childhood wish - suggesting this connection to infantile material may be a structural condition of dreaming itself.

    I can actually show in the analysis of hysteria that in a true sense these remote experiences have remained recent up to the present time

14. #14

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the interpretation of typical dreams—particularly those involving the death of beloved relatives—as expressions of repressed childhood wishes, grounding this in a reconstruction of infantile psychology (sibling rivalry, primary egoism, proto-hostility) and demonstrating that latent dream-content, not manifest content, carries the determining emotional meaning.

    Where the primary character has already been covered up by later development, it may be at least partially uncovered again by an attack of hysteria. The correspondence between the so-called hysterical character and that of a naughty child is strikingly evident.

15. #15

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that death-wishes toward parents and siblings in dreams originate in childhood sexuality and rivalry, and that the Oedipus Complex—the boy's desire for the mother and rivalry with the father, and vice versa for the girl—is the universal operative factor behind this typical dream pattern, with the unconscious managing these wishes through dreams, symptoms, and hysterical counter-reactions.

    it created the excessive concern for the mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and manifestation of defence. In the light of these considerations it is no longer inexplicable why hysterical girls are so often extravagantly attached to their mothers.

16. #16

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the Oedipus and Hamlet myths are not culturally exotic but universally compelling precisely because they dramatise repressed childhood wishes (desire for the mother, murderous rivalry with the father) that are constitutive of the psychic life of all children, neurotics and non-neurotics alike; the degree of repression distinguishes neurotic from normal, and ancient from modern tragedy.

    if some one wishes to call Hamlet a hysteric subject I cannot but recognise it as an inference from my interpretation.

17. #17

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that typical dreams (dental irritation, flying, falling, swimming, fire, sexual symbolism) draw on infantile somatic and erotic material, and that the majority of adult dreams express sexual wishes that can only be accessed by pushing past manifest content to latent dream thoughts, while cautioning against the over-generalization that all dreams are exclusively bisexual or death-bound.

    With some boys the hysterical attack consists simply in the reproduction of such tricks, which they accomplish with great skill.

18. #18

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Through detailed dream analyses, Freud demonstrates how condensation works as the primary mechanism of dream-formation: multiple latent dream-thoughts are fused into single manifest elements via inversion, symbolic allusion, and associative chains, such that any one dream element may condense several distinct meanings simultaneously.

    was at that time attributed to tuberculosis (probably hysterically simulated)

19. #19

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates that condensation operates through multiple mechanisms—collective image formation, composite persons, common-mean displacements, and phonetic/semantic word-fusions—showing that the dream-work systematically compresses latent dream-thoughts into manifest content via associative overdetermination rather than simple displacement.

    the patient, whom I have sent to the Orient, and whose hysteria has been wrongly recognised

20. #20

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

    Theoretical move: Through detailed analysis of the dream-word "Autodidasker," Freud demonstrates how condensation operates by compressing multiple names, persons, concerns, and wish-fulfillments into a single verbal formation, and generalizes that dream speech is always derived from remembered speech in the dream material.

    The verbal compositions of the dream are very similar to those which are known to occur in paranoia, but which are also found in hysteria and in compulsive ideas.

21. #21

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) REGARD FOR PRESENTABILITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces 'regard for presentability' (Darstellbarkeit) as a third factor in dream-work alongside condensation and displacement, arguing that abstract dream-thoughts are systematically recast into visual/figurative language to enable dramatisation, with word-play and verbal ambiguity serving both condensation and censorship evasion, and that this symbolic-substitutive mechanism is shared across dreams, neuroses, and cultural/mythic tradition.

    The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be dreamed about in apparently harmless allusions to culinary operations, and the symptoms of hysteria become practically unintelligible if we forget that sexual symbolism can conceal itself

22. #22

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparent acts of judgment, inference, and argumentation within dream content are not spontaneous cognitive performances of the dreaming mind but are always traceable to—and borrowed from—the dream thoughts themselves; additionally, he introduces "secondary elaboration" as a fourth factor in dream-formation that imposes a specious coherence on dream material.

    these impressions—greatly distorted it is true, and exaggerated by memory—are capable of furnishing the original and fundamental basis of hysterical symptoms.

23. #23

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that affects in dreams are not distorted by the dream-work the way presentation contents are — affects remain intact while ideas undergo displacement and substitution — and that this dissociation between affect and idea is the key to understanding the apparent incongruity of emotions in dreams, a logic that equally governs psychoneurotic symptoms.

    If a hysteric is surprised that he is so very afraid of a trifle, or if the patient with compulsive ideas is astonished that he develops such painful self-reproach out of a nonentity, both of them err in that they regard the presentation content—the trifle or the nonentity—as the essential thing.

24. #24

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-work performs two operations on affects: suppression (reducing emotional intensity) and inversion (transforming affects into their opposites), both of which he identifies as products of the dream censor — the restraint of opposing thought-trains upon one another — making censorship's affective dimension structurally parallel to its role in the distortion of ideational content.

    everything which I had to say displeased me thoroughly… the lecture on the relation between hysteria and the perversions

25. #25

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(H) SECONDARY ELABORATION**

    Theoretical move: Freud identifies "secondary elaboration" as the fourth factor in dream-formation: a waking-like psychic function that imposes coherence and intelligibility on dream content by filling gaps, connecting fragments, and preferentially assimilating pre-existing daytime fantasies—thereby revealing that repression/censorship is not the only shaping force and that fantasy (the day-dream) is the structural template secondary elaboration exploits.

    these phantasies or day dreams are the immediate predecessors of hysterical symptoms—at least of a great many of them

26. #26

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the forgetting of dreams is primarily caused by psychic resistance rather than the gap between sleeping and waking states, and that the sleeping state enables dream formation precisely by diminishing the endopsychic censor—a conclusion demonstrated through clinical practice, delayed dream interpretation, and the structural analogy with neurotic symptoms.

    when I treat a neurotic, perhaps an hysteric, by psychoanalysis, I am compelled to find explanations for the first symptoms of the disease which have long been forgotten

27. #27

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparently aimless free association is never truly without an end-presentation; when conscious end-presentations are relinquished, unconscious ones take over and determine the train of thought, while the psychic censor—rather than the absence of goals—accounts for the predominance of superficial, displaced associations over deep ones, a principle that forms the twin pillars of psychoanalytic technique.

    I have ascertained that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of the end-presentation, occurs as little in the realm of hysteria and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams.

28. #28

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(B) REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces "regression" as the defining structural feature of dream formation: the dream process runs retrogradely through the psychic apparatus from the motor end back to the perceptual end, reactivating memory traces as hallucinatory images, and this same mechanism underlies hysterical visions and paranoid hallucinations, with infantile reminiscences acting as the attracting force that draws preconscious thoughts back into perceptual representation.

    The hallucinations of hysteria and paranoia, as well as the visions of mentally normal persons, I can explain as actually corresponding to regressions, being in fact thoughts transformed into images

29. #29

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the argument that the dream is the paradigmatic case of unconscious wish-fulfilment, but that hysterical symptoms reveal a more complex double determination—requiring the convergence of an unconscious wish and a preconscious counter-wish (often self-punishment)—thereby positioning the dream as merely the first member of a broader class of abnormal wish-fulfilments that includes all psychoneurotic symptoms.

    the theory of all psychoneurotic symptoms culminates in the proposition that they too must be taken as wish fulfilments of the unconscious... the formation of an hysterical symptom necessitates the combination of both streams of our psychic life.

30. #30

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) WAKING CAUSED BY THE DREAM—THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM—THE ANXIETY DREAM**

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a functional theory of the dream as a psychic compromise-formation: the dream serves as a "safety-valve" that allows unconscious wish-energy to discharge through regression to perception while the preconscious restricts and neutralises that energy at minimal cost, thereby preserving sleep—thus the dream is not merely a distortion but a mechanism that brings the unconscious back under preconscious domination.

    This impression is most strongly gained in the study of the neuroses, especially of hysteria. The unconscious stream of thought which leads to the discharge through an attack becomes passable again as soon as there is an accumulation of a sufficient amount of excitement.

31. #31

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) WAKING CAUSED BY THE DREAM—THE FUNCTION OF THE DREAM—THE ANXIETY DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety dreams do not refute the wish-fulfilment theory but instead demonstrate the conflict between the Unconscious and Preconscious systems: repressed sexual wishes, unable to discharge as pleasure, are converted into anxiety, with the symptom (phobia) serving as a frontier-fortress against that anxiety—a claim illustrated through case analyses of children's anxiety dreams and a critique of somatic-only (cerebral anaemia) explanations.

    It is highly instructive to consider, e.g., the significance of any hysterical phobia or of an agoraphobia.

32. #32

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud synthesizes competing theories of dream formation by subordinating them to his unified framework of wish-fulfilment and dream-work, then advances the argument by distinguishing the preconscious stream of thought from the unconscious wish that energizes it—establishing that the most complex mental operations occur without consciousness, and that regression and the primary process are the hallmarks of the dream-work proper.

    the most complex mental operations are possible without the co-operation of consciousness, which we have already learned independently from every psychoanalysis of persons suffering from hysteria or obsessions.

33. #33

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical foundation of the primary and secondary psychic processes, showing that the dream-work (condensation, displacement, compromise formation, disregard of contradiction) is identical to the mechanism producing hysterical symptoms, and derives both from the transference of an unconscious infantile wish operating under repression—with repression itself modelled on the primary apparatus's deviation from painful memory.

    In hysteria, too, we at once find a series of perfectly correct thoughts equivalent to our conscious thoughts... these normal thoughts have been subjected to abnormal treatment and have been transformed into the symptom by means of condensation and compromise formation

34. #34

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud establishes the structural distinction between primary and secondary psychic processes, arguing that repression arises when infantile wish-feelings undergo an affective transformation (pleasure into pain) that renders them inaccessible to the preconscious, and that the dream—as a compromise formation driven by the primary process—constitutes the royal road to knowledge of the unconscious in normal psychic life.

    the psychic mechanism made use of by the neuroses is not created by a morbid disturbance of the psychic life, but is found ready in the normal structure of the psychic apparatus.

35. #35

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the unconscious is the foundational stratum of all psychic life—larger than and prior to consciousness—and that it operates as two functionally distinct systems (Ucs. and Pcs.), thereby replacing a topographic/spatial model with a dynamic-energetic one while positioning consciousness as merely a sensory organ for psychic qualities rather than the seat of the psychic.

    these phantasies come to expression not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and in other symptoms

36. #36

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud concludes the theoretical chapter of *The Interpretation of Dreams* by articulating how consciousness functions as a qualitative regulator of the mobile psychic economy, how the censor operates at the Prec/Cons boundary as well as the Unc/Prec boundary, and by affirming—through clinical vignettes—the reality of unconscious wishes and repression; the appendix section is editorial apparatus listing translation emendations.

    The manifold problems of consciousness in their entirety can be examined only through an analysis of the hysterical mental process.

37. #37

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a collection of editorial footnotes and translator's notes to Freud's *The Interpretation of Dreams*, providing contextual commentary on terminology, translation choices, and theoretical disputes (e.g., Freud vs. Jung); it is largely non-substantive for Lacanian theory, though footnote 9 explicitly links Freud's attention to word-presentations at the syllable level to Lacan and structuralism.

    Most of what were termed hysterical symptoms were in fact symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.

38. #38

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES** > **<span class="underline">Z</span>**

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial footnotes and marginal annotations from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, presenting supplementary dream interpretations, clinical observations, and bibliographic references—it is primarily apparatus/footnote material with limited stand-alone theoretical development.

    hysterical subjects do the same thing; besides what has actually occurred to them, they unconsciously conceive horrible or extravagant fantastic images, which they construct from the most harmless and commonplace things they have experienced. The symptoms depend solely upon these phantasies, not upon the memory of their real experiences

39. #39

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES** > **<span class="underline">Z</span>**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case of a dental-irritation dream to validate Freud's claim that such dreams encode masturbatory wishes, demonstrating how day-residues, repression's somatic displacement (lower to upper jaw), and infantile autoeroticism converge in dream-work; the dream is argued to be a wish-fulfillment not merely of the sexual motive but also of the desire to confirm the Freudian interpretation itself.

    all kinds of sensations and intentions occurring in hysteria which ought to be enacted in the genitals can be realised upon less objectionable parts of the body

40. #40

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.31

    FINDIN G SATI SFAC TION UN SATI SF YIN G

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's later theory — the compulsion to repeat as itself satisfying — undermines the liberatory political promise of early Freudian Marxism (Adorno et al.), and that capitalism's hold on subjects derives not from imposed dissatisfaction but from the satisfaction subjects already derive from their own repetition of loss and dissatisfaction.

    no one interprets the silence of the hysteric who cannot speak as a public performance of fellatio.

41. #41

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.87

    THE IM AGE OF NEU TR ALIT Y

    Theoretical move: Capitalism sustains itself not by hiding its existence (like the Devil) but by presenting itself as natural and self-grounding, thereby concealing the political decision that constitutes it; Freud's discovery that subjects consistently act against self-interest demolishes capitalism's foundational claim to accord with human nature, revealing capitalism as a political construction rather than a natural order.

    He defines therapeutic success not as allowing the realization of self-interest but as 'transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.'

42. #42

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.260

    IN TRODU C TION: AF TE R IN J USTIC E AND R E PR E SSION

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnote section providing bibliographic citations and brief scholarly asides for the introduction; it contains no sustained theoretical argument of its own.

    Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey

43. #43

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The adversary

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory in "The Freudian Thing" turns on the distinction between ego and subject (with proper subjectivity as unconscious), the insistence that truth/unconscious always returns despite repression or theoretical falsification, and the defense of a symbolically-mediated body against pseudo-Freudian reductivism to pre-Oedipal objects.

    he clearly has in mind not only the conversion symptoms of hysteria, but also Freud's physical parapraxes, the bungled actions of 'the psychopathology of everyday life'

44. #44

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.87

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Neurosis and the imaginary

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) must be understood structurally through the subject's alienation in language and symbolic castration—not through behavioral or biological reductions—and that the neurotic's behavior constitutes a symbolic response to the facticity of the subject's contingent existence within the symbolic order.

    the enigmas of one's sex (as in hysteria) and one's existence (as in obsession).

45. #45

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The imaginary in neurosis and object relations

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic impasses (hysterical and obsessional) are constituted entirely within the imaginary register—between little others and ego-images—and therefore cannot be resolved from within that register; the hysteric perpetuates an alienated desire mediated through the other's image while the obsessive deploys his ego as a puppet to stave off death, both strategies ultimately annulling desire and blocking genuine subjective engagement.

    She can neither satisfy the other's desire nor have her own without endangering her existence.

46. #46

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.178

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > II. After Freud

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

    Lacan argues that uncertainty about one's own sex also comes to the fore in hysteria.

47. #47

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.180

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

    This fundamental question determines the subject... either focuses on gender, which is typical of hysteria

48. #48

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.234

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams through the butcher's wife dream, Lacan argues that desire operates through the linguistic mechanisms of metonymy (desire as sliding lack-of-being) and metaphor (surplus of meaning), and that analytic treatment must preserve the literal, signifier-structured dimension of desire rather than reducing it to ego-psychological normalization.

    the patient's desire alludes to another woman's desire… it is the desire 'to have an unsatisfied desire' that is 'satisfied' in the dream.

49. #49

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.238

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

    It is especially in the 'impasse' of the hysteric having to desire an unsatisfied desire, that she finds the key to her freedom. These dynamics can be considered as central to hysterical identification.

50. #50

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the direction of treatment must preserve a place for desire by refusing to respond at the level of demand; the phallus as signifier of lack structures the subject's desire metonymically, and analysis must lead the subject to confront the lack in the Other rather than offering new identifications that only deepen alienation.

    As the hysteric is precisely someone who responds to the Other's desire via identification, s/he remains captivated at this point.

51. #51

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.285

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    any relation to the phallus, for both hysterics and obsessives, necessarily involves the rock of castration

52. #52

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (F–I) from a scholarly volume on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    hysteria 10, 86–87, 177–178, 180, 284

53. #53

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.63

    I > 1 > Targeted Violence

    Theoretical move: The abandonment of the seduction theory is reframed as Freud's foundational theoretical move toward the death drive: by relocating violence from an external aggressor to the subject's own self-inflicted sacrificial loss, Freud (and Lacan after him) grounds subjectivity in a constitutive self-violence that repetition compels the subject to re-enact — making aggressive violence toward the other a detour, not a solution, and redirecting the ethical question toward assaulting one's own symbolic identity.

    he believed that hysteria had its ultimate cause in a sexual assault — the parent's premature introduction of sexuality to the child.

54. #54

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.140

    I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

    Hélène Cixous celebrates the radicality of hysteria... Freud and Joseph Breuer tell the hysteric, 'You will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.'

55. #55

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.252

    I > 9 > Death in Life

    Theoretical move: Psychoanalysis offers a "third way" beyond the life/death binary by locating the death drive as internal to life: the subject is constituted through an originary loss (correlative to the acquisition of the signifier/name), and enjoyment derives not from life or death but from this death-in-life, which also grounds a political position that transcends the Left/Right opposition.

    Hysterics originally came to Freud and Breuer because of the disjunctive relationship between the body and the world of signification. Part of the hysteric's body refuses to speak, to accept its integration into the symbolic order.

56. #56

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.315

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 3. Class Status and Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: These endnotes develop the theoretical argument that enjoyment, class status, subjectivity, and emancipation are structurally interlinked: the master's power is constituted through the renunciation of jouissance, anarchism fails by positing a subject outside social restriction, and the capitalist infinite of enjoyment corresponds to Hegel's true infinity (circular) rather than the bad infinite (linear).

    in the founding text of psychoanalytic treatment, Studies on Hysteria, Freud notes that the treatment of the lower-class country girl Katharina goes much easier

57. #57

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.324

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

    Frances Restuccia has made one of the most compelling cases for the revolutionary dimension of hysteria... 'Her fantasy persists and can be in a sense forced to materialize'

58. #58

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.348

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 11. The Case of the Missing Signifier

    Theoretical move: This passage's endnotes collectively argue that the missing (binary) signifier is an internal gap within the signifying structure rather than an external absence, and that genuine political transformation requires identification with this internal structural position rather than its replacement—a claim developed through engagements with Hegel, Lacan, Badiou, Derrida, and feminist theory.

    Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine

59. #59

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_194"></span>**Structure**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

    within the clinical structure of neurosis, he distinguishes two kinds of neurosis (obsessional neurosis and hysteria)

60. #60

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_181"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0205"></span>**sexual difference**

    Theoretical move: Sexual difference cannot be grounded in anatomy or biology but is constituted by a fundamental dissymmetry in the signifier: the phallus is the only sexual signifier with no feminine equivalent, so sexual positions (masculine/feminine) are symbolic constructions determined by one's relation to the phallus and formalised through the formulae of sexuation, with the result that no fully 'finished' sexual identity is achievable and the sexual relationship is structurally impossible.

    The question of one's own sex ('Am I a man or a woman?') is the question which defines HYSTERIA.

61. #61

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***H***

    Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

    Lacan comes to define hysteria not as a set of symptoms but as a STRUCTURE... what differentiates hysteria from obsessional neurosis is the nature of this question... hysteria concerns the question of the subject's sexual position.

62. #62

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_137"></span>**obsessional neurosis**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes obsessional neurosis not as a cluster of symptoms but as an underlying clinical structure organized around an existential question about death and being, distinguishing it from hysteria while preserving Freud's diagnostic inheritance.

    like HYSTERIA (of which Freud said it is a 'dialect'), obsessional neurosis is essentially a question which being poses for the subject

63. #63

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_201"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0229"></span>**Symptom**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of the symptom across his work: from a linguistic conception (symptom as signifier, signification, metaphor, message) grounded in the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis, through to a post-1962 shift toward the symptom as pure jouissance culminating in the concept of the sinthome — while consistently distinguishing symptom from clinical structure as the proper focus of psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment.

    the Lacanian analyst can only arrive at a diagnosis of hysteria or obsessional neurosis by identifying the fundamental question that animates the neurotic's speech.

64. #64

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_ncx_214"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part32.xhtml_page_0245"></span>***W***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the concept of "woman" across Freud and Lacan, arguing that Lacan's key move is to displace the question of femininity from a biological or universal essence to a structural position in the symbolic order defined by the logic of the not-all, feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, and woman as symptom of man.

    hysteria is in fact nothing other than the question of femininity itself, the question which may be phrased 'What is a woman?'. This is true for both male and female hysterics

65. #65

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_68"></span>**fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

    Lacan also provides more specific formulas for the fantasy of the hysteric and that of the obsessional neurotic (S8, 295).

66. #66

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_151"></span>**phobia**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

    the two great orders of neurosis, hysteria and obsessionality, and also the junction which it realises with perversion

67. #67

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_ncx_127"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_page_0146"></span>***N***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary provides canonical Lacanian definitions for five interconnected concepts — Name-of-the-Father, narcissism, nature, need, negation, and neurosis — showing how each is structured around the primacy of the symbolic order over biological/imaginary registers, and how Lacan transforms Freudian clinical categories into structural ones.

    The question of the hysteric ('Am I a man or a woman?') relates to one's sex, whereas the question of the obsessional neurotic ('To be or not to be?') relates to the contingency of one's own existence.

68. #68

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_74"></span>**fragmented body**

    Theoretical move: The fragmented body (corps morcelé) is theorised as a constitutive counterpart to the Mirror Stage: the perception of bodily disunity drives identification with the specular image that forms the ego, while the memory of fragmentation continues to threaten that ego's synthetic unity, surfacing in aggressivity, negative transference, and hysterical symptoms governed by an 'imaginary anatomy'.

    the fragmented body is 'revealed at the organic level, in the lines of fragilization that define the anatomy of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria'

69. #69

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_54"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0069"></span>**discourse**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically presents Lacan's theory of the Four Discourses as four possible social bonds founded in language, each defined by rotating four algebraic symbols (S1, S2, $, a) through four structural positions, with the discourse of the master as the generative base from which the others derive—and with the discourse of the analyst positioned as the structural inverse of mastery, making psychoanalysis inherently subversive.

    It is not simply 'that which is uttered by a hysteric', but a certain kind of social bond in which any subject may be inscribed.

70. #70

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_116"></span>**materialism**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's materialism is not a crude reductive or economic determinism but a 'materialism of the signifier,' in which the materiality of language/the signifier (identified with the Letter in its indivisibility) grounds a distinctive Lacanian ontology distinct from both idealism and vulgar materialism.

    he opposed Charcot's attempts to explain all hysterical symptoms by reference to lesions in the brain, distinguished psychical reality from material reality

71. #71

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_49"></span>**desire**

    Theoretical move: This passage establishes Desire as the central concept of Lacanian theory by distinguishing it rigorously from Need and Demand, grounding it in the Hegelian-Kojèvian framework of mutual recognition, and defining it structurally as a relation to Lack caused by Objet petit a rather than a relation to any satisfiable object.

    This universal feature of desire is especially evident in hysteria; the hysteric is one who sustains another person's desire, converts another's desire into her own.

72. #72

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    **XIV**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental aim of psychoanalytic technique is the symbolic recognition of desire—not narcissistic revelation or imaginary ego-remodelling—by demonstrating through the Dora case that Freud's error was intervening at the imaginary level (remoulding the ego toward Herr K.) rather than naming Dora's true desire (Frau K.) and thereby integrating it on the symbolic plane; this critique positions Object Relations analysis (Balint) as a dead-end that mistakes narcissistic mirage for therapeutic outcome.

    Dora is a hysteric. At that point in time, Freud is not sufficiently aware… of what he calls the homosexual component

73. #73

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.49

    **IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Verwerfung (foreclosure) names a primitive nucleus that is more foundational than repression — something excluded from the subject's symbolic history altogether rather than merely repressed — and then uses Freud's dream-theory and the Signorelli example to show that the most theoretically significant residue is precisely what is most absent, forgotten, or hesitant, because desire and its repressed substratum speak through the gaps in discourse.

    To explain how a repression of this or that sort is produced, of an hysterical or obsessional type, there is actually no need to have recourse to an innate predisposition.

74. #74

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **II**

    Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's intermediate technique between hypnosis and dialogue (hand-pressure, the lifting of the barrier), Lacan identifies the embryonic form of the analytic relationship to discourse and resistance, using the Lucy R. and Anna O. cases to contrast elegant, compressed symptom-resolution with the extended labour of working-through.

    This woman had what one could call olfactory hallucinations, hysterical symptoms, and their signification was detected, with locations and dates, in an altogether happy manner.

75. #75

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.190

    **XIV**

    Theoretical move: Lacan maps the first phase of analysis as a movement from ego-unknown (0) to imaginary identification (0'), structuring it as a mirror-stage repetition within the analytic setting, and argues that this narcissistic exaltation must be surpassed through a second phase organised around the Ideal Ego and the analyst's transference function.

    if not the point Dora could have reached. Are we going to leave her there, in this contemplation?

76. #76

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.41

    **m**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that resistance cannot be located simply in the ego or secondary process, but must be understood in relation to the subject's historical discourse — a present synthesis of the past — and that the foundational analytic question is not memory per se but recognition, whose possibility is grounded in the subject's present structuration by socialised time and history.

    the patient, a hysteric, responded with a little hysterical crisis, a replica of the characteristic crisis. She listened and replied, in her own way, which was her symptom.

77. #77

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.14

    **I**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the contemporary confusion in analytic technique stems from a reduction of psychoanalysis to a two-body (intersubjective) psychology, and proposes that the analytic experience must instead be formulated as a three-term relation in which speech is the central organizing element.

    I only have to remind you of the Studien über Hystérie, which is nothing other than one long account of the discovery of the analytic technique.

78. #78

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.27

    **II** > *Idem,*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's analytic experience was uniquely inaugural rather than methodological, and uses this to challenge Ego Psychology's domestication of Freud's later theory of the ego—positioning a return to the truth of the subject (via discourse/resistance/unconscious) against the objectifying tendencies of both standard science and post-Freudian technique.

    D. Anzieu cites a passage from the Studies on Hysteria... Here, what is stratified around the pathogenic nucleus calls to mind a bundle of papers, a score with several registers.

79. #79

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a catalogue of partial objects (objet petit a) as pre-symbolic, non-shareable objects whose entry into the field of exchange signals anxiety, while simultaneously arguing that the partial object's synchronic function in transference has been systematically neglected — a neglect that explains Freud's limit at castration and the post-analytic failures in sexual function. Topological surfaces (cross-cap, Möbius strip) are then deployed to distinguish the specular (imaginary) object from objet petit a.

    the third type designated by Freud in his article on identification, the one which finds its major example in hysteria.

80. #80

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.228

    **x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan regrounds the philosophical function of "cause" — irreducible to critique across all of Western philosophy — in the structural "syncope" of the objet petit a within the fantasy: cause is not a rational category but the shadow of anxiety's certainty, which is the only non-deceptive certainty, and this move radically challenges any cognizance that attempts to domesticate desire into objectivity.

    The experience of the hysteric is significant enough to know that this comparison, which affords a glimpse of the fact that an arm can be forgotten, neither more nor less than a mechanical arm, is no forced metaphor.

81. #81

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.80

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety has a determinate structure — it is always *framed* — and uses this structural claim to reposition both the Unheimliche and the fantasy (via the Wolf Man's dream as window-framed scene) as instances of that framing, while also deploying Ferenczi's notion of the "unmediated interruption" of female genitality to argue that the structural empty place (locus of jouissance) is constitutive of desire prior to any diachronic myth of maturation.

    the vagina comes to function in the genital relation through a mechanism that is strictly equivalent to all the other hysterical mechanisms

82. #82

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    BookX Anxiety > **BEYOND CASTRATION ANXIETY**

    Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the classical Freudian account of castration anxiety from anxiety-as-signal-of-lack to anxiety-as-presence-of-the-object, demonstrating through the neurotic/pervert contrast and the exhaustion of demand that it is not the absence but the imminence of the object that generates anxiety, and that castration only appears at the far limit of demand's regressive cycle.

    There was a certain Anna O. who knew a thing or two about the manoeuvre of the hysteric's game. She presented all of her little story, all her fantasies, to Herren Breuer and Freud, who leapt on them like little fish into water.

83. #83

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.277

    **x** > **THE EVANESCENT PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus's evanescence—its structural failure to conjoin man's and woman's jouissance—is the very mechanism through which castration anxiety is constituted, and that this failure, rather than any ideal of genital fulfilment, is what organizes the subject's relation to the Other, desire, and the death drive.

    That desire, which is not jouissance, should in woman be naturally right where it ought to be according to nature, that is, tubal, is perfectly designated by those women known as hysterics.

84. #84

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety is constituted by the emergence of lack under the pressure of a question (from the Other), and traces the origin of the signifier itself to a primordial act of deception — laying a falsely false trace — which simultaneously constitutes the subject, the Other, and the structure of cause, showing that the signifier reveals the subject only by effacing his trace.

    Anxiety doesn't appear in hysteria to the exact extent that these lacks are misrecognized.

85. #85

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.335

    **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

    This example is sufficiently demonstrative to be elaborated as such and it can be transposed into other structures, notably the hysteric.

86. #86

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XI by positioning psychoanalysis as a *praxis* — a concerted human action that treats the real by means of the symbolic — and uses his own institutional excommunication as an object-lesson that simultaneously illustrates the comic structure of subjectivity (truth of the subject residing not in himself but in a concealed object) and poses the foundational question of what grounds psychoanalysis between science and religion.

    Am I The essence of comedy. What is a praxis?. Between science and religion. The hysteric and Freud's own desire

87. #87

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's clinical failures with Dora and the female homosexual stemmed from his inability to identify the structural logic of hysterical desire—namely, that the hysteric's desire is to sustain the desire of the father, and that desire is fundamentally the desire of the Other—a formulation Lacan uses to retroactively correct and extend Freud's case-readings.

    the hysteric's desire which is legible in the most obvious way in the case—is to sustain the desire of the father

88. #88

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition) from Reproduzieren (reproduction), arguing that true repetition is not a making-present of the past but an act structured in relation to a real that exceeds symbolic capture — thereby linking repetition to the enigmatic bipartition of pleasure and reality principles.

    the desire of the hysteric was the desire of the father, to be sustained in his status. It was hardly surprising that, for the benefit of him who takes the place of the father, one remembered things right down to the dregs.

89. #89

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.85

    THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primal scene is constitutively traumatic—not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation but in a 'factitious fact' structured by the tuche (the encounter with the Real)—and that the split in the subject persists as the deeper division between the dream-image and the invocatory/scopic solicitation of the gaze and voice.

    or too little, as in the case of the hysteric?

90. #90

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

    PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), articulates the lying structure of truth, anchors the analyst's position in the hystorization of desire rather than institutional validation, and grounds the pass-procedure in the object as cause of desire and the real as the 'lack of lack.'

    a fact of hystory, or hysteria: that of my colleagues

91. #91

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of the unconscious as "pre-ontological" — it precedes and resists ontological categorization — thereby linking the structural gap of the unconscious to a 'want-to-be' (manque-à-être) that is irreducible to either being or non-being, and reframing the question of ontology as an ethical rather than metaphysical one.

    The desire of the hysteric

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the female homosexual's deceptive dream to distinguish the Freudian subject of certainty from the search for truth, and announces that repetition—as repetition of deception—is the mechanism by which Freud coordinates experience with the Real, which is constitutively missed by the subject.

    What the female homosexual does in her dream, in deceiving Freud, is still an act of defiance in relation to the father's... It is defiance in the form of derision.

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends the reference to Freud's desire and the hysteric's desire as structural rather than psychological, arguing that desire must be positioned as an object rather than as a ground of original subjectivity — a move shared by both Socrates and Freud that defines the properly Freudian unconscious.

    It was through the hysterics that Freud learnt the way of the strictly Freudian unconscious.

94. #94

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.172

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the cross-cap to redefine desire not as the overlap between the field of demand/unconscious and sexual reality, but as the void at their junction — a "line of desire" — and then pivots to argue that the operative desire in transference is ultimately the analyst's desire, grounding this through a re-reading of the Anna O. case that distinguishes the sign (symptom, something for someone) from the signifier (representing a subject for another signifier).

    she blew up with what is called a nervous pregnancy... the domain of sexuality shows a natural functioning of signs.

95. #95

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.187

    THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function specifically as rims by virtue of the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that when other bodily zones enter the economy of desire they do so through desexualization—most paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—thereby distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the broader field of desire.

    It is in the function in which the sexual object moves towards the side of reality and presents itself as a parcel of meat that there emerges that form of desexualization that is so obvious that it is called in the case of the hysteric a reaction of disgust.

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.48

    OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference and repetition must be kept conceptually distinct despite their historical entanglement in Freud's discovery, and that the ontological status of the unconscious is fragile yet grounded in Freud's encounter with hysterical deception—a foundational encounter that required retroactive theoretical revision as the field developed.

    the most rejected, the most concealed, the most contained, reality, that of the hysteric, in so far as it is —in a sense, from its origin—marked by the sign of deception.

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition as function) from mere Wiederkehr (return of circuits), locating the real as that which always returns to the same place precisely where the thinking subject fails to encounter it — thereby grounding Freudian repetition in a structural gap between thought and the real rather than in memory or biography.

    This was fine at the beginning, because one was dealing with hysterics.

98. #98

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43

    THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The unconscious is theorized as the locus of a splitting in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, while Freud's own unresolved relation to feminine desire (hysteria) is used to illustrate the structural limits of the speaking subject's self-knowledge.

    Freud would certainly have made a perfect impassioned idealist had he not devoted himself to the other, in the form of the hysteric

99. #99

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26

    The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis cannot be defined as a science through hermeneutics, praxis-field, or formula-making alone; instead, its scientific status depends on clarifying the status of its four fundamental Freudian concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive) and, crucially, on interrogating the analyst's desire as constitutive of the analytic field itself.

    the differential feature of the hysteric is precisely this—it is in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire

100. #100

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets the Breuer/Anna O. episode to demonstrate that "man's desire is the desire of the Other," arguing that Freud treated Breuer as a hysteric by locating Bertha's transference in the unconscious of the Other rather than Breuer's own desire—and then pivots this to claim that what truly determines the direction of psychoanalytic theory of transference is the desire of the analyst.

     I think Freud treats Breuer as a hysteric here, since he says to him: your desire is the desire of the Other.

101. #101

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the concept of the unconscious as repression to a structural definition: the unconscious is constituted by the cut (Unbegriff/Un-Begriff), linking the pulsative, disappearing nature of the unconscious to the subject's constituent relation to the signifier, and situating psychoanalysis as a 'conjectural science of the subject' analogous to, but distinct from, the physical sciences.

     When Freud realized that it was in the field of the dream that he had to find confirmation of what he had learnt from his experience of the hysteric

102. #102

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.8

     PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan's preface performs a series of theoretical pivots: it redefines the unconscious as real (not imaginary), repositions the analyst as one who 'hystorizes only from himself', introduces the 'pass' as a test of analytic truth, and locates the object as cause of desire as the only conceivable idea of the object—with the lack of the lack constituting the Real.

     a fact of hystory, or hysteria: that of my colleagues

103. #103

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.15

     The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XI by using his institutional excommunication as a theoretical object — illustrating that the truth of the subject (even the master) is concealed in an external object, and that exposing this structure is the essence of comedy — before defining psychoanalytic praxis as the treatment of the real by the symbolic, and posing the founding question of whether psychoanalysis belongs to science or religion.

     Am I The essence of comedy. What is a praxis?. Between science and religion. The hysteric and Freud's own desire

104. #104

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26

     The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalysis from both hermeneutics and alchemy by arguing that its scientific status hinges on the structural role of the analyst's desire and on the foundational conceptual status of Freud's four fundamental concepts (unconscious, repetition, transference, drive), which have been systematically distorted in the analytic literature; the passage thereby frames the central theoretical question of Seminar XI.

     the differential feature of the hysteric is precisely this—it is in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire

105. #105

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28

     The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both Freud's desire and the hysteric's desire are structural rather than psychological references: Freud's desire is an "original desire" that governs the transmission of psychoanalysis, and like Socrates' desire, it situates desire not as a property of a founding subjectivity but in the position of an object — thereby distinguishing the strictly Freudian unconscious from structuralist accounts (Lévi-Strauss's 'Primitive Thinking').

     It was through the hysterics that Freud learnt the way of the strictly Freudian unconscious.

106. #106

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: The passage situates the unconscious as the site of a split in the subject from which desire emerges via metonymy, and uses Freud's unresolved question about feminine desire ('What does a woman want?') as an illustration of how the encounter with the hysteric oriented Freud's theoretical trajectory despite his personal idealism.

     Freud would certainly have made a perfect impassioned idealist had he not devoted himself to the other, in the form of the hysteric

107. #107

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is "pre-ontological" — it resists ontological capture — and links this to the structuring function of lack (manque-à-être / want-to-be), making an ethical rather than ontological status the proper frame for the unconscious as gap.

     The desire of the hysteric

108. #108

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the concepts of repetition and transference must be analytically separated rather than collapsed, and that the ontological status of the unconscious—fragile and elusive—was forged through Freud's encounter with hysteria, which means the entire theoretical edifice requires retroactive revision as the discovery proceeded beyond its origins.

     the most rejected, the most concealed, the most contained, reality, that of the hysteric, in so far as it is —in a sense, from its origin—marked by the sign of deception

109. #109

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     OF THE SUBJECT OF CERTAINTY > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's clinical failures with Dora and the female homosexual stem from his lack of structural reference-points to identify the hysteric's desire as sustaining the desire of the father — illustrating the formula that "man's desire is the desire of the Other" through close re-reading of both cases.

     the hysteric's desire which is legible in the most obvious way in the case—is to sustain the desire of the father

110. #110

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is defined not by what consciousness can evoke from the subliminal but by a constitutive relation to the cut—the Unbegriff—and that this ties the subject, the signifier, and the unconscious together in a single structural site, positioning psychoanalysis as a "conjectural science of the subject."

     When Freud realized that it was in the field of the dream that he had to find confirmation of what he had learnt from his experience of the hysteric

111. #111

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines repetition (Wiederholen) not as a closed circuit of memory but as the subject's structural encounter with the Real — that which always returns to the same place precisely where thought (res cogitans) fails to meet it — thereby distinguishing the drive (Trieb) from instinct and grounding Freud's discovery of repetition in the relation between thought and the Real.

     This was fine at the beginning, because one was dealing with hysterics.

112. #112

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Wiederholen (repetition) from Reproduzieren (reproduction), arguing that true repetition is not a making-present of the past but an act with structural relation to a real that exceeds symbolic capture — thereby situating The Act as the horizon-concept linking repetition and the real.

     the desire of the hysteric was the desire of the father, to be sustained in his status. It was hardly surprising that, for the benefit of him who takes the place of the father, one remembered things right down to the dregs.

113. #113

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental relation to sexuality in analytic experience is not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation, but in a traumatic, factitious fact (the primal scene), and that the subject's split—exemplified by the dream-awakening structure—points toward a more profound split between the representative image and the invocatory/scopic causality (voice and gaze) that underlies it.

     or too little, as in the case of the hysteric?

114. #114

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots the standard account of transference away from the analysand's unconscious spontaneity and toward the desire of the analyst, arguing that every analyst's theory of transference is itself a readable symptom of the analyst's own desire — a move that simultaneously re-reads the Breuer/Anna O. episode through the formula "man's desire is the desire of the Other."

     I think Freud treats Breuer as a hysteric here, since he says to him: your desire is the desire of the Other.

115. #115

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     THE DECONSTRUCTION OF THE DRIVE > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that erogenous zones function as rims precisely through the exclusion of adjacent zones, and that whenever non-erogenous zones enter the economy of desire they do so under the sign of desexualization—manifested paradigmatically as disgust in hysteria—distinguishing the satisfaction proper to the drive from the wider circulation of desire.

     that form of desexualization that is so obvious that it is called in the case of the hysteric a reaction of disgust

116. #116

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

     Without, Vermögen, this is what is most purely signifying … what Freud articulates … as an oralgenital relationship.

117. #117

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     the hysteric charges a third person to respond to the demand of the Other. For her part, she sustains herself in her desire as unsatisfied

118. #118

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.

     it is the hysteric who gives us the model of it; for him or for her… a certain type of desire. The desire of the hysteric grounds all desire as hysterical desire

119. #119

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium—specifically Alcibiades's pursuit of the hidden agalma in Socrates—Lacan establishes the dialectical structure of transference as desire for a concealed object that the Other does not possess, and concludes that the analyst's own identificatory position must be suspended within transference, collapsing the distinction between transference and counter-transference.

     What Alcibiades simulates is what had been previously defined in the Symposium as the highest merit of love... what is defined in Freud as hysterical desire.

120. #120

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Mannoni's extended anecdote about the proper name argues that the signifier's attachment to the signified is irreducible and escapes the subject's mastery of nomination — the proper name, constructed from pure phonemic sequence, acquires a quasi-autonomous identity that resists substitution, illuminating Leclaire's earlier claim about the irreducibility of the proper name in the fundamental phantasy.

     Outside any institution hysterics sometimes give themselves first names which do not belong to them. ............... the spelling of the one they have.

121. #121

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.162

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

     desire, if it can detach itself, arise, appear as absolute condition... makes it simply subsist by sustaining it as unsatisfied - a hysterical mechanism whose essential value I have marked

122. #122

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     the hysteric charges a third person to respond to the demand of the Other. For her part, she sustains herself in her desire as unsatisfied.

123. #123

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

     Without, Vermögen, this is what is most purely signifying, this homonymic play on words... without which nothing in Dora's cough would have this sense that Freud gives it

124. #124

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Mannoni's contribution to the seminar advances the argument that the proper name is irreducible—neither fully assignable by a naming subject nor exchangeable—because it enacts a foundational adhesion between signifier and signified that resists the subject's mastery, illuminating the structural problem Leclaire raised about the fundamental phantasy's non-sense and the limits of secondary-process translation of primary-process material.

     Outside any institution hysterics sometimes give themselves first names which do not belong to them

125. #125

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.166

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Alcibiades's encounter with Socrates in Plato's *Symposium* as the structural prototype of analytic transference, Lacan argues that the *agalma* (hidden treasure) organises desire-as-lack and that what analysts call 'counter-transference' is properly a moment of unwarranted identification internal to transference itself, thereby collapsing the counter-transference/transference distinction into a single analytic field.

     What does he try to get from Agathon, if not, properly speaking, what is defined in Freud as hysterical desire.

126. #126

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.134

     **Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.

     it is the hysteric who gives us the model of it; for him or for her, for this kind of patient not much is needed to locate in some sign, wherever it may be produced, a certain type of desire

127. #127

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

     Hysteria happens in the parlour, the parlour of nun's convents, of course.

128. #128

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire structurally emerges from the gap between demand and need within language, that unconscious desire is constituted as "desire-not" (désirpas) through a broken link in the discourse of the Other, and that fantasy functions not as content within the unconscious discourse but as an axiom — a "truth-meaning" — that anchors the transformation-rules of neurotic desire.

     for hysteria, unsatisfied desire

129. #129

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.214

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act constitutes the founding impossibility (the "holed One") from which all truth, symptom, and signification emerge, while identifying the big Other not with spirit but with the body as the primary site of inscription — thereby grounding the Symbolic in a Real that cannot be formally proved.

     the hysterical symptom, under its simplest form, that of a '*ragade*' does not have to be considered as a mystery, but as the very principle of any signifying possibility

130. #130

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

     I energetically protest against the use of terms like these, for example: 'hystero (hyphen) phobic structure'. Why that? A hysterical structure is not the same as a phobic structure!

131. #131

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     Hysteria happens in the parlour, the parlour of nun's convents, of course.

132. #132

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.

     for hysteria, unsatisfied desire

133. #133

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.213

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 19: Wednesday 10 May 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act is constitutively impossible (there is no sexual act), yet it remains the sole ground of truth; the symptom is the knot at the hole of the 'One', the Other is identified with the body as the primordial locus of inscription, and all truth—including ideology and perception—is structured by this foundational gap.

     the fact that the body is made to inscribe something that is called the mark would avoid a lot of worries for everyone… The hysterical symptom, under its simplest form, that of a '*ragade*' does not have to be considered as a mystery, but as the very principle of any signifying possibility.

134. #134

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.117

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: By re-reading the founding scene of transference (the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis), Lacan argues that the subject supposed to know is the indispensable structural hinge of transference, and that the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question — thereby distinguishing transference from mere love and revealing the objet petit a as the object at the heart of love's apparatus.

     One understands why, in psychoanalysis, the hysteric is cured of everything except her hysteria.

135. #135

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

     the hysteric, in her final articulation, in her essential nature, quite authentically... is sustained in a signifying affirmation which, for us, looks like theatre, looks like comedy... the most firm and most autonomous status of the subject

136. #136

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper concept of transference is only fully illuminated once the 'subject supposed to know' is introduced and its fracture in the analytic act is understood; the originary scene of Freud's patient embracing him out of hypnosis reveals that what the hysteric seizes is the objet petit a—not love as sentiment—thereby grounding the entire structure of the analytic operation in the subject's relation to this object rather than in narcissistic identification.

     One understands why, in psychoanalysis, the hysteric is cured of everything except her hysteria.

137. #137

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

     the hysteric, in her final articulation, in her essential nature, quite authentically... is sustained in a signifying affirmation which, for us, looks like theatre, looks like comedy.

138. #138

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.382

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.

     the hysteric is not unaware of anything about it and that is why she questions herself beyond what I already articulated about Dora

139. #139

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.344

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

     the hysteric is characterised by not taking herself for the woman... She promotes castration at the level of this name of the symbolic father in the place of whom she posits herself

140. #140

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions phobia not as a discrete clinical entity but as a structural "turntable" that illuminates the relations between hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion, and from which the disjunction between knowledge and power can be re-examined.

     its relationships with what it most commonly veers towards, namely, the two great orders of neurosis, hysteria and obsessional neurosis

141. #141

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that jouissance functions as an absolute Real, and that it is hysteria—not androcentric theory—that logically unveils the structure of desire as lack-of-the-One; the drive already implies knowledge, but this knowledge is marked by a constitutive lie (proton pseudos), forcing the displacement from sign to signifier as the properly psychoanalytic move beyond metaphysics.

     it is she in effect who posits it as an absolute, that is why she unveils the logical structure of the function of enjoyment.

142. #142

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.366

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

     promising you for the next time to enter into the detail of what is at stake concerning the respective positions of the hysteric and the obsessional with regard to the big Other.

143. #143

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.374

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

     Let us spell out the texts, taking the first case to be presented under the figure of the hysteric, to Freud... Something at the level of the body that is emptied out, a field where sensitivity disappears.

144. #144

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.386

     Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the subject's constitution through the fantasy ($◇a) and the Four Discourses schema, arguing that knowledge born from the slave serves the master, that the objet petit a as surplus-jouissance is the structural stake in the Master/Slave dialectic, and that the Discourse of the University is the hommelle (alma mater) whose subjection effects on students mirror the hysteric's truth-telling function—making the political question of revolution inseparable from the psychoanalytic question of knowledge and the subject.

     In this Oedipus, the hysteric who has answered, answered in so far as the truth about the woman must indeed have been said for the Sphinx to have disappeared because of it.

145. #145

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalytic discourse from philosophical discourse by insisting that the subject is primordially constituted as an effect of language (as 'o', the bet/zero), and uses a critical reading of Bergler's account of the superego to argue that Durcharbeitung (working-through) and the superego must be rethought together—not as a theatrical agency hitting the ego but as structurally related to identification, the ego ideal, and the limit-encounter in treatment.

     If the hysterics had not already opened up the question, there is no chance that even the truth would have shown the tip of its ear!

146. #146

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969** > Seminar **9:** Wednesday **29** January **1969**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio (φ/o) to demonstrate that the subject's division is irremediable: the relation between the subject of enjoyment and the subject constituted by the unary trait (1) can never collapse into self-identity (Hegelian Selbstbewusstsein), because the o (objet petit a as surplus-jouissance) is always already an effect of the inaugural mark and persists as an irreducible remainder across infinite repetition.

     Why not the hysteric, because let us not forget that it is at the level of neurotic identification… that there appears, that there arises the question of the einziger Zug, this unary trait that I extracted from it.

147. #147

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.47

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Discourse of the Hysteric underlies both philosophical discourse (Hegel as "the most sublime of hysterics") and analytic experience, and that the structure of psychoanalytic interpretation operates through a logic of the "half-said" — figured as either a riddle (stating without statement) or a quotation (statement invoking authorial authority) — with the analyst functioning as Objet petit a and cause of desire rather than Subject Supposed to Know.

     Hegel, the most sublime of hysterics... the hysteria of this discourse stems precisely from the fact that it avoids the minimal distinction that would allow it to be seen that... absolute knowledge would be purely and simply the abolition

148. #148

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.45

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transition from the ancient Master's discourse to modern capitalism/bureaucracy involves a displacement of knowledge (S2) into the dominant position, producing a new tyranny that occludes truth; and that psychoanalytic experience operates by introducing the Hysteric's discourse as a structural condition ("hystericisation") that exposes the non-self-knowing character of unconscious knowledge and the impossibility of sexual rapport.

     we see the hysteric fabricating a man as best she can, a man animated by the desire to know.

149. #149

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.91

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that phallic enjoyment is structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy, and that this exclusion—not biological sexuality—is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about; the repetition compulsion discovered in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* is reread as the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance, while surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system that operates in place of prohibited phallic enjoyment.

     what Freud was able to extract from the discourse of the Hysteric. It is starting from there that it can be conceived that the hysteric symbolises this primary dissatisfaction.

150. #150

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to argue that Freud's substitution of the Oedipus complex for the truths offered by hysterical experience was a defensive idealization that masked the fundamental truth — audible in the hysteric's discourse — that the father/master is castrated from the start; this leads to a critique of the Oedipus myth as an unworkable, quasi-religious fiction that displaces the proper analytic relation between knowledge and truth.

     anything he was able to do for hysterics ended up in nothing other than what he pinpointed as Penisneid

151. #151

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

     *[A porter appears]*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is constitutively grounded in loss/entropy, and that this structural gap—formalized as surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust)—is what drives knowledge as a means of enjoyment, necessitating the Four Discourses as its articulation; simultaneously, truth is identified not with full-saying but with half-saying, its essence being the concealed fact of castration/impotence, which redefines the analyst's position and the analytic act.

     This is what defines the Hysteric, and that is why on the board... I placed her in the centre. It is nevertheless clear that it is not by chance that the word truth provokes this particular tremor in her.

152. #152

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     *[A porter appears]* > Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Dora case to demonstrate the structural logic of the Discourse of the Hysteric: the hysteric maintains an alienated relation to the master-signifier (the idealised father) precisely by refusing to surrender knowledge and by orienting desire around the Other's enjoyment rather than her own, thereby unmasking the master's function while remaining in solidarity with it.

     People talk about somatic compliance in hysterics. Even though the term is Freudian can we not see that it is very strange, and that what is at stake is rather a refusal of the body.

153. #153

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     **ANALYTICON** > Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic as a foil to show that the Master Signifier is constitutively tied to the impossibility of mastery, and that the Real—defined as the impossible—cannot be reached through truth alone; this structural impossibility is what the discourse of the master conceals and what analytic discourse uniquely allows us to articulate.

     governing, educating, analysing also, and why not 'making desire', to complete by a definition what is involved in the hysterical discourse, are operations that are properly speaking impossible.

154. #154

     Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970

     Theoretical move: Castration is redefined as the real operation produced by the impact of the signifier on the sexual relationship — not a fantasy — and this reframing allows Lacan to articulate how jouissance separates the master-signifier from knowledge-as-truth, completing the structural account of the Discourse of the Analyst and grounding the hysteric's desire as the historical source of Freud's master-signifiers.

     What the hysteric wants - I say this for those who do not have this vocation, there must be many - is a master... She wants a master over whom she reigns. She reigns, and he does not govern.

155. #155

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: Lacan drives a wedge between the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) and *Totem and Taboo* (an obsessional-neurotic construction that places enjoyment at the origin, then law), arguing that the psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation.

     The psychoanalytic discourse is established by this restoration of her truth to the hysteric. It was enough to dissipate the theatre in hysteria.

156. #156

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that all language functions through metaphor and metonymy with the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches, and uses Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction to reframe the paternal metaphor: the Name of the Father is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone, but as a name that summons someone to speak — revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.

     Let us come now to the hysteric because I like to start from the hysteric, to see where the thread leads us.

157. #157

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the hysteric's desire—structurally unsatisfied because it emphasises the invariance of the unknown—functions as a formal schema for the logic of the Not-all (pas-toute), such that 'a woman' can only emerge by sliding beyond the hysteric's phallic semblance; simultaneously, Lacan grounds the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis in the irreducible division between jouissance and semblance, and links truth to half-saying rather than full articulation.

     it is not where people think it is, but in its structure as subject that the hysteric - conjugates the truth of her enjoyment with the implacable knowledge that she has that the Other proper to cause it, is the phallus, in other words a semblance.

158. #158

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.190

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father function as logical zero-points (analogous to Peano's axiom of zero) that ground the series of natural numbers, and that the "murder of the Father" is the hysterical substitute for rejected castration; he then pivots to show that the superego — originating from the mythical primordial father of *Totem and Taboo* — issues the paradoxical impossible command "Enjoy!", which is the hidden motor of moral conscience.

     the hysteric has this simple procedure, the fact is that she unilateralises it on the other side, the side of the partner. Let us say that for the hysteric, a castrated partner is necessary.

159. #159

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the logic of quantification (universal/particular, affirmative/negative) is not merely a formal apparatus but carries the mark of the sexual impasse: the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship without a third term (the phallus), and the asymmetry between the masculine "all" (grounded in a mythical exception) and the feminine "not-all" (sustained only as a discordant statement, as 'a-woman' rather than 'every woman'), with Hysteria named as the neurosis that articulates this truth of failure.

     The hysterics are the ones who, as regards what is involved in the sexual relationship, tell the truth. It is difficult to see how this path of psychoanalysis could have opened up if we had not had them.

160. #160

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.173

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.

     The One makes Being as the hysteric makes the man.

161. #161

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.89

     Seminar **6:** Wednesday **8** March 1972

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops the formulas of sexuation—specifically the not-all (pas toute) and the logic of the at-least-one exception—to articulate woman's mode of presence as "between centre and absence," a jouissance that exceeds the phallic function without negating it, while diagnosing Hegelian dialectics and Marxist discourse as structurally blind to the surplus-jouissance drawn from the real of the Master's discourse.

     the man's failure to recognise is required by it. Which is the definition of the hysteric.

162. #162

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.9

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the title "...Ou pire" as a vehicle for the claim that "there is no sexual relationship" — a truth that can only be half-said, such that any attempt to escape it produces something worse — and grounds this in a logical analysis of the empty place in language, the impossibility of metalanguage, and the introduction of the "not-all" as what exceeds Aristotelian quantification, thereby linking the structure of language to castration and sexuation.

     very precisely in connection with the hysteric and the hommoiraun that she requires.

163. #163

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.80

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > I ASK YOU TO REFUSE WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formulas of sexuation cannot be read through standard propositional logic (negation, conjunction, disjunction) because the phallic function governs both sexes asymmetrically: the masculine side is structured by a universal ('All x') grounded in an exception ('there exists an x that negates φx'), while the feminine side is 'not-all' within the phallic function, which opens onto a dual, properly feminine jouissance irreducible to phallic jouissance—and it is precisely this asymmetry that marks the non-existence of the sexual relationship.

     all the philosophical lucubrations we have did not emerge by chance from someone called Socrates who was manifestly hysterical, I mean clinically.

164. #164

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.234

     XVIII

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the Freudian concept of libido away from its quantitative-theoretical usage, arguing instead that desire is a relation of being to lack—irreducible to objectification, prior to consciousness, and constitutive of the human world—thus establishing desire as the foundational category of psychoanalytic experience over and against classical epistemology's subject-object adequation.

     Aristotle was already offering a theory of hysteria based on the fact that the uterus is a small animal which lives inside the woman's body

165. #165

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **VII** > 92 Complement

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the distinction between the infinite and the finite to recast the logic of the not-all (pas-toute): in the finite, not-all implies a particular exception, but in the infinite the not-all produces only an indeterminate existence that cannot be constructed—grounding his claim that Woman cannot be written (barred) and that feminine jouissance exceeds the phallic function.

     To be hysterical or not - that is truly the question. Is there One or not?

166. #166

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)*

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

     lead them to this final term - and it is not for nothing that I call it as I do - wrepia, as it is said in Greek, hysteria, namely, to play the part of the man (faire l'homme)

167. #167

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.218

     J.Lacan-... of this?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the 'not-all' logic governing Woman cannot be read through finite Aristotelian particularity (which would imply an exceptional existence), but only through the infinite—where no determinate exception can be constructed—grounding Lacan's claim that Woman is properly half-said, and that her enjoyment is of the order of the infinite rather than the phallic universal.

     This truly is the question. To be hysterical or not? Is there a One or not?

168. #168

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

     ysteron, as it is put in Greek, of hysteria, in other words to play the man, as I have said.

169. #169

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes ek-sistence as the Real dimension of the Borromean Knot, uses this to articulate the triadic RSI structure as an "infernal trinity," and pivots to redefine the symptom—against both Hegelian repetition (via Kierkegaard) and Marxian social analysis—as the particular way each speaking being (parlêtre) enjoys their unconscious.

     the symptom of the obsessional is not the symptom of the hysteric

170. #170

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 15 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads Freud's three identifications through the topology of the Borromean knot, arguing that the cartel's structure (three plus-one) is grounded in the Name-of-the-Father as the fourth term that knots the triskel of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real into a genuine Borromean bond, thereby locating identification, love, and desire at the topological heart of the social knot.

     the place of the o object as being the one that dominates what Freud makes the third possibility of identification, the desire of the hysteric.

171. #171

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 8: Tuesday 18 March 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot—understood through the topology of the torus—displaces the insoluble question of objectivity and grounds the three consistencies (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as irreducible, such that their triple points generate meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Name-of-the-Father respectively; identification is then reformulated as three distinct operations corresponding to the three registers of the knot's real Other.

     Identify yourselves to its Imaginary, you have then the identification of the hysteric to the desire of the Other

172. #172

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.130

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean chain's topological manipulability (turning inside-out, colouring, orientation) to argue that the Real is not a single ring but is constituted by the knot-relation itself, and that the circle's hole—not its closure—is what founds both set theory's not-all and the chain's supple geometry as opposed to rigid, formal demonstration.

     hysteria, has always been, anyway since Freud, has always been two. And there, one sees this hysteria being in a way reduced to a state that I would call... in a way to its material state.

173. #173

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.59

     **Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is the proper topological support for "first truths" about the Real, which is founded precisely by excluding meaning; and that the speaking being's (parlêtre's) only consistency is bodily/imaginary, while the knot — not the cord — is what properly ex-sists, grounding both truth and the analyst's responsibility in know-how (savoir-faire) rather than in any Other of the Other.

     I was led to it by the sexual relationship. Namely, by hysteria, in so far as it is the final perceptible reality, as Freud saw very well, the final usteron, the reality about what is involved in the sexual relationship precisely.

174. #174

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.92

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure, and that the torus — not the simple ring — is the proper topological unit for this knotting; he further exploits the distinction between metaphor and structure to insist that topology here is structural (not merely analogical), while his anecdote about his grandson reframes the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand — language as parasitic.

     to which I was pushed, not by just anyone, by the hysterics, so that I started from the same material as Freud

175. #175

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the structure of man (and the living body) is toric rather than spheroidal, and uses this topology to reframe the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as a double Möbius strip cut from a torus — displacing any notion of psychic "progress" and redefining the une-bévue (mis-hearing/blunder) as the structural condition of the signifier's exchange value.

     the *hystorique* in short has only an unconscious to make her consist...the difference is this...a hysteric is sustained in her form as rod, is sustained by a framework...This framework is her love for her father.

176. #176

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976**

     Theoretical move: Lacan proposes that the three classical Freudian modes of identification (paternal, hysterical, and identification to a single/any trait) can be mapped topologically onto three distinct operations of turning the torus inside out, using cuts on the toric surface to produce what he calls the "torus-rod" — thereby grounding a typology of identification in topology rather than clinical description alone.

     how identify hysterical identification, the so-called loving identification to the father and the identification that I would call neutral

177. #177

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.127

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

     Aristotle imputes, we do not know why, being hysterical to the woman; it is a play on the word hysteron.

178. #178

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lalangue—the mother tongue as obscene, pre-structural substrate—is what the analytic session truly circulates around (via the analysand's kinship discourse), and that the symptom (sinthome), not truth, is what the analyst actually reads; "varité" (a portmanteau of truth and variety) names the only accessible approximation of truth, rendering psychoanalysis structurally an "autism à deux" redeemed only by lalangue's communal character.

     neurosis was not structurally obsessional, that it was fundamentally hysterical, namely, linked to the fact that there was no sexual relationship

179. #179

     Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

     history – as I sometimes say – history is hysteria. Freud, if he sensed clearly what is involved in the hysteric, if he fabulated around the hysteric, this is obviously only a fact of history.

180. #180

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is fundamentally structured by the subject's exteriority to the signifier — where the neurotic 'inhabits language,' the psychotic is 'inhabited by language' — and that the onset of psychosis is triggered at the moment of being called upon to 'speak out' one's own speech, a failing rooted in the prior foreclosure of the primordial signifier (Verwerfung).

     what characterizes the hysterical position is a question that refers precisely to the two signifying poles of male and female... how can one be either male or female?

181. #181

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinctiveness of the signifier — that it signifies nothing in itself — is the key to understanding both the structure of human subjectivity and the differential mechanism of neurosis versus psychosis: in neurosis the signifier remains enigmatic but operative, while in psychosis what has been foreclosed from the symbolic (Verwerfung) reappears in the real, with delusion marking the moment the initiative is attributed to the big Other as such.

     Hysteria is a question centered on a signifier that remains enigmatic as to its meaning. The question of death and the question of birth are as it happens the two ultimate questions that have precisely no solution in the signifier.

182. #182

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.187

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dissymmetry of the Oedipus complex between the sexes is not anatomical but fundamentally symbolic: the absence of a signifier for the female sex forces the girl to take a detour through identification with the male (phallic) image, making the phallus as signifier — not as organ — the pivot of sexuation for both sexes; this symbolic lack is what structures neurosis and, specifically, the hysteric's question "What is a woman?"

     What is Dora saying through her neurosis? What is the woman-hysteric saying? Her question is this - What is it to be a woman?

183. #183

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.191

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hysteria (in both men and women) revolves around the question of procreation—a question generated by the fact that the Symbolic cannot account for individual existence, birth, or death—and grounds this in a reading of Freud's early letters showing that repression originates in the failure of signifying inscriptions to carry over across developmental stages.

     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 that one wonders and, up to a point, to wonder is the contrary of becoming one.

184. #184

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By moving from the clinical case of Dora's hysteria through a theory of narcissism to ethological examples (the stickleback), Lacan argues that the Mirror Stage constitutes the ego as an alienating, foreign image that structurally inscribes an aggressive tension ("either me or the other") into all imaginary relations—and that this same logic differentiates hysteria from psychosis via the criterion of language disturbance rather than persecution-like content.

     Dora is a hysteric, and as such she has unusual object relationships.

185. #185

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question**

     Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's delusion through the schema of analytic communication, Lacan argues that in psychosis the big Other—where being is realized through speech—is foreclosed, reducing discourse to an internal echo (automatism) that cannot resolve the subject's constitution; this structural difference from neurosis must be clarified before any technique for working with psychotics can be formulated.

     ON THE PREVERBAL WORLD PRECONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SIGN, TRACE, SIGNIFIER A TRAUMATIC HYSTERIA

186. #186

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.182

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Through a case of traumatic hysteria (Eisler's 1921 analysis), Lacan argues that hysterical symptoms are not reducible to imaginary or libidinal contents (anal, homosexual) but are formulations of a fundamentally symbolic question—"Am I a man or a woman? Am I capable of procreating?"—thereby grounding neurosis in the subject's failed symbolic identification with a sexed position, and linking this to Dora's question to establish a structural dissymmetry in the Oedipus complex between the sexes.

     They suspected a traumatic hysteria and sent him to our author, who analyzes him.

187. #187

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **XVI** > *Reading of the* Memoirs, *46-47*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the paternal function operates across three registers—symbolic, imaginary, and real—and that Schreber's psychosis is distinguished by the emergence of the father's *real* generative function in imaginary form (the "little men" as spermatozoa), representing a regressive retreat through all three registers rather than normal symbolic integration via imaginary conflict.

     The hysterical pregnancy that Eisler describes, which occurred following a traumatic breakdown of his equilibrium, isn't imaginary but symbolic.

188. #188

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.180

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

     I want to illustrate this for you with an example, an old observation of traumatic hysteria — no trace of hallucinatory elements.

189. #189

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **X** > **XI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primordial signifier (Wahrnehmungszeichen) is the condition of possibility for memory, historicization, and neurosis, while its foreclosure (Verwerfung) constitutes the distinctive mechanism of psychosis—a "hole in the symbolic" rather than a reworking of reality—thereby reframing Freud's Verneinung and the neurosis/psychosis distinction in strictly signifier-based terms.

     Everything he subsequently says in this letter about the dynamics of the three great neuropsychoses that he applies himself to - hysteria, obsessional neurosis, paranoia - presupposes the existence of this primordial stage

190. #190

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.116

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental distinction between neurosis and psychosis lies in the register where the repressed returns: in neurosis it returns *in loco* within the symbolic order (under a mask), while in psychosis it returns *in altero* in the imaginary (without a mask) — and that post-Freudian ego-psychology's reduction of psychosis to ego-defense mechanisms systematically obscures this economic and topographical distinction.

     When he speaks of Abwehrhysterie, he distinguishes it from two other types of hysteria, and this is the first attempt to carry out a properly psychoanalytic nosography.

191. #191

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.142

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.

     Dora's neurosis takes on its meaning to the extent that it is metaphorical, and to the extent that it can be unravelled.

192. #192

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.388

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

     any further progress can be conceived of as a deepening or an extension into other neuroses, most notably hysteria and obsessional neurosis.

193. #193

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     FAREWELL > AUSTRIA-HUNGARY > XXIII 'Me donnera sans femme une progéniture9 > XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar IV, listing names, concepts, and bibliographic references with page numbers; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     hysteria see neurosis

194. #194

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.101

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's case of the young homosexual woman to distinguish frustration from privation and to argue that desire can only be properly analysed once the subject has entered the pre-existing Symbolic Order; frustration is an evanescent, narcissistic moment that dissolves into either the symbolic chain of gifts or closed narcissism, and no clinical experience can be articulated without first positing the subject's entry into the legal-symbolic realm.

     Freud says that the girl had never been neurotic, and came to the analysis without even one hysterical symptom.

195. #195

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.135

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan re-reads the Dora case to argue that hysteria's structural ambiguity is resolved only by positing that the phallus must be raised to the level of the symbolic gift — what is loved and sought is precisely what the father lacks and cannot give — thereby grounding the female subject's entry into the symbolic order in the gift of the phallus rather than in real need.

     the hysteric is someone who loves vicariously. You will find this in a whole host of observations. The hysteric is someone whose object is homosexual and who approaches this homosexual object by identifying with someone of the opposite sex.

196. #196

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing symbolic insistence (Wiederholungszwang) from imaginary deception in the transference, Lacan argues that the young homosexual woman's "ruse dreams" are in fact the return of an unconscious symbolic message ("You will bear my child") from the Oedipus complex—and that Freud's error was failing to locate transference at the level of symbolic articulation rather than preconscious intentionality; this is then set against the Dora case as its structural mirror (perversion as negative of neurosis).

     We also have another case in which the problem arises on the same level and in like fashion, except that Freud makes the exact opposite mistake. This is the Dora case.

197. #197

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.344

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis:

     Theoretical move: Freud, via Lacan's reading, identifies that the hysteric is structurally compelled to create an unfulfilled wish in real life, with the dream functioning not as wish-fulfillment but as the representation of a enacted renunciation — raising the structural question of why the subject stands in need of an unsatisfied desire.

     she was obliged to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in her actual life

198. #198

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.466

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the resolution of obsessional and hysterical neurosis hinges on the subject's correct relationship to the phallus as a signifier—not identifying with it but assuming one's place relative to it—and that failures of analytic technique (reducing this to imaginary phallic identification) produce symptomatic persistence rather than cure, with the Freudian formula 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' pointing toward the properly symbolic realization of desire.

     For the hysteric, the place of desire is located in a deep incertitude which obliges him or her to take a detour... the hysteric separates herself from and turns away from the Other and from the signified of the Other so as to come to locate herself in a certain ideal type by means of an image with which she identifies.

199. #199

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.454

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.

     Obsessional or hysterical behaviour is overall structured like a language.

200. #200

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.351

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.

     I simply wish to point out to you today the elements of the deficiency that is always to be found in hysterics.

201. #201

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.390

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structured by dependence on the Other, and that fantasy must be redefined not as a blind imaginary image but as the imaginary captured in a particular use of signifiers—a scenario ($◇a) in which the subject is implicated—thereby distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire from the hysteric's identificatory structure.

     for the hysteric desire is located in a position such that telling her 'This or that person is whom you desire' is always a forced, inexact interpretation... an hysteric's desire is not a desire for an object, but a desire for a desire

202. #202

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

     in hysteria, which is in short a mode of constitution of the subject precisely concerning her sexual desire, the stress is to be placed not only on the dimension of desire insofar as it's opposed to that of demand, but above all on the Other's desire, the position or the place of desire in the Other.

203. #203

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.383

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan differentiates the hysteric's and obsessional's structural relations to desire: the hysteric locates desire in the Other's desire, while the obsessional's desire is constituted as an absolute condition that necessarily destroys the Other—making the obsessional's search for the object of desire self-defeating, since desire requires the Other's support as its very place.

     the hysteric lives entirely at the level of the Other. She emphasizes being at the level of the Other, and that is the reason that the Other's desire must exist

204. #204

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.416

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

     For the hysteric, her problem is focusing her desire somewhere... she can only actually focus it on the condition that she identify with something, a small trait, it doesn't matter what.

205. #205

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.369

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difficulty of accessing sexual desire is located in the gap between the Other's absolute subjectivity (as giver/withholder of love) and its necessary objectification as an object of desire; this gap produces dizziness/nausea, theorized via the Phallus as signifier rather than as image or fantasy, which Lacan proposes as the key rectification over existing (Ego Psychology) technique.

     In the Studies on Hysteria, Breuer connects the manifestation of hysterical symptoms in the form of nausea and disgust to the phenomena of dizziness.

206. #206

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.519

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     hysterialhysterics 317 ... unsatisfied desire, creation of 342-5,347,353-4,393

207. #207

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the original Freudian discovery of unconscious desire must be recovered against the distorting backdrop of contemporary psychoanalytic normativization: early Freudian interpretations derived their efficacy precisely from the absence of a pre-formed cultural framework, whereas today the analyst's intervention is weighted by an implicit normative horizon that obscures desire's essential link to its mask (symptom), making desire structurally unarticulable even when articulated.

     We now feel and we know, after all the experiences we have had since, that, for a hysteric, this is forcing things - like telling Dora that she was in love with Herr K.

208. #208

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.342

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire must be distinguished from demand by showing how the subject's desire is fundamentally constituted through its encounter with the Other's desire, illustrated by Freud's analysis of the butcher's beautiful wife's dream, which serves as a paradigm case for the structure of unsatisfied/barred desire and the alienation of desire in the Other's speech.

     I have already alluded here to what we can point to in the initial observations Freud makes on hysteria.

209. #209

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.347

     **THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's dream of the butcher's wife, Lacan argues that hysterical identification enacts the structural split between demand and desire: the hysteric's unsatisfied desire is not a deficiency but a necessary condition for constituting a real Other, and it is only through the Other's barred desire that the subject can recognize and encounter its own barred, castrated desire.

     the hysteric is precisely a subject who finds it difficult to establish a relation - one that enables her to retain her place as a subject - with the constitution of the Other as big Other and bearer of the spoken sign. This is the very definition that one can give of the hysteric.

210. #210

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     **SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**

     Theoretical move: The symptom functions as a "mask" that presents desire in an ambiguous, closed form—addressed to nobody, articulated but not articulable—and this structure of masked desire, rooted in the hysterical identification with a situation of desire rather than a determinate object, necessitates that analytic interpretation always does more than mere recognition: it assigns an object to a desire that is fundamentally desire-for-lack-in-the-Other.

     essentially the question is about the interest that the subject takes in a situation of desire... An hysteric's identification is perfectly capable of subsisting, in a correlative manner, in several directions.

211. #211

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.448

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.

     As for our hysteric, we have seen that in order to sustain her enigmatic desire, the little a for her is employed as an artifice. We can represent it with two parallel tensions - one at the level of the idealizing formation, [55 0 a], the other at the level of the identification with a little other, i(a).

212. #212

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.467

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipal structure is grounded in the castration complex as the effect of the signifier on the Other, which introduces a constitutive lack-in-being into the subject; this foundational lack then distributes into distinct clinical structures—symptom, hysteria, and obsession—each defined by a specific relationship to desire and its object.

     the hysteric the question is one of making the object of desire subsist as distinct from and independent of the object of all need. The relationship to desire, to its constitution and to its being maintained in an enigmatic form in the background in relation to all demand is the hysteric's problem.

213. #213

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.359

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Against Dolto's imaginarist account of the phallus as a 'beautiful and good form,' Lacan argues that the phallus is neither image, fantasy, nor object but a signifier—specifically the signifier of desire—and that only this symbolic status allows it to articulate the heterosexual relation's irreducible complexity, which is then illustrated through close reading of Freud's hysteric's market dream.

     We will therefore skip the dream of the botanical monograph and come to the patient who, as Freud tells us, is an hysteric. We are therefore returning to the hysteric's desire.

214. #214

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Freudian dream analysis (the hysterical gesture of the hand on the jacket) to articulate the structural position of the woman in desire: she makes a mask of herself to *be* the phallus, and this leads to a rigorous reformulation of desire as the residue produced by the subtraction of need from the demand for love — an absolute condition that abolishes the dimension of the Other's response.

     what remains is to reject what one is in appearance, which is very precisely the woman's position in hysteria. As a woman, she makes a mask of herself. She makes a mask of herself precisely so that, behind this mask, she can be the phallus.

215. #215

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.362

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the butcher's wife's dream to demonstrate that the phallus functions as a *signifier* of desire—not as an object—and that the subject's dilemma is whether to *have* or *be* this signifier, a distinction that lies at the heart of the castration complex and the hysteric's relation to desire.

     Here, we find represented in the clearest of manners another example of the hysteric's relationship to desire as such, the place of which, as I indicated last time, the hysteric has a need for in her dreams and symptoms.

216. #216

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.350

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hamlet's structural position—his delay, his encounter with death, and the father's revelation of truth—to articulate the Lacanian subject as constituted by the signifier and the Graph of Desire, distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire (Erwartung) from the Oedipal structure, and positioning the father who "knew the truth" as the key differential coordinate between Hamlet and Oedipus.

     Hamlet, as I told you, is not this or that, is neither an obsessive nor an hysteric. Why? Because he is first and foremost a poetic creation.

217. #217

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structure of fantasy ($◇a) by distinguishing how the object of desire (objet petit a) takes the place of the symbolically deprived phallus, and then uses this framework to differentiate perversion (emphasis on the imaginary pole, a) from neurosis (emphasis on the barred subject, $), with Hamlet serving as the privileged illustration of neurotic fantasy through his constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

     Hysteria is characterized by the function of a desire qua unsatisfied... the hysteric always repeats what initially occurred in her trauma - namely, something that came too soon, a fundamental unreadiness

218. #218

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.441

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     The subject can sustain his desire when faced with the Other's desire in two manners: as an unsatisfied desire - that is the case in hysteria.

219. #219

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Hamlet's dramatic power derives not from Shakespeare's personal biography but from the play's structural composition as a space where desire finds its place; he then critiques the standard psychoanalytic (Jonesian/Oedipal) reading of Hamlet's paralysis, exposing its non-dialectical character and pointing toward the need for a more rigorous structural account of why two positive impulses cancel each other out.

     This intersects, as it were, what Sir James Paget, who is cited by Jones, wrote about hysterical paralysis: 'Hamlet's advocates say he cannot do his duty, his detractors say he will not, whereas the truth is that he cannot will.'

220. #220

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.466

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     Similarly for the hysteric: she is not the one who is enjoyed.

221. #221

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.442

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a differential dialectic of desire in neurosis: hysteria and obsession are contrasted as two distinct structural positions relative to desire and the phallus, with the phallus theorized as the signifier that ties desire to the law of exchange and fertility, such that the neurotic subject's fundamental impasse is the "to be or not to have" disjunction—being the phallus for the Other exposes one to the threat of castration, while the neurotic ego-defense is what organizes the subject's distance from the Other's desire.

     The hysteric in effect brings in a shadow, who is her double, in the guise of another woman; the hysteric's desire manages to slip in by means of this other woman, but in a hidden way

222. #222

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

     We see this, for example, in the hysteric's lived experience. Psychoanalysis began with this and this is where Freud set out from when he began to formulate analytic truths.

223. #223

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the graveyard scene in Hamlet to argue that mourning is the condition for the constitution of the object (objet petit a), and that Hamlet's sudden reactivation of desire occurs through a narcissistic identification with Laertes's grief — a mechanism that dissolves the distinction between hysterical and obsessional desire, pointing instead to a more fundamental structure of desire as such.

     I will show you what Hamlet's desire is. It is the neurotic's desire... People have said that Hamlet's desire is an hysteric's desire... his desire is there unbeknownst to the subject, and he is thus forced to construct it.

224. #224

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is an index section (pages 340-344) of Seminar VII, listing key terms, proper names, and page references with no independent theoretical argument; it is non-substantive filler but maps the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     hysteria, 53, 54,73,129,138,205-6

225. #225

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

     he does so from time to time without doing it on purpose. Thus I once quoted a very short formula which brought together the respective mechanisms of hysteria, obsessional neurosis and paranoia with three forms of sublimation, art, religion and science.

226. #226

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.215

     **XIV** > **XVI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.

     We saw the hysteric come alive in her own sphere, and not by reference to obscure forces that are unevenly divided in a space that is not moreover homogeneous

227. #227

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

     The behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered on the object, insofar as this object, das Ding, is, as Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion.

228. #228

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

     the ôpOoç kôyos of the unconscious at this level - as Freud indicates clearly in the Entwurf in relation to hysteria - is expressed as irpérov ^ettôoç, the first lie

229. #229

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.438

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXIV - Identification via** *\*ein einziger Zug***"**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXIV, providing textual variants, source identifications, and cross-references; it is non-substantive for theoretical extraction.

     On Dora, see Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905), SE VII, pp. 7-122.

230. #230

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.442

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVI - "A Dream of a Shadow Is Man"**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVI, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, bibliographic references, and explanations of Lacan's optical schema and identification formulas. It is non-substantive as theoretical argumentation, serving only as editorial apparatus.

     hysterics reject the normal, genital sexual aim, and put in its place other, 'perverse' aims... a stage of object-love with the exclusion of the genitals

231. #231

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

     The hysteric's devotion, her passion to identify with all kinds of sentimental dramas, to be there, to sustain in the wings everything that can happen which is exciting and which is nevertheless none of her business - this is the mainspring or resource around which all of her behavior revolves.

232. #232

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

     The phallus in hysteria and obsession.

233. #233

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.258

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

     What does the hysteric do? What, in the final analysis, does Dora do?... Dora would not be an hysteric were she content with this fantasy. She aims at something else, at something better, at A.

234. #234

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.369

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs two linked theoretical moves: (1) it distinguishes the *einziger Zug* (single trait) as a sign rather than a signifier, using it to differentiate Ego Ideal (symbolic introjection) from Ideal Ego (imaginary projection); and (2) it articulates love as structured by the unconditional dimension of demand, where love is "giving what you don't have," connecting poverty/lack structurally to desire, and wealth/jouissance structurally to the saint's position — thereby positioning the analyst's own ideal against the horizon of sainthood and jouissance.

     Our hysteric has a fit the day that, in the common area where slightly neurotic and nutty girls at a boarding school congregate, one of her friends receives a letter from her lover.

235. #235

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not purely internal to the subject but circulates between subjects as a kind of shared energy, and that desire functions as a remedy for anxiety—yet the analyst's proper position requires not using desire merely as an expedient but sustaining a relationship to "pure desirousness" that refuses to fill the place of the anxious Other for the patient.

     hysteria and obsession can be defined on the basis of the two statuses of desire that I call 'unsatisfied desire' and 'impossible desire'

236. #236

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**

     Theoretical move: Lacan recasts Abraham's concept of "partial love for the object" (Partialliebe) to argue that identification with the ego-ideal operates through isolated signifying traits (einziger Zug), not global introjection, and that narcissistic cathexis of one's own genitals is the structural condition for the exclusion of the object's genitals — establishing the phallus as the pivot that organises the series of partial objects (objet petit a) within the imaginary field structured by the mirror stage and face-to-face erotic posture.

     hysterical symptoms can be understood as the negative of the function that is defined as the exclusion of the genitalia.

237. #237

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

     the hysteric, which I wrote for you last time as follows: a over minus phi, in relation to the Other with a capital O

238. #238

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     **Jacques Lacan** > <span id="page-15-0"></span>**IN THE BEG IN N IN G WAS LOVE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VIII by situating transference not within an intersubjective framework but within a constitutive disparity, tracing its origin back to love (the Breuer/Anna O. encounter), and connecting it to the prior year's ethical reflection — especially the rejection of the Sovereign Good (Plato's Schwärmerei), the function of beauty as a barrier to the death drive, and the 'between-two-deaths' — in order to establish Socrates' secret knowledge of love as the hidden key to understanding transference.

     the encounter between a man and a woman, Josef Breuer and Anna O., recounted in the inaugural case of the Studies on Hysteria, what was already a form of psychoanalysis emerged

239. #239

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

     for the hysteric the accent is put on the object of the Other, taken as support for his demand

240. #240

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     it is even much more and much better set aside in the hysteric than in the obsessional, the complacency of the Other all the same being much greater

241. #241

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.312

     *Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of the seminar, Lacan consolidates the year's teaching by articulating the structural difference between i(o) and o (the specular image and the object), grounding desire in the phantasy formula $◊a, identifying the desirer as always already implicated in the object of desire via the "Che vuoi?", and situating castration's object as the very object of analytic science—while using Blanchot's prose and the hysteric's relation to the Other's desire as literary and clinical anchors.

     The hysteric shows us clearly in effect the distance between this object and the signifier, this distance which I defined by the lack of the signifier but implying its relation to the signifier.

242. #242

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.40

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Euclid's definition of the monad to ground the concept of the "unary trait" (einziger Zug) as the minimal support of difference and identification, arguing that the second type of Freudian identification (partial, regressive) is the privileged entry-point into the problem of identification precisely because structure—located in the Symbolic—always emerges at the level of the particular, and that the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real triad is not an ontological division but a methodological one born of the Freudian field of experience.

     the identification to the other through the instrumentality of desire, the identification that we know well, which is hysterical

243. #243

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

     *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the automatism of repetition is not merely a tension-discharge cycle but is fundamentally structured by a signifying function: what repeats is always in service of making a lost signifier (the *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz*) re-emerge, and repression is precisely the loss of that signifying 'number' behind the apparent psychological motivations of behaviour.

     let us say it, the hysterical access for example: one of the forms in the case of a particular subject are his hysterical accesses, and it is this which emerges as behaviour number such and such

244. #244

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other — not an affect without an object in reality but one where the lack of object is on the subject's side — and positions the phallus as the mediating term between demand and desire, showing how hysteria and obsessional neurosis are each specific strategies for managing the desire of the Other.

     The hysteric lives her relationship to the object by fomenting the desire of the Other with a big 0 for this object. Consult Dora's case.

245. #245

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

     I insist: I am saying that it is well and truly there that we have discovered it... the mechanisms operate with such subtlety that there is no other hypothesis possible to explain the way in which the neurotic establishes, constitutes his hysterical or obsessional desire

246. #246

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "reality of desire" is constituted through the dimension of the hidden and the structural weakness of the Other as guarantor of truth; this dialectic is traced through hysteric and obsessional modes of evading capture, and culminates in the claim that ethical behaviour—and the irreducibility of the castration complex at analysis's end—can only be understood by mapping desire's function in relation to the Other.

     The hysteric also can pose herself as real qua impossible. Her trick then is that this impossible will subsist, if the Other admits her as sign. The hysteric poses herself as the sign of something in which the Other could believe.

247. #247

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus—its two irreducible circles, their symmetric difference without intersection, and a privileged composite circle that both encircles and passes through the hole—to provide an intuitive topological model for the structural relationship between demand and desire, where the "self-difference" of the objet petit a and the void of desire are formalised through non-intersecting, non-unifiable fields.

     whether it is a matter of the obsessional, of the hysteric, of the pervert, even of the schizophrenic, have to articulate the relationship between desire and demand.

248. #248

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.289

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

     this so manifest form of the constitution of desire which is that of the hysteric

249. #249

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.18

     I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.

     the hysterical symptom, which is undeciphered by its very nature and thus decipherable

250. #250

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.29

     <span id="page-23-0"></span>The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity > Limitations of Freud's Trauma Theory

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a theoretical arc within Freud's work from a reparative model of trauma (foreign body removable by psychoanalytic cure) through an infiltrate model (trauma as constitutive residue), to the introduction of the death drive in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', which forces recognition of trauma as a constitutive kernel of the psyche rather than a deviation from a healthy norm—thereby undermining the coherence-restoring aim of early psychoanalytic therapy.

     the causal relation between the determining psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon is not of a kind implying that the trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur

251. #251

     Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.95

     <span id="page-92-0"></span>The Death Drive, Politics, and Love: A Conversation Between Todd McGowan and Julie Reshe

     Theoretical move: McGowan and Reshe argue that the death drive, properly understood, is not anti-political but rather the only ground for a genuine social bond and political project: because the death drive is constitutive of both subject and social order (each emerging from the failure of the other), it exposes ideology's fundamental operation of displacing internal contradiction onto an external enemy, and points toward a politics of shared suffering rather than promised harmony.

     I often think of the last line of Studies in Hysteria about transforming hysterical misery into common human unhappiness. Even that is helping.

252. #252

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.144

     The voice and the drive > The click

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

     This is where Freud sees the cornerstone on which he hopes to build a new theory of hysteria and a new model of human psychic life...The missing piece in the hysteria puzzle...has turned up in the form of a new source...hysterical phantasies which...invariably go back to things heard in early infancy.

253. #253

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.145

     A month later:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that fantasy is structurally generated by the temporal gap between hearing a voice and understanding it (après-coup), functioning as a provisional quilting point in place of understanding; crucially, true understanding never dissolves fantasy but only prolongs it, so analytic progress requires traversal of fantasy rather than understanding—with the matheme and formulas of sexuation standing as the non-fantasmatic, purely literal counterpart to the traumatic voice.

     I now see that all three neuroses, hysteria, obsessional neurosis and paranoia, share the same elements.... But the break-through into consciousness, the compromise or symptom-formation, is different in each case.

254. #254

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.50

     chapter 2 > Voice and presence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the object voice, far from grounding a "metaphysics of presence" (as Derrida's deconstruction of phonocentrism might imply), introduces an irreducible rupture at the core of narcissistic self-presence: the voice is not the transparent medium of auto-affection but harbors an alien, Real kernel—the object voice—that makes the subject possible only through an impossible relation to what cannot be present.

     There was aphonia, a frequent hysterical symptom, a sudden inability to use one's voice, an enforced silence which makes the object voice appear all the more, maybe in its pure form.

255. #255

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.153

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

     Theoretical move: By reading the "Teflon President" phenomenon through Lacan's "realist imbecility" and the objet petit a, Copjec argues that television's failure to damage Reagan exposed the structural distinction between the enunciated (referential content, subject's statements) and the enunciating instance (the surplus object that retroactively constitutes the subject's consistency), and further identifies this Lacanian structure with the Cartesian cogito and the democratic subject — thereby positing a homology between psychoanalytic and political-philosophical logics of universality.

     We accept someone's gifts and ministrations because we love him; we do not love him because he gives us these gifts... as the behavior of the hysteric makes clear.

256. #256

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.61

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause: Lac:an and Aristotle

     Theoretical move: Lacan's appropriation of Aristotle's concept of automaton (as failure of final cause / indeterminate accidental cause) reframes the death drive and the subject's relation to language: the subject is not an effect contained within language but a surplus excess cut off from it, created ex nihilo — directly opposing Bergson's intussusceptive, cumulative model of duration where nothing comes from nothing.

     Lacan argues that we think not as a consequence of our engagement with the totality of our bodily presence but rather as a consequence of the fact that 'a structure carves up [man's] body .... Witness the hysteric.'

257. #257

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.160

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Tefton Totem

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that the psychoanalytic subject is objectively indeterminate (not merely vaguely described), and uses the need/demand/desire triad to theorize how democracy itself hystericizes the subject by structuring its relation to an impotent (unvermögender) Other—a relation that sustains demand precisely through the Other's failure to deliver, while American pluralism forecloses the radical difference psychoanalysis defends by clinging to belief in a consistent Other of the Other.

     America's solution is, in analytic terms, hysterical: one elects a master who is demonstrably fallible-even, in some cases, incompetent... Democracy hystericizes the subject.

258. #258

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.167

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.

     The primal father is primarily the father who seduces the child—at least this is the guise under which he appears most often to psychoanalysis, in the complaints of the hysterics.

259. #259

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.208

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

     Theoretical move: The passage argues, first, that film noir's visual techniques and the femme fatale figure both function as failed symbolic defenses against the drive/jouissance; and second, pivoting to Butler's Gender Trouble, that the sex-as-substance vs. sex-as-signification binary is inadequate because it smuggles in an imaginary (complementary) conception of sexual difference, which Lacanian sexuation can displace.

     The femme fatale is in everyone's estimation one of the most fascinating elements of the noir world.

260. #260

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.266

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego > Chapter l

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical asides; it is largely non-substantive, though several notes touch on suture, the logic of the signifier, voice, drive, and democracy as symbolic mutation.

     in reinterpreting her description, Freud was indicating the sort of master the hysteric prefers.

261. #261

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.172

     The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern democratic subject is constituted not by power's self-guaranteeing omniscience (Foucault) but by a structural lack of knowledge in the Other: because power cannot certify the subject, a surplus of meaning escapes social recognition, and it is precisely this conflict—including the irruption of jouissance—that both constitutes democratic subjectivity and prevents its totalisation.

     It seems that the preeminent form of modern power is the source of 'modern nervousness.'

262. #262

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.282

     LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Chapter S

     Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (pages 281-283) listing topics, authors, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive filler with no theoretical argument.

     and hysteria, 41

263. #263

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.51

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacanian narcissism, far from anchoring the subject in pleasurable self-recognition, is structured by a constitutive fault or lack in representation that grounds the subject in desire and the death drive—directly opposing the film-theoretical account of the gaze and constructivist accounts of ideology, which mistakenly posit a smooth 'narcissistic pleasure' as the cement between psychical and social reality.

     an investigation of turn-of-the-century medical practices, codes of photography, discourses of the Church and of psychoanalysis, and so on will tell us not how hysteria was looked at then but, more accurately, how it was constructed as a historical entity.

264. #264

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).

     The majority of hysterical women may be numbered among the attractive and even beautiful representatives of their sex.

265. #265

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego's peculiar severity derives from its dual origin—as the earliest identification (heir to the Oedipus complex) and as a reincarnation of archaic id-formations—and uses this structural account to explain clinical phenomena including negative therapeutic reaction, unconscious guilt, and the differential manifestation of guilt in obsessional neurosis, melancholia, and hysteria, ultimately linking the super-ego's cruelty to the death drive turned inward.

     this latter form of guilt-feeling is mainly to be found in hysteria, and in states of the hysterical type. The mechanism causing it to remain unconscious is not difficult to divine... the hysterical ego fends it off in just the same way as it is otherwise wont to fend off an unbearable object-cathexis – by an act of repression.

266. #266

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety (fear) is structurally constituted as the reproduction of a prior traumatic experience—paradigmatically birth—and that its function bifurcates into a counter-purposive automatic reaction to actual danger and a purposive signal of impending danger; the deepest root of fear is separation from the loved object, which ties castration anxiety, birth trauma, and object-loss into a single structural series.

     the other affects are also reproductions of ancient, perhaps pre-individual events of life-and-death importance, and may be regarded as universal, typical, inborn hysterical attacks, in contradistinction to the attacks characteristic of hysterical neurosis

267. #267

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes the conceptual architecture of defence, repression, anxiety, and trauma by: (1) demoting 'repression' to a sub-category of a broadened concept of 'defence'; (2) constructing a developmental sequence from trauma through danger-situation to anxiety-as-signal; and (3) showing that the distinction between objective and neurotic fear dissolves once the drive is recognized as an internal danger that mirrors external helplessness.

     We first learned about repression and symptom-formation in the context of hysteria. We saw that the perceptions attaching to excitatory experiences … are forgotten and thus excluded from reproduction within the subject's memory

268. #268

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     those reflecting the restitution process which, after the manner of hysteria (in the case of dementia praecox and paraphrenia proper) or obsessional neurosis (in the case of paranoia), re-attaches the libido to objects

269. #269

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, clarifying translation choices for key Freudian terms (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.) and cross-referencing other Freudian texts; it is paratextual apparatus rather than theoretical argumentation.

     Freud defines this phenomenon elsewhere (in the context of hysteria) by reference to people 'in whom any cause of sexual excitement provokes feelings consisting mainly or wholly of unpleasure' ('Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse'…)

270. #270

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     True conversion hysteria is one such: we encounter not the slightest tinge of fear in even its gravest symptoms.

271. #271

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies two surrogate repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—and argues that both operate through motor symbolism to achieve the same goal as repression, while also raising the problem of whether castration anxiety is the sole motor of defence across all neuroses, particularly in women.

     In hysteria, as we know, it is possible to have a traumatic experience 'swallowed up' by amnesia. In obsessional neurosis this has often not been fully accomplished

272. #272

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs a developmental series of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) each generating its specific fear-determinant, while simultaneously revising his earlier economic theory of anxiety to recast fear as an intentional ego-signal rather than an automatic libidinal discharge, and correlating each fear-determinant with a corresponding neurotic structure.

     loss of love plays the same kind of role as a fear-determinant in hysteria as the threat of castration does in the phobias, and fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

273. #273

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses traumatic neurosis and the fort/da game to establish that certain psychic phenomena — repetition of painful experiences in dreams and play — cannot be explained by the pleasure principle alone, pointing toward tendencies "beyond" the pleasure principle that are more primal and independent of it.

     Breuer and Freud expressed the view in 1893 that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences

274. #274

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud refines his metapsychology of repression by arguing that (1) the ego deploys a signal of unpleasure—not a mere transformation of drive-energy—to inhibit id-processes, and (2) fear is reproduced from primal traumatic memory-traces rather than generated anew, thereby relocating anxiety from the id to the ego and distinguishing primal from secondary repression.

     I believe that I was not mistaken when I equated them to attacks of hysteria, which arise at a later stage and on an individual basis, and when I described them as the normal paradigms for such attacks.

275. #275

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes inhibition from symptom by grounding inhibition in ego-function restriction—caused either by excessive eroticization of organs, conflict-avoidance with the id or superego, or energy depletion—while symptoms are processes operating outside or upon the ego, making the two conceptually non-equivalent even when clinically overlapping.

     We class this as a form of hysteria, as we also do in the case of the defensive symptom of disgust... Hysteria forces the person to stop working altogether by paralysing organs and functions.

276. #276

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section providing translational, editorial, and cross-referential annotations to Freud's essays; it is non-substantive theoretical content and primarily serves as a philological and bibliographic resource.

     *Konversionshysterien*. 'Conversion' in Freud's sense is defined in the OED as 'The symbolic manifestation in physical symptoms of a psychic conflict'

277. #277

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the transition from hypnotic/cathartic technique to modern free-association analysis reveals that patients do not remember the repressed but instead repeat it as action under conditions of resistance — establishing repetition-compulsion as the central dynamic of transference and the structuring force of analytic work.

     Even this yearning, however, is capable of being gratified, particularly in the case of conversion hysterias.

278. #278

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     The hysteric and the obsessional neurotic likewise abandon their relationship to reality... But analysis shows that they by no means forsake their erotic relationship to people and things.

279. #279

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptom-formation is not directly tied to anxiety but is mediated by the 'danger situation': symptoms are created to extricate the ego from danger, with anxiety serving as the minimal signal that triggers this defensive process, while the persistence of archaic danger situations—rather than the drives themselves—is what distinguishes neurosis from normal development.

     many of the childhood conversion hysterias show no recurrence in later years.

280. #280

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud refines and taxonomizes the mechanisms of repression and resistance, distinguishing five types of resistance from three psychic agencies (ego, id, superego), and revises his theory of anxiety away from direct libido-transformation toward an ego-signal theory grounded in the paradigmatic danger situation of birth.

     Hysterical counter-cathexis, however, is largely directed outwards, and against any perception that might pose a danger. It takes the form of a special vigilance which, by means of restrictions of the ego, avoids situations

281. #281

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id and ego-superego relationships are not binary oppositions but dynamic, partially overlapping organizations; the symptom's "exterritoriality" from the ego-organization initiates a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between reconciliation (incorporating the symptom) and renewed repression, with secondary illness-gain reinforcing the symptom's fixation and generating analytic resistance.

     symptoms of hysteria that we have come to realize constitute a compromise between the need for gratification and the need for punishment

282. #282

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 6**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive notes/references section for Chapter 6, listing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses; the only theoretically notable gestures are: Copjec's gloss on "intersubjective" as non-psychological, her acknowledgement of Lefort's theorisation of democracy as a "mutation of the symbolic order," her note on Dora's demand for a master as a key move in Freud/hysteria, and her citation of Lacan's distinction between the primal and Oedipal father.

     in reinterpreting her description, Freud was indicating the sort of master the hysteric prefers.

283. #283

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.150

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that American democracy structurally hystericizes the subject by generating a demand for an *unvermögender* (impotent/incapable) Other whose very failure to deliver accreditation preserves the subject's singularity; this diagnosis is grounded in the tripartite distinction of need/demand/desire and the logic of love (giving what one does not have), and culminates in a critique of the American suppression of the Real excess within the law itself.

     America's solution is, in analytic terms, hysterical: one elects a master who is demonstrably fallible—even, in some cases, incompetent... democracy hystericizes the subject.

284. #284

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **Cutting Up**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that contemporary theory's reduction of the psychic-social relation to a pleasure-principle model (where the social order constructs desiring subjects through narcissistic identification) expels the Real; against this, she proposes that it is the death drive—not pleasure—that causally unites the psychic and the social, with the Real as irreducible remainder that resists incorporation into any representational apparatus.

     an investigation of turn-of-the-century medical practices, codes of photography, discourses of the Church and of psychoanalysis, and so on will tell us not how hysteria was looked at then but, more accurately, how it was constructed as a historical entity.

285. #285

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.157

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Modern Forms of Power**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power is structurally blind to totalitarianism because it fails to recognize that the "mild and provident" tutelary power is, in Freudian-Lacanian terms, the ideal father who constitutes himself precisely by interdicting jouissance (expelling objet petit a), and that this interdiction — not discursive multiplicity — is what generates the fantasy of transgression and the eventual return of the despotic primal father in the form of totalitarianism.

     The primal father is primarily the father who seduces the child—at least this is the guise under which he appears most often to psychoanalysis, in the complaints of the hysterics.

286. #286

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.51

     **Cutting Up** > **Cause: Lacan and Aristotle**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Lacan's concept of *automaton* (Aristotle's category of chance/failure of final cause) reframes the classical philosophical problem of cause: rather than a Prime Mover securing bodily unity and freedom, it is language's cut that divides the subject from part of itself, and this primary detachment — not Bergsonian illusion — is the true source of Eleatic paradoxes and the endless, asymptotic structure of desire.

     Lacan is asking us to witness the paralyses and anesthesias of the hysteric, those blind spots in consciousness, those spaces of inattention that mark the point where something is missing in the hysteric's image of herself.

287. #287

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.143

     **The** ***Unvermögender*** **Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America** > **The Teflon Totem**

     Theoretical move: By reading the "Teflon President" phenomenon through Lacan's concept of objet petit a (as the instance of enunciation that exceeds all statements), Copjec argues that "realist imbecility"—the sacrifice of the signified for the referent—structurally disables television's (and the police's) capacity to menace the subject, and that democratic ideology is founded on a Cartesian universal subject whose "innocent" enunciating instance mirrors the logic of objet petit a.

     We accept someone's gifts and ministrations because we love him; we do not love him because he gives us these gifts. And since it is that something beyond the gifts that we love and not the gifts themselves, it is possible to dislike the gifts, to find fault with all the other's manifestations, and still love the other—as the behavior of the hysteric makes clear.

288. #288

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage (letters H–K) from Boothby's *Freud as Philosopher*, listing names and concepts with page references. No theoretical argument is advanced.

     Hysteria 5, 6, 100, 107–09, 111, 122, 203–04

289. #289

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.6

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

     it is tempting to characterize the behavior of the hysteric in terms of an excessive charge spread over the entire surface of the personality, as if to compensate for an internal lack or vacuity.

290. #290

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.107

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > In the Navel of the Dream

     Theoretical move: By reading the sexual imagery of Freud's Irma dream through its "switch word" (Lösung/solution), Boothby argues that Freud's resistance to sexual interpretation at the dream's navel point reveals a constitutive guilt—not merely professional anxiety—at the core of the dream's formation, linking seduction theory, transference, and the hysterical symptom to a repressed sexual scenario involving Freud himself.

     the pivotal tension in the dream over the question of Irma's diagnosis—hysterical or organic—becomes equivalent to a question about the presence or absence of sexual trauma.

291. #291

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.212

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

     for Freud the hysterical proton pseudos is a particular mistranscription of ideas. Yet the explanatory potential of the proton pseudos far exceeds the passing reference Freud makes to it.

292. #292

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.203

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > The Thing about the Other

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's Emma case from the *Project*, Boothby argues that the mechanism of deferred trauma (*Nachträglichkeit*) depends on the di-phasic structure of sexuality: the prematurity of the original experience means that an apparently tamed memory can later bypass primary defense and unleash an uncontrolled primary-process discharge, making the symptom a "symbol of a symbol" produced by a double layer of repression and symbolic substitution.

     Accordingly, says Freud, every adolescent must carry the germ of hysteria within him.

293. #293

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.111

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > In the Navel of the Dream

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Irma dream has a symmetrical double structure in which "solution" operates as a condensation of both professional and sexual meanings, revealing that Freud's anxieties about professional status were underpinned by anxieties about his own sexuality — a claim confirmed by the formal homology between the Irma dream and the later Mathilde/Hella dream.

     Freud was convinced at the time that hysteria was caused by a premature or unwilling exposure to sexual advance, especially by an older person or by a person in authority.

294. #294

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a back-of-book index from Boothby's "Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan" (2001), listing concepts and page references from S through V. It is a navigational aid and contains no substantive theoretical argument.

     Seduction theory of hysteria 107–08, 111–12, 114

295. #295

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.302

     A Play of Props > Conclusion

     Theoretical move: The conclusion argues that where Tarde instrumentalized everyday talk as a means to collective opinion-formation, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan instead revealed its individuating potential: chatter, idle talk, and empty speech function as techniques of self-cultivation through which subjects lose and refind themselves in mass society, a capacity now amplified by networked individualism.

     made them equally susceptible to hysteria, hallucination, somnambulism, automatism, and other kinds of 'emotional insanity.'

296. #296

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.42

     Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies: > **Traveler's Logorrhea** > **Communicable Disease**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a conceptual genealogy of "chatter" (snak/Geschwätz/adoleschia) from Plutarch through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan, arguing that the medical metaphor of talkativeness as a communicable disease—flowing through barbers, journalists, and audiences alike—is the structuring logic behind Kierkegaard's critique of everyday talk as a collective, self-perpetuating civic pathology.

     Lacan would eventually follow suit, likening the free associations of his patients to the adoleschia of ancient Greeks

297. #297

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage elaborates two registers of symbolic castration—enjoyment and meaning—by drawing on Plato's account of sexuality as organism-within-organism (the genealogy of hysteria and the phallic 'conjunction of high and low'), and on Žižek's formulation of the phallus as insignia/mask that introduces a constitutive gap between the subject's immediate being and its symbolic mandate.

     As is well known, the last part of this passage was responsible for the original naming of hysteria (from hystera, uterus) and for its being considered, for a long time, an illness caused by a 'wandering uterus,' moving around within the body and causing difficulties in its various parts.

298. #298

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.213

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the phallus functions as the signifier of castration not because anatomy is destiny, but because an anatomical peculiarity comes to incarnate a pre-existing symbolic impasse — the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment — and psychoanalysis, by disclosing this contingent linkage, dethrones the phallus from necessity to contingency and reveals human sexuality as itself the problematic junction of nature and culture.

     Consider the classic hysterical symptoms which usually take the form of some kind of physical dysfunction. If we think about the flexibility of these symptoms, how they seem to be uncannily able to 'decide' which part of the body will 'take on' the impasse of enjoyment

299. #299

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud pivots from the earlier therapeutic goal of conscious remembering (via catharsis/hypnosis) to the recognition that patients under resistance *repeat* rather than remember — acting out repressed material as present reality — and that this compulsion to repeat is structurally tied to transference and resistance, reframing repetition as the primary clinical phenomenon to be worked through.

     Even this yearning, however, is capable of being gratified, particularly in the case of conversion hysterias.

300. #300

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: By moving from traumatic neurosis (and the compulsive return of its dreams) to the fort/da game, Freud establishes that repetition of unpleasurable experience cannot be fully accounted for by the pleasure principle, thereby opening the conceptual space for drives that are 'more primal than and independent of' the pleasure principle — i.e., the Beyond.

     The clinical picture presented by traumatic neurosis is not unlike that of hysteria in its plethora of similar motor symptoms, but generally goes well beyond it.

301. #301

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical necessity of a primary narcissism by tracing the concept from its clinical origins through schizophrenia, childhood, and "primitive" thought, thereby justifying the differentiation of ego-libido from object-libido and grounding psychoanalysis in empirical observation rather than speculative theory.

     The separation of the libido into one that pertains to the ego, and one that becomes attached to objects, is a necessary corollary of a primary hypothesis that differentiated between sexual drives and ego drives... the conclusion that I was driven to by analysis of both of the pure forms of transference neurosis (hysteria and obsessional neurosis).

302. #302

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud revises and taxonomizes the concept of resistance (distinguishing five types from three sources: ego, id, superego) and reformulates the theory of anxiety/fear, shifting from direct libido-transformation to an ego-signal model grounded in danger situations, thereby refining the structural account of repression, counter-cathexis, and working-through.

     Hysterical counter-cathexis, however, is largely directed outwards, and against any perception that might pose a danger. It takes the form of a special vigilance which, by means of restrictions of the ego, avoids situations in which such a perception might occur

303. #303

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     We class this as a form of hysteria, as we also do in the case of the defensive symptom of disgust, which initially sets in as a post factum reaction to the passively experienced sexual act.

304. #304

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.

     The majority of hysterical women may be numbered among the attractive and even beautiful representatives of their sex; and inversely, the heavy incidence of ugliness, infirmity and wasted organs in the lower classes of our society has no effect whatever on the frequency of neurotic disorders occurring amongst them.

305. #305

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through close analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis involves not merely repression of a single drive-impulse but the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (sadistic aggression toward the father and passive affection for him), with displacement—not reaction-formation—as the operative mechanism, and that regression can serve as an alternative or supplement to repression in warding off disagreeable drive-impulses.

     Let us look first of all at infantile hysterical animal phobia – a good example of which is the horse phobia of 'Little Hans'

306. #306

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id distinction is relational rather than absolute — the ego is the organized portion of the id — and uses this to explain how repression generates symptoms that achieve 'exterritoriality' from the ego-organization, initiating a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between incorporating the symptom and continuing to repress it, a dynamic reinforced by secondary illness-gain.

     A classic instance of this is afforded by those symptoms of hysteria that we have come to realize constitute a compromise between the need for gratification and the need for punishment.

307. #307

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

     after the manner of hysteria (in the case of dementia praecox and paraphrenia proper) or obsessional neurosis (in the case of paranoia), re-attaches the libido to objects

308. #308

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reintroduces 'defence' as the general category for all ego-protective techniques against drive demands, subsumes 'repression' as one specific mechanism, and then elaborates anxiety/fear as a signal anticipating traumatic helplessness — establishing a structural sequence: fear → danger → helplessness (trauma) that grounds the distinction between objective and neurotic fear.

     We first learned about repression and symptom-formation in the context of hysteria... the perceptions attaching to excitatory experiences... are forgotten and thus excluded from reproduction within the subject's memory

309. #309

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes on Freud's terminology (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.), offering philological and conceptual commentary on translation choices in the Standard Edition — it is non-substantive as theoretical argument but contains minor conceptual clarifications about the Ego, Superego, Id, drives, anxiety, and repetition.

     Freud defines this phenomenon elsewhere (in the context of hysteria) by reference to people 'in whom any cause of sexual excitement provokes feelings consisting mainly or wholly of unpleasure'

310. #310

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud introduces two auxiliary repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—arguing that isolation's logic is ultimately grounded in a primordial taboo on touching, and closes by challenging whether castration fear alone can be the universal motor of repression, especially given women's neuroses.

     In hysteria, as we know, it is possible to have a traumatic experience 'swallowed up' by amnesia. In obsessional neurosis this has often not been fully accomplished

311. #311

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section providing translator's annotations, bibliographic references, and terminological clarifications for several Freud essays; it is non-substantive as primary theoretical argument but does trace key Freudian concepts (repetition, repression, pleasure/reality principles, abreaction) through their German originals and editorial history.

     *Konversionshysterien*. 'Conversion' in Freud's sense is defined in the OED as 'The symbolic manifestation in physical symptoms of a psychic conflict'

312. #312

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the superego's special severity derives from its dual origin—as the heir to the Oedipus complex and as a residue of the id's phylogenetic inheritance—and uses differential clinical presentations (negative therapeutic reaction, obsessional neurosis, melancholia, hysteria) to demonstrate how guilt-feeling, whether conscious or unconscious, operates as the superego's primary weapon against the ego, ultimately linking the superego's harshness to a harnessed death drive turned inward.

     the hysterical ego fends it off in just the same way as it is otherwise wont to fend off an unbearable object-cathexis – by an act of repression

313. #313

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety (fear) is a reproduced affect rooted in the trauma of birth, and that its paradigmatic form in early childhood reduces to distress at the absence of a loved object—thereby linking birth-separation, castration fear, and object-loss as structurally homologous danger situations, while simultaneously critiquing Rank's direct derivation of phobias from birth trauma.

     the other affects are also reproductions of ancient, perhaps pre-individual events of life-and-death importance, and may be regarded as universal, typical, inborn hysterical attacks, in contradistinction to the attacks characteristic of hysterical neurosis

314. #314

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud reformulates the mechanics of repression by reconceiving the ego's power over the id as deriving from its signal of unpleasure (not automatic affect-transformation), and re-situates the origin of anxiety in reproduced memory-traces of primal traumatic experiences rather than in converted drive-energy, while correcting a prior over-emphasis on the ego's weakness relative to the id.

     I believe that I was not mistaken when I equated them to attacks of hysteria, which arise at a later stage and on an individual basis, and when I described them as the normal paradigms for such attacks.

315. #315

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes anxiety as an ego-generated signal rather than a product of automatic economic discharge, and systematically maps a developmental sequence of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) that underlie distinct neurotic structures, while revising his earlier libido-transformation theory of anxiety.

     given the well-established fact that hysteria has a stronger affinity to femaleness, just as obsessional neurosis has a stronger affinity to maleness

316. #316

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     True conversion hysteria is one such: we encounter not the slightest tinge of fear in even its gravest symptoms.

317. #317

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.117

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Antinomies of Pure Sexuation](#contents.xhtml_ahd7) > The Dymamical Antinomies > The fourth antinomy (of necessary being or not)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference is not a difference between two species of a universal but a meta-difference that splits universality from within, and he homologizes this structure to Kant's transcendental, which is itself traversed by immanent antinomies and transcendental illusion—culminating in the Kantian paralogism that prefigures Lacan's distinction between the barred subject of the signifier and the imaginary ego as object.

     such a rejection is the feminine gesture par excellence, a gesture of hysterical resistance to interpellation

318. #318

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.253

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [From Cross-Cap to Klein Bottle](#contents.xhtml_ahd17)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sexual difference (and analogous structures like class antagonism) cannot be resolved by nominalist multiplication of categories, because the "+" remainder in any classificatory series is not an epistemological gap but a positive ontological entity—the very embodiment of antagonism—homologous to objet a as the reflexive stand-in for surplus desire itself; fetishistic multiplication of identities/modernities is thus a disavowal of castration.

     insofar as questioning the identity bestowed on you is the basic feature of hysteria—the hysteric's question is ultimately: 'Why am I what you are telling me that I am?'—and insofar as hysteria is feminine, we can now understand why we can write sexual difference … as M+

319. #319

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.62

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1608"></span>Parallax <span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-1657"></span>of Ontology > [<span id="theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_p57" class="pagebreak" title="57"></span>The Margin of Radical Uncertainty](#contents.xhtml_ahd4)

     Theoretical move: Sexuality is formally defined by the structural impossibility of its goal, such that the drive sustains itself through repeated failure rather than satisfaction; this logic of impossibility—anchored in das Ding—is what distinguishes the human from the animal, and hysteria is identified as the elementary human modality of installing this point of impossibility as absolute jouissance.

     Hysteria is thus the elementary 'human' way of installing a point of impossibility in the guise of absolute jouissance

320. #320

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.91

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Buddha, Kant, <span id="scholium_11_buddha_kant_husserl.xhtml_IDX-235"></span>Husserl

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Husserl's phenomenological epoché enacts a "splitting of the Ego" structurally homologous to Buddhist anatman and, paradoxically, to a perverse de-subjectivization — the subject becoming the transparent instrument of the Other's will — thereby exposing the politically dangerous underside of any stance that dissolves subjectivity's constitutive hysteria.

     Insofar as subjectivity as such is hysterical, insofar as it emerges through the questioning of the interpellating call of the Other, we get here the perfect description of a perverse desubjectivization

321. #321

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.236

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

     Theoretical move: The Möbius-strip topology of the "inner eight" (self-reflecting hierarchical inversion) is deployed to argue that true materialist dialectics requires acknowledging that the Universal is *already* barred/voided from within—not sublated into the Idea—and that fantasy, repression, and the Form/content split all operate according to this same logic of a loop immanent to hierarchy.

     The standard wisdom tells us that perverts practice (do) what hysterics only dream about (doing)

322. #322

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.444

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     in contrast to other Soviet composers caught in the turmoil of Stalinist accusations (Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and others), there are in Prokofiev no inner doubts, hysteria, anxiety

323. #323

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.229

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Möbius Strip, or, the Convolutions of Concrete Universality](#contents.xhtml_ahd13)

     Theoretical move: The Möbius strip serves as the topological model for dialectical "coincidence of opposites," showing how a line brought to its extreme intersects with its opposite — a structure that governs politics (Fascism), sexuation (universality/exception), the psychoanalytic relation of contingency to symbolization, and the Signifier/Signified relation in language, with the quilting point as the element of contingent Real that concludes the symbolic process by throwing it back to its origin.

     in the hysterical link, subject is divided, traumatized, by what for an object she is for the Other, what role she plays in the Other's desire: 'Why am I what you're saying that I am?'

324. #324

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.148

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sex as Our Brush with the Absolute > [Plants, Animals, Humans, Posthumans](#contents.xhtml_ahd10)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "Absolute Knowing" names a redoubled not-knowing in which ontological incompleteness is displaced into reality itself, and that this logic—exemplified by the Lacanian "subject of the unconscious" structured as a Kierkegaardian apostle—entails rejecting the human/animal exception as the origin of sexual deadlock: the rupture of sexuality is pre-human, constitutive of nature as such, with humanity merely the site where this constitutive gap "appears as such."

     Is what we encounter in hysteria not precisely a 'body of truth': in the bodily symptoms that result from the hysterical 'conversion,' the immediate organic body is invaded, kidnapped, by a Truth, transformed into a bearer of truth

325. #325

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.251

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Cross-Capping Class Struggle](#contents.xhtml_ahd16)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that class struggle (and social antagonism generally) must be understood through a "redoubled" logic of suture, where the quilting point splits into an excess at the top and a "part of no-part" at the bottom (the rabble/proletariat as singular universality); this move is then extended to psychoanalytic symptom-theory by inverting the usual relation: not only is the symptom a symptom of normality, but normality is itself a symptomal compromise-formation covering a constitutive antagonism.

     for Freud, a—say—hysterical symptom indicates that there is something wrong in the very basic constitution of the subject whose symptom it is

326. #326

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.416

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Wagner's *Parsifal* — framed against historicist contextualization — Žižek argues that the opera's central ethical and libidinal drama turns on the obscene superego-jouissance of the father (Titurel as père-version), hysterical feminine subjectivity (Kundry), and the paradox of a wound that is simultaneously the mark of corruption and the source of immortal life-energy; Parsifal's salvation-gesture is grounded not in simple purity but in hysterical identification with the very suffering he refuses.

     Lacan rendered the division that characterizes the hysterical feminine subject in a concise formula: 'I demand that you refuse my demand, since this is not that.'

327. #327

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > [Index](#contents.xhtml_end2)

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Žižek's *Sex and the Failed Absolute*, listing alphabetical entries from H–I with page-reference hyperlinks to various chapters; it performs no theoretical argument of its own.

     hysteria [here](#theorem_i_the_parallax_of_ontology.xhtml_IDX-945), [here](#theorem_ii_sex_as_our_brush_with_the_absolute.xhtml_IDX-946)

328. #328

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

     By determining the passage from Kant to Hegel as the hystericization of the obsessional's position, we are already in the midst of the properly Hegelian relation between genus and its species

329. #329

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Symbolic identification (ego-ideal, I(O)) dominates imaginary identification (ideal ego, i(o)) as the mechanism of socio-symbolic interpellation, but this quilting always leaves a remainder — the gap of 'Che vuoi?' — which marks the irreducible split between demand and desire and prevents full closure of the subject's integration into the symbolic order.

     according to the classic Lacanian formula, the logic of the hysterical demand is 'I'm demanding this of you, but what I'm really demanding of you is to refute my demand because this is not it!'

330. #330

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.

     the subject presumed to desire plays such a role in hysteria. One only has to remind oneself of Freud's analysis of Dora: it is quite clear that Frau K is playing for Dora the role - not of her object of desire... but of the subject presumed to desire

331. #331

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The subject is not a questioning force but an "answer of the Real" — the void produced when the Other's question exposes the ex-timate traumatic kernel (objet petit a / das Ding); this hystericization is constitutive of the subject, while interpellation/subjectivation functions as an attempt to evade this kernel through identification. Žižek further deploys Hitchcock's object-typology to distinguish the MacGuffin, the circulating real-object (objet petit a), and the phallic object, showing how the Real must irrupt to establish the symbolic structure.

     the question as such produces in its addressee an effect of shame and guilt, it divides, it hystericizes him, and this hystericization is the constitution of the subject: the status of the subject as such is hysterical.

332. #332

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The symptom's 'return of the repressed' operates from the future rather than the past — meaning is retroactively constructed through the symbolic process, not excavated from hidden depths — and this temporal paradox entails that transference is a necessary illusion through which Truth is constituted via misrecognition, a structure equally operative in historical repetition (Luxemburg, Hegel).

     we have the opposition between the obsessional (man) and the hysterical (woman): the obsessional is delaying, putting off the act, waiting for the right moment, while the hysteric (so to speak) overtakes herself in her act and thus unmasks the falsity of the obsessional's position.

333. #333

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized as a double operation: it answers the unbearable gap of the Other's desire ('Che vuoi?') by filling the void with an imaginary scenario, while simultaneously constructing the very coordinates that make desire possible; this structure illuminates hysteria as failed interpellation, anti-Semitism as racist fantasy, Christianity vs. Judaism as contrasting strategies for 'gentrifying' the desire of the Other, and sainthood/Antigone as ethical positions of not giving way on one's desire.

     Lacan formulates the hysterical question as a certain 'Why am I what you're telling me that I am?' - that is, which is that surplus-object in me that caused the Other to interpellate me

334. #334

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the classical ideology-critique model (false consciousness, "they do not know it but they are doing it") is insufficient against cynical reason; the deeper, untouched level of ideology is that of ideological fantasy, which operates not in knowing but in doing—subjects are "fetishists in practice, not in theory"—so that the illusion is inscribed in social reality itself, not merely in consciousness.

     here we have a precise definition of the hysterical symptom, of the 'hysteria of conversion' proper to capitalism.

335. #335

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).

     This gap between the way I see myself and the point from which I am being observed to appear likeable to myself is crucial for grasping hysteria... when we take the hysterical woman in the act of such a theatrical outburst, it is of course clear that she is doing this to offer herself to the Other as the object of its desire

336. #336

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.78

     Eating before Knowing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Hegel's materialist turn is grounded in the priority of the moral act over theoretical idealism: acting in and on the world collapses the Kantian barrier between phenomena and things-in-themselves, thereby demonstrating that knowledge cannot remain at a remove from its object and that morality must actualize itself rather than perpetually striving toward an unreachable ideal.

     he accuses Kant of moral hysteria. While proclaiming that he wants a moral order or a kingdom of ends, Kant actually wants to continue striving for the kingdom of ends. He desires his desire rather than its realization.

337. #337

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.47

     Mladen Dolar > Freud's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Freud's departure from scientific materialism is not a rejection but a radicalization of it: by pushing mechanism, determinism, monism, reductionism, and scientism to their outermost consequences, psychoanalysis discovers a crack or inner break within each—a 'less than nothing' that persists without ontological substance—thereby converging, by an entirely different route, with Hegel's 'substance is subject.'

     Freud's constant anxiety in his early days: 'haven't I missed some organic cause for these spectacular hysteric symptoms?'

338. #338

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.245

     Russell Sbriglia

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian *objet petit a* as an extimate object—simultaneously inside and outside the subject—reveals that subjectivity is constitutively split and hystericized, and that this logic of sublimation (where "thing-power" is itself the product of the subject's anamorphic distortion) undermines new materialist "flat ontology" by showing that there is no vibrant matter (*a*) without the subject, just as there is no subject without *a*.

     subjectivity as such is hysterical. And it is precisely this hystericization of the subject—a hystericization that results from the subject tying itself to the objet petit a

339. #339

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.190

     Who Cares? > The Human Object

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic account of sexuality as an ontological negativity—instantiated in the drive, fantasy, and the body as distinct from the organism—provides a properly materialist ethics that new materialism cannot supply, because it grounds freedom, difference, and ethical creativity in the constitutive gap at the core of human being rather than in a "flat ontology" that nullifies human peculiarity.

     Consider the Studies on Hysteria. Against the grain of the whole medical establishment of the time, which insisted that any physical ailment must be traceable to a physiological origin, Freud intuited that the bodily symptom for which no such origin could be found must be the effect of pathogenic ideas

340. #340

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.154

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **The Hysteric's Discourse**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hysteric's Discourse is structurally homologous with the discourse of science because both are driven by the Real (object a as truth) and by the imperative to expose the incompleteness of knowledge rather than systematize it — thus Lacan's eventual identification of the two discourses is grounded in their shared orientation toward the impossible and the unfillable hole in any knowledge-set.

     Hysterics led Freud to develop psychoanalytic theory and practice, all the while proving to him in his consulting room the inadequacy of his knowledge and know-how.

341. #341

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

     hysteria is defined as a particular kind of affective response to a sexually charged 'primordial' encounter with an other person, one of unpleasure or disgust

342. #342

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.145

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > <span id="page-141-0"></span>**A New Metaphor for Sexual Difference**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's account of sexual difference introduces a genuinely new topological metaphor—grounded in the cross-cap and set-theoretic distinctions between open and closed sets—that replaces the classical Western model of concentric spheres and recasts masculine/feminine structure as closed/open sets respectively; this is further characterised as a "Gödelian structuralism" that systematically points to incompleteness and undecidability within any formal system.

     His work embodies the very structure of hysteria: the closer he comes to formulating a system, the more vigorously he reexamines it and calls it into question.

343. #343

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

     the different clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, and perversion) and their subcategories (e.g., hysteria, obsession, and phobia under neurosis)

344. #344

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.127

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **"There's no Such Thing** as a **Sexual Relationship"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's formula "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" is grounded in the claim that masculinity and femininity are defined separately and differently with respect to the symbolic order—not in relation to each other—such that each sex has a distinct mode of alienation by language and a distinct form of jouissance, making any direct complementary relation between them structurally impossible.

     Feminine structure proves that the phallic function has its limits and that the signifier isn't everything. Feminine structure thus bears close affinities to hysteria as defined in the hysteric's discourse.

345. #345

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.234

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**Index**

     Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

     Hysteria, 95, 107, 125

346. #346

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.234

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit? > Concluding Remarks > (Essential) Appendix: The Phallus

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys two registers of symbolic castration — enjoyment and meaning — using Plato's Timaeus to illuminate the paradoxical exteriority of sexuality to the organism, and Žižek's account of the phallus-as-insignia to show that symbolic castration is not symbolic-as-metaphorical but the constitutive gap opened by assumption of a symbolic mandate.

     the last part of this passage was responsible for the original naming of hysteria (from hystera, uterus) and for its being considered, for a long time, an illness caused by a 'wandering uterus'

347. #347

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.213

     Wozu Phallus in dürftiger Zeit?

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Lacan's insistence on the phallus as the *signifier* of castration—rather than its anatomical embodiment—transforms phallic necessity into contingency: by spelling out the link between an anatomical peculiarity and the symbolic deadlock (the constitutive gap between body and enjoyment), psychoanalysis moves the phallus from the impossible-necessary register into the contingent, thereby dethroning it and exposing sexual difference as defined not by presence/absence of castration but by the mode of relation to its universal signifier.

     the classic hysterical symptoms which usually take the form of some kind of physical dysfunction... how they seem to be uncannily able to 'decide' which part of the body will 'take on' the impasse of enjoyment

348. #348

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.151

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Burned by the Sun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject of the unconscious has the structure of a Kierkegaardian apostle—a pure formal function of impersonal Truth rather than an expression of ego or id—and that the "Thing from Inner Space" (which modern art strains toward beyond the pleasure principle) is not the Kantian Thing-in-itself but rather the site of the direct inscription of subjectivity into reality, emerging through fantasy-staging of what is "actually" a rational phenomenon.

     Is not what we encounter in hysteria precisely a 'body of truth': in the physical symptoms that result from the hysterical 'conversion,' the immediate organic body is invaded, kidnapped, by a Truth, transformed into a bearer of truth.

349. #349

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.303

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the discourse of the Analyst and the discourse of perversion share the same upper-level formula (a–S/), such that the crucial difference lies in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a (as fantasmatic lure vs. the Void behind it); consequently, today's civilization functions as a perverse social link, and psychoanalysis—as the only discourse permitting non-enjoyment—points toward a different collective social bond beyond the Master's discourse.

     he posits her as the hystericized/divided subject who 'doesn't know what she wants'—the pervert knows it for her

350. #350

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.401

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > 2Building Blocks for a Materialist Theology

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations and brief theoretical glosses; while several substantive conceptual asides occur (on the phallus as signifier of castration, Saint Paul's comic reinterpretation of Christ's death, the banality of the Good, and Stalinist normalization), the material is primarily footnote apparatus rather than sustained theoretical argument.

     does the uterus not function in the same way in the old notion of 'hysteria' as a disease of the traveling womb? Is hysteria not the illness in which the partial object within the subject runs amok, and starts to move around?

351. #351

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.206

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > "Positing the Presuppositions"

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that genuine freedom is not the absence of causal determination but the retroactive capacity to choose which causes determine us — a "positing of presuppositions" structure that links Bergsonian retroactive possibility, Kantian self-determination, Hegelian Setzung der Voraussetzungen, and Varela's autopoiesis into a single temporal-ontological loop.

     she was hysterical, probing, authentic, self-destructive; while he was mythologizing and putting the blame on the Other.

352. #352

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.134

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the "parallax view" as a structural principle—no common denominator can resolve the split between incommensurable perspectives (First World/Third World, Milly/Densher/Kate)—and uses this to argue that genuine ethical acts consist not in symbolic reconciliation or hysterical clinging to fantasy, but in a traversal of fantasy that breaks the deadlock from within, as exemplified by Kate's refusal in James and Paul's self-sacrifice in Iñárritu.

     Her 'hysterical' solution, then, is nothing but a cleaving to the sustaining barrier that prevents us from ever achieving the full realization of desire.

353. #353

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.327

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that egalitarian political "terror" (from the Jacobins to Maoism) is a symptom of the *foreclosure* of the economic sphere rather than its over-extension, and that Badiou's anti-Statist politics reaches a deadlock precisely because it refuses to grant the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth/evental potential—the only exit being to restore the economic as a site of Event.

     What was the Jacobins' recourse to radical 'terror' if not a kind of hysterical acting-out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order

354. #354

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.248

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Unconscious Act of Freedom

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Kantian/German Idealist Self-Consciousness (the empty point of pure reflectivity) is structurally identical to Lacan's subject of the Unconscious, and that this identity is confirmed by Kant-Schelling's notion of a primordial, atemporal act of choice: what phenomenal self-awareness experiences as imposed nature is in fact a radically unconscious free act, meaning Self-Consciousness itself is radically unconscious.

     Take the typical attitude of a hysterical subject who complains how he is exploited, manipulated, victimized by others, reduced to an object of exchange—Lacan's answer to this is that this subjective position of a passive victim of circumstances is never simply imposed on the subject from outside

355. #355

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.173

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

     Jean Laplanche wrote about the hysteric's 'primordial lie' which articulates the original fantasy: 'the term proton pseudos aims at something different from a subjective lie; it describes a kind of passage from the subjective to the founding—even, one could say, to the transcendental; in any case, a kind of objective lie, inscribed into the facts.'

356. #356

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.93

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Kantian ethical revolution—which displaces all external authority onto autonomous self-limitation—makes the "Sadeian perversion" not Kant's hidden truth but rather his *symptom*: Sade emerges precisely from Kant's failure to follow his own breakthrough to the end, and the only genuine resolution of the hysteric's demand for a Master is the analytic position of subjective destitution.

     Lacan's famous reply to the revolting students in 1968—'As hysterics, you want a new master. You will get one'—has to be given its entire Kantian weight

357. #357

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.125

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     this is what accounts for the elementary structure of hysteria, of the hysterical question 'Why am I what you are saying I am? Why am I at that place in the symbolic order?'

358. #358

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.132

     **The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy**

     Theoretical move: The "cinema of integration" operates ideologically by blending desire and fantasy so as to domesticate the gaze—transforming the objet petit a from a constitutively impossible object into an attainable one—and this blending is homologous to neurosis, which supplements desire with fantasy to shield the subject from the traumatic Real while producing only an imaginary transgression that reinforces ideological interpellation.

     When at the end of Studies on Hysteria Freud and Breuer explain their goal as one of transforming 'hysterical misery into common unhappiness,' they suggest—though they wouldn't have put it this way—eliminating the blending of desire and fantasy

359. #359

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.17

     **Contradiction** > **Displacement**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Freud's account of displacement as the core mechanism of anxiety hysteria (phobia formation): repression fails to eliminate unpleasure, so the libidinal cathexis is displaced onto a substitute idea, which then becomes the pivot of an escalating system of anticathexes, avoidances, and projections — showing how displacement, repression, and anxiety articulate with one another across three progressive phases.

     In anxiety hysteria a first phase of the process is frequently overlooked...The flight from a conscious cathexis of the substitutive idea is manifested in the avoidances, renunciations and prohibitions by which we recognize anxiety hysteria.

360. #360

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.188

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek *contra* Levinas

     Theoretical move: Žižek's critique of Levinasian ethics argues that the "face" of the other is always already symbolically mediated and therefore politically domesticated; against Levinas's ethical alterity, Žižek proposes the neighbor as the embodiment of the Lacanian Real—a traumatic, inhuman Thing that short-circuits the particular to produce genuine universality and grounds a more radical anti-racist politics.

     the neighbor 'remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes.'

361. #361

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.282

     Žižek Responds! > [Response to Ruti](#contents.xhtml_ch11a)

     Theoretical move: Žižek rejects Ruti's prioritization of desire over drive (and her reading of sublimation as 'taming' of the Thing into objet a), arguing instead that desire and drive are co-dependent parallax terms—neither more primordial—both being reactions to the same irreducible gap, while also insisting that 'desire of the Other' must be read at imaginary, symbolic, and real levels, and that lack is the lack in the Other itself, not merely the subject's own.

     Hysteria is a subjective stance of questioning (What do I really desire? What does my Other see or desire in me…), while a pervert knows, he is not haunted by questions.

362. #362

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.160

     [THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_5) > **WE DO THE CONCENTRATING**

     Theoretical move: By taking Nazism as the paradigm of identity politics rather than of universalism, McGowan argues that identitarian projects are structurally self-defeating: they require the very other they aim to eliminate in order to constitute their own identity, so that success is always simultaneously failure.

     Like every version of identity politics, it is a hysterical project, one that constantly undermines what it purportedly aims to accomplish.

363. #363

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.186

     [THIS IS NOT IDENTITY POLITICS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_6) > **COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that universality is not the additive sum of all particulars but rather what all particulars lack, and that Black Lives Matter exemplifies genuine universalism by fighting at the site of inequality rather than advocating colorblind inclusion — whereas "All Lives Matter" represents a retreat into particularism disguised as universality.

     The project of universal inclusion is hysterical: it doesn't want the total inclusion that it strives for.

364. #364

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     What if you held a protest and everyone came?

     Theoretical move: Capitalist realism is not undermined by anti-capitalism but structurally sustained by it: through fetishistic disavowal and interpassivity, ideological fantasy operates at the level of unconscious behavior rather than explicit belief, so that gestural anti-capitalism (Hollywood films, Live 8, Product Red) performs critique on our behalf while leaving capitalist relations intact.

     there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn't expect to be met.