Object Relations Psychoanalysis

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (117)

1. #01

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **EGO PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT RELATIONS, LINGUISTICS, FEMINISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM, AND GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES**

   Theoretical move: This passage is a bibliography/further reading section listing secondary works on ego psychology, object relations, linguistics, feminism, post-structuralism, and queer/gay-lesbian studies; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argument.

   develops a theory of object relations—the idea that the infant incorporates good and bad images of his mother and other caregivers, creating an entire interior world of its own

2. #02

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.40

   LOSIN G W H AT WA S ALR E ADY G ONE

   Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the lost object is constitutively lost—generated retroactively by signification itself rather than empirically lost—and that the subject's satisfaction is inseparable from the repetition of this loss; capitalism and object relations psychoanalysis both err by granting the lost object a substantial, pre-given status, thereby obscuring the ontological primacy of lack.

   This is often visible in object relations psychoanalysis, which understands the subject as first and foremost relational rather than traversed by loss.

3. #03

   Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.262

   . THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM

   Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.

   In the case of Melanie Klein (to whom Jacques Lacan owes an enormous debt), a similar sense of dealing with actual objects that are lost occurs. Th e child is not dealing with a constitutively lost object but with empirically good and bad objects.

4. #04

   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.

   This accusation of reductivism broadens Lacan's indictments of his post/pseudo-Freudian rivals in the international analytic movement to include Kleinian object-relations theorists in addition to ego psychologists.

5. #05

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.18

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

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

   Both currents share in common a conviction that the true metapsychological foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis are laid only by the later Freud, starting in 1923's The Ego and the Id

6. #06

   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 intersubjective game by which truth enters reality

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symptom is constituted by the diachronic and synchronic operations of the signifier rather than by object-relations or emotional causality, and that the signifier's arbitrary yet overdetermined nature means it cannot serve as a guide to adaptive reality but instead generates a complex web of meanings that impacts reality — a view that Lacan uses to critique the ego-psychological and object-relations reduction of psychoanalysis to adaptive "corrective emotional experience."

   Reducing this complex web of signifiers to object relations does nothing to understand or change it.

7. #07

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.107

   [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Action figures

   Theoretical move: Lacan's "Return to Freud" is theorized here as a corrective practice that reinstates the primacy of the symbolic (signifier, speech, structure) against post-Freudian distortions—particularly object relations and affect-based readings of transference—thereby renewing both the conceptual foundations and the institutional situation of psychoanalysis.

   Such a detour allows him to begin critiquing object relations theory as the partner of the imaginary comforts of institutional association.

8. #08

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

   [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Mirages and other narcissistic extravagances

   Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical critique of mid-century psychoanalytic institutionalism — its narcissistic 'good object' ideology, fetishization of technique, and anal-stage ritualism — is shown to ultimately serve his core theoretical claim that the unconscious is structured like a language, grounding rhetorical tropes as defenses and linking style to the Real beyond meaning.

   He embraced and developed object relations theory in France and was President of the Societé Psychanalytique de Paris. Lacan's 'Variations on the Cure Type' (1956) was written in part as an antipode to Bouvet's theoretical and institutional position.

9. #09

   Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.208

   [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > Context

   Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes Lacan's 'The Direction of the Treatment' as a theoretical turning point that pivots from an intersubjective/symbolic model of analysis toward a structural account of desire as the metonymy of lack-of-being, in direct opposition to ego psychology and object relations approaches that centre adaptation and the analyst's ego as goals of treatment.

   ego psychology and object relations perspectives were the dominant theoretical and clinical paradigms. In both approaches, adapting the patient's behavior to the reality of the analyst was central to the treatment.

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.223

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "central defect" of post-Freudian theories of transference (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and intersubjective-introjective) is their reduction of the analytic situation to a dual, imaginary relationship, thereby neglecting the symbolic order and the constitutive impasse of desire; against these, Lacan insists that the direction of treatment must be oriented by the patient's signifiers rather than any normalizing ideal of adaptation or harmonious object-love.

    the second theoretical trend that Lacan examines ... is the object relational perspective ... The idea of a natural evolution from a defective pre-genital relation towards an untroubled genital relationship is untenable for Lacan. Again it leads to a psychoanalytic practice that aims at adaptation, sustaining the mirage of genital bliss

11. #11

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.227

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques reality-benchmarked analytic technique (as exemplified in Lebovici's case) by arguing that confining transference, the drives, and Freudian topographies within the imaginary dyad reduces being to a fact of reality, alienates the subject further, and forecloses the symbolic coordinates where analytic effects properly reside.

    it is not the genetic perspective or the study of object relations per se that is problematic for Lacan

12. #12

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

    [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 uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.

    Psychoanalysis is sometimes portrayed as an attempt to bring about maturation or progress into our 'object-relations'... The objects of object-relations theories are portrayed in Lacan's model by the bouquet of flowers.

13. #13

    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 (letters L–O) from a book on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    object relations [13]–[14], [18], [21], [85], [88], [107]–[108], [112], [129], [186]...

14. #14

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.60

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Thing about a Psychoanalyst

    Theoretical move: The analyst embodies both the little Other (das Ding) and the big Other (subject supposed to know) at different levels of the analytic encounter; the progress of analysis moves from the patient's identification of the analyst with the symbolic big Other toward the dissolution of that Other, ultimately returning the subject to the pre-symbolic abyss of das Ding as the core of the unconscious.

    Lacan rejects the ego-to-ego conception of analysis championed by some object-relations theorists in favor of a 'game of four players'

15. #15

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_104"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_page_0122"></span>***L*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part22.xhtml_ncx_106"></span>**language**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces four developmental phases of Lacan's theory of language, arguing that language (langage) functions as the single paradigm of all structure, that the unconscious is structured like a language of signifiers, and that language has both symbolic and imaginary dimensions—against any reduction of it to the symbolic order alone or to a mere code.

    Lacan criticises the way that other forms of psychoanalysis, such as Kleinian psychoanalysis and object-relations theory, tend to play down the importance of language and emphasise the 'non-verbal communication' of the analysand.

16. #16

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_97"></span>**introjection**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines introjection against Kleinian and Ferenczian usage by locating it exclusively in the Symbolic register (as introjection of the signifier/speech of the Other, constitutive of the Ego Ideal), while relocating projection to the Imaginary register, thereby dissolving the classical introjection/projection symmetry and exposing it as a confusion between fantasy and structure.

    Lacan criticises the way psychoanalysts have tended to adopt 'magical' views of introjection, which confuse it with incorporation

17. #17

    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_144"></span>**part-object**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's theorisation of the part-object from its Kleinian and Freudian origins through to its reformulation as objet petit a, arguing that for Lacan objects are partial not because they are fragments of a whole body but because they are only partially represented in the unconscious via the signifying system, and that they lack specular image—making them irreducible to narcissistic completeness.

    Lacan finds the concept of the part-object particularly useful in his criticism of object-relations theory, which he attacks for attributing a false sense of completeness to the object.

18. #18

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_37"></span>***cogito***

    Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with the Cartesian cogito performs a double move: it subverts the cogito's equation of subject=ego=consciousness (thereby grounding the critique of ego-psychology) while simultaneously retaining and radicalising the concept of the subject — identifying the subject of the cogito with the subject of the unconscious, and using it to articulate the split between enunciation and statement.

    Lacan's main criticisms of ego-psychology and object-relations theory is that these schools betrayed Freud's discovery by returning to the pre-Freudian concept of the subject as an autonomous ego

19. #19

    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_158"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0179"></span>**psychoanalysis**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes Lacan's position that his own practice constitutes the only authentic psychoanalysis—a return to Freud against deviations—and that psychoanalysis is an autonomous scientific discipline irreducible to psychology, medicine, philosophy, or linguistics, whose aim is not cure but the articulation of truth.

    the three major non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory (KLEINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS, EGO-PSYCHOLOGY, OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY) are all, in Lacan's view, deviations from authentic psychoanalysis

20. #20

    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_69"></span>**father**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically distinguishes three registers of the father (symbolic, imaginary, real) to show that the father is not a unified concept but a tripartite structure whose interplay constitutes the conditions of possibility for subjectivity, psychosis, and perversion — and to position Lacan's theory against object-relations prioritization of the mother-child dyad.

    Lacan's emphasis on the importance of the father can be seen as a reaction against the tendency of Kleinian psychoanalysis and object-relations theory to place the mother-child relation at the heart of psychoanalytic theory.

21. #21

    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 criticises the Kleinian account of fantasy for not taking this symbolic structure fully into account, and thus remaining at the level of the imaginary

22. #22

    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_75"></span>**Freud, return to**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's "return to Freud" is not a simple return to orthodoxy but a claim to have uncovered a deeper, coherent logic in Freud's texts that had been obscured or betrayed by post-Freudian schools (ego-psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory), while simultaneously functioning as a rhetorico-political challenge to the IPA's monopoly on the Freudian legacy.

    Freud's radical insights had been universally betrayed by the three major schools of psychoanalysis within the IPA: EGO-PSYCHOLOGY, KLEINIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS, and OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY.

23. #23

    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_135"></span>**object-relations theory**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object-relations theory targets its reduction of the object to a register of need and satisfaction, its neglect of the symbolic dimension of desire, and its idealization of a perfectly symmetrical dyadic relation, against which Lacan reasserts the triadic Oedipal structure and the irreducibility of symbolic desire.

    object-relations theory can be contrasted with EGO-PSYCHOLOGY on account of its focus on objects rather than on the drives in themselves.

24. #24

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_94"></span>**International Psycho-Analytical** **Association**

    Theoretical move: The passage uses the IPA as a foil to articulate Lacan's institutional and theoretical positioning: his excommunication from the IPA becomes the occasion for defining his own school's aims (La Passe, cartels) and his "return to Freud" as a corrective to the IPA's betrayal of psychoanalysis, particularly through its embrace of Ego Psychology.

    Lacan levelled various criticisms at all the main theoretical tendencies in the IPA, including Kleinian psychoanalysis and object-relations theory

25. #25

    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_125"></span>**moebius Strip**

    Theoretical move: The Möbius strip, as a topological figure, is deployed by Lacan to dissolve binary oppositions (inside/outside, signifier/signified, etc.) by demonstrating that apparently discrete terms are in fact continuous, and to model the possibility of traversing the fantasy without a localizable crossing point.

    In the work of Melanie Klein, the emphasis shifted from the role of the father to the pregenital mother-child relation; the latter was described as a sadistic relation in which the child makes (in fantasy) vicious attacks on the mother's body.

26. #26

    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_51"></span>**development**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of developmental psychology (geneticism) turns on replacing a linear, chronological model of psychosexual maturation with a structural, retroactive account: the so-called stages of development are timeless symbolic structures ordered *nachträglich* by the Oedipus complex, and entry into the Symbolic is always a creation ex nihilo rather than gradual evolution.

    while both ego-psychology and OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY propose the concept of a final stage of psychosexual development, in which the subject attains a 'mature' relation with the object, described as a genital relation, this is totally rejected by Lacan.

27. #27

    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_126"></span>**mother**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's theory of the mother across three registers (real, symbolic, imaginary) and traces how the child's relation to the mother's desire—structured around the phallus—generates anxiety, drives the entry into the symbolic order, and ultimately requires the paternal function to resolve the imaginary deadlock of the Oedipus complex.

    Hence much of Lacan's work is aimed at shifting the emphasis in analytic theory from the mother-child relation (the preoedipal, the prototype of the imaginary) back onto the role of the father (the Oedipus complex, the prototype of the symbolic).

28. #28

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_ncx_101"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part21.xhtml_page_0119"></span>***K***

    Theoretical move: This passage makes two theoretical moves: first, it positions Kleinian psychoanalysis as a key foil for Lacan's reading of Freud, cataloguing his criticisms (fantasy in the imaginary, neglect of the symbolic, linguistic unconscious) while acknowledging partial affinities; second, it articulates Lacan's fundamental distinction between two modes of knowledge—imaginary connaissance (ego-based misrecognition) and symbolic savoir (unconscious desire, jouissance of the Other)—establishing their opposed roles in psychoanalytic treatment.

    Along with the two other major non-Lacanian schools of psychoanalytic theory (EGO-PSYCHOLOGY and OBJECT-RELATIONS THEORY) Kleinian psychoanalysis forms a major point of reference for Lacan

29. #29

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.186

    **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.

    Balint is one of the most self-aware of analysts… the entire development of analysis consists in the tendency of the subject to rediscover what he calls 'primary love'

30. #30

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.208

    **XVI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Balint's object-relations theory as a foil to argue that "two-body psychology" remains a relation of object to object, failing to introduce the properly intersubjective (symbolic) register, and that the erasure of the symbolic and imaginary in favour of a "call on the real" constitutes a technical and theoretical deviation from the fundamental analytic experience.

    Balint fully realises that there must be something that exists between two subjects. Since he is completely lacking in the conceptual apparatus necessary for introducing the intersubjective relation, he is led to speak of a two-body psychology.

31. #31

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.308

    xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

    Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Seminar I, listing terms and page references; it contains no original theoretical argument but maps the seminar's conceptual terrain through cross-referenced entries.

    object relation 11, 111, 174, 205. 209. 218-19, 261 absence of recognition of others in 213, 218-19 effacement of symbolic in 206

32. #32

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.217

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Balint's object-relation theory by showing that intersubjectivity—not satisfaction of need—is the original and irreducible dimension of desire, demonstrated through the perversions and Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze and love, and concluding that there is no transition from animal need to human desire without positing intersubjectivity from the start.

    analysis today is engaged in applying the notion of the object relation, which is caught—Lang's idea is extremely fruitful at this point—within that of frustration.

33. #33

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.211

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan critically exposes the theoretical dead end of Balint's object-relation theory, which defines the object purely as satisfier of need and models all libidinal life on a closed, harmonious mother-infant complementarity—arguing this framework cannot account for the subject's encounter with the Other as a genuine subject, and thus deviates from the fundamental analytic conception of the libido.

    the period extending from 1930 to today, which is marked by the growing influence, within analysis, of the notion of the object relation. I believe that that is the central point in the conception of Balint

34. #34

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    **vn**

    Theoretical move: Using the optical schema of the inverted bouquet, Lacan argues that the constitution of the ego and of reality depends on the position of the subject within the symbolic order: only from within the symbolic cone does the imaginary/real articulation cohere, while Dick's psychosis exemplifies the failure of this conjunction. Lacan simultaneously critiques Klein for lacking theories of the imaginary and the ego, and distinguishes projection (imaginary) from introjection (symbolic).

    Melanie Klein has neither a theory of the imaginary nor a theory of the ego. It is up to us to introduce these notions

35. #35

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    **XVII**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that intersubjectivity is not grounded in imaginary dyadic relation but in the symbolic function itself: the child's use of language (naming, presence/absence) demonstrates that the symbolic and the real are primary, with the imaginary only becoming accessible retrospectively through adult realisation - thus critiquing object-relations theory (Balint) for missing the constitutive role of the symbolic.

    In neglecting the intersubjective dimension, one slips into the register of that object relation from which there is no means of escape, and which leads us to theoretical no less than to technical blind alleys.

36. #36

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.17

    **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.

    Around this formula one may quite easily align all studies on object-relations, on the importance of counter-transference, and on a certain set of related terms, amongst which fantasy stands in the foreground.

37. #37

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of analytic experience rests on full speech as a performative, symbolic act of recognition—not on imaginary transference or indoctrination—and critiques object-relations and superego-based accounts (Strachey, Klein) for remaining trapped on the imaginary plane, proposing instead to relocate the question to the narcissistic/ego economy of the subject.

    he is obliged to posit that a set of exchanges, of introjections and projections, take place between the analysand subject and the analyst subject, which bring us to the level of the mechanisms by which good and bad objects introduced by Melanie Klein into the practice of the English school - are constituted.

38. #38

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

    This line of elaboration... sterilized everything that, in analysis, meant to move in the direction known as object relations and I've already taken a good number of different routes to rectify that.

39. #39

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.76

    BookX Anxiety > **v** > Schema of the effaced trace

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises when the constitutive void that preserves desire is filled in by a false response to demand, and that the drive (distinct from instinct) is structured by the cut between barred subject and demand, with partial objects (breast, scybalum) marking the place of this void rather than stages of relational maturation.

    The function that may be given to it in analytic theory in what goes by the name of object relations... finds itself justified by what I've just been saying, with nevertheless one slight difference, which is that everything about it gets falsified when one sees in it a model of the patient's world

40. #40

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that because the unconscious is structured as a temporal pulsation that opens and closes, and because repetition is always in relation to a missed encounter, transference cannot be simply identified with the efficacity of repetition or the restoration of hidden unconscious content — it is constitutively precarious and must be reconceptualized beyond catharsis or behavioural stereotype.

    the function of the internal object... polarized into the extremes of that good or bad object, around which, for some, revolves everything in a subject's behaviour

41. #41

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > ANALYSIS AND TRUTH

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that if the unconscious operates through temporal pulsation (opening and closing) and repetition is always a missed encounter rather than mere behavioral stereotype, then transference cannot be reduced to repetition, restoration of hidden unconscious content, or catharsis — it is structurally precarious and cannot be conflated with those efficacities.

    the function of the internal object. In the end, this function is polarized into the extremes of that good or bad object, around which, for some, revolves everything in a subject's behaviour

42. #42

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.101

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, understood topologically through the Klein bottle as a cut that reveals an a-cosmic surface, exposes the fundamental inadequacy of ego-psychological and developmental object-relations approaches to transference: the analyst risks being "deceived" (not merely deceiving) by reducing the structure of the subject to a normative developmental history of needs and traumatic incidence, thereby foreclosing the properly Freudian dimension of desire and the unconscious.

    The title is then: 'The unconscious exploitation of the bad parent to maintain belief in infantile omnipotence'

43. #43

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.256

    **Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic dialectic cannot be confined to demand and the maternal Other (as in object-relations approaches), but must pass through desire and ultimately jouissance; castration is reinterpreted not merely as the Oedipal prohibition but as the barrier of desire that bars the subject from jouissance — and the Hegelian master/slave dialectic is criticised for falsely attributing jouissance to the master, revealing it as a mirage.

    By limiting, as tends to happen within a certain analytic horizon, the whole dialectic of the relationships of the subject to the Other to demand, one ends up at this sphere limited to frustration, at the prevalence of the maternal Other, just about raised to the degree of complication that is called the composite parent.

44. #44

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    [Foot note

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its suppression of the Symbolic by reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary opposition, while the ideal ego / ego ideal distinction is repositioned as a platform for theorising the subject's relation to the Other.

    In French psychoanalytic work the notion of object relations has developed a good deal (Bouvet) imported from Anglo-Saxon authors (M Klein especially, after Abraham).

45. #45

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory and its reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's proper position is to demand nothing, and that what the analyst gives is the objet petit a — specifically, through the anal object as the paradigm of demand, castration, and the gift, Lacan exposes the scatological underside of the phallic dialectic in obsessional neurosis and the concept of oblativity.

    a certain analytic technique described as being centred on object relations, in so far as it brought into play in a certain fashion the phallic phantasy, and the phallic phantasy especially in obsessional neurosis.

46. #46

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not the object of need's satisfaction but the structural cause of desire, arising from the relationship between the subject's demand and the Other's desire — and that the scopic field (the gaze) occupies a privileged position in this structure precisely because Freud founded the analytic position by excluding the look, making it a paradigmatic object that reveals the subject's foundational relationship to the Other.

    let us take advantage of it... they have clearly allowed this relationship of the subject to the Other to deviate by reducing it to the register of demand

47. #47

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29

    [Foot note

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its failure to account for symbolic mediation, reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary dyad; meanwhile, the Nunberg-Lagache distinction between ideal ego and ego ideal serves as a platform for Lacan's theorisation of the Other.

    the notion of object relations has developed a good deal (Bouvet) imported from Anglo-Saxon authors (M Klein especially, after Abraham). Lacan is opposed to it underlining the absence of any references to elements of mediation in these conceptions.

48. #48

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

    there are normal perverts,

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's position is precisely to demand nothing, and that the privileged o-object in the field of the Other's demand is anal—linking oblativity, the phallic fantasy in obsessional neurosis, and the anal phase's logic of the bar (gift/retention) to show that 'giving what one has' is always giving shit, whereas genuine love is to give what one does not have.

    a certain analytic technique described as being centred on object relations, in so far as it brought into play in a certain fashion the phallic phantasy, and the phallic phantasy especially in obsessional neurosis

49. #49

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.248

    **Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structure of the subject necessarily bears the mark of a gap or wound that "full objectification" forecloses, and that the objet petit a—specifically as it appears in the scopic field and in oral/anal dialectics—is not the object of need-satisfaction but the cause of desire, which emerges only when the subject's demand is articulated in relation to the desire of the Other.

    let us take advantage of it... makes of the good breast, as it is called, an object of the demand made on the other; it is the object of the demand which comes from the other that gives its value to the excremental object. It is clear that all of this leaves us locked in a perfectly dual relationship

50. #50

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that masochism, neurotic rejection, and the sexual act cannot be understood through moralistic or pleasure-based frameworks but require a rigorous logical articulation of the subject's structural position; the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the Other, the phallus, the mother) that prevents any simple dyadic union, and feminine jouissance remains irreducible to what psychoanalytic theory has so far been able to articulate.

    a term like that of 'object relations' should have imposed itself here, is self-evident. This takes nothing from the ridiculous character of what happens when one tries to inscribe under this term, to vary it, to stagger it according to the greater or lesser ease in which the relation is inscribed.

51. #51

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that alienation is the pivotal operation through which the Freudian unconscious must be understood: by situating the Other as the locus of the word (and hence as barred, S(O)), he reframes the cogito's subject as inherently split and repressing, displacing both Cartesian self-transparency and object-relational nostalgia for primitive unity in favour of a logical articulation of the subject's constitutive dependence on the symbolic order.

    it is a crude and dishonest mythology to present, as the foundation of our experience, some nostalgia or other for a primitive unity, for a pure and simple pulsation of satisfaction, in a relationship to the Other, which is here the only one who counts, and who is imaged, who is represented as the Other of a feeding relationship.

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.82

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan re-articulates alienation as the pivotal operation that redefines the unconscious subject in relation to the Other-as-locus-of-the-word, arguing that the Freudian step is only graspable by tracing the consequences of the Cartesian cogito and by replacing the mythological "primitive unity" reading of psychoanalysis with the rigorous formula S(Ⓞ): the Other has no existence except as the site where assertions are posited as veracious, making the barred Other the nodal point of the dialectic of desire.

    a crude and dishonest mythology to present, as the foundation of our experience, some nostalgia or other for a primitive unity, for a pure and simple pulsation of satisfaction, in a relationship to the Other, which is here the only one who counts, and who is imaged … as the Other of a feeding relationship.

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.207

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that "masochism" as a clinical label obscures the logical structure of neurotic desire (specifically the "wish to be refused"), and that grasping the full range of satisfactions implied by the sexual act requires logical articulation—not moralistic or adaptive frameworks—culminating in the claim that the sexual act necessarily implies a third element (the prohibited mother, the phallus) and that feminine jouissance remains fundamentally unarticulated by sixty-seven years of psychoanalytic practice.

    a term like that of 'object relations' should have imposed itself here, is self-evident. This takes nothing from the ridiculous character of what happens when one tries to inscribe under this term, to vary it, to stagger it according to the greater or lesser ease in which the relation is inscribed.

54. #54

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.122

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that logic's defining function is precisely to resorb (conjure away) the problem of the subject supposed to know, and it is this structural feature that makes modern logic a privileged reference point for psychoanalysis — allowing it to pose the question of the analyst's existence in terms of quantification where the subject supposed to know is reduced to nothing.

    by women, by Melanie Klein. What do we do? We notice that it is precisely at the pre-genital levels that we have to recognise the function of the Oedipus complex.

55. #55

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.56

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's concepts of true/false self and therapeutic regression as a symptomatic case study to argue that any miscognition of the analytic act inevitably leads—however gifted the analyst—to a negation of the analytic position, thereby confirming the necessity of a theoretical critique of the psychoanalytic act.

    Winnicott tells us this self which is waiting. This self which, by being frozen, constitutes the false self that Mr. Winnicott has to return to by a process of regression

56. #56

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural function — neither an insult nor a psychological category but a knot of "dé-connaissance" (mis-knowing) — in order to argue that the psychoanalytic act must reckon with the irreducible overlap between truth and stupidity, grounded ultimately in the inappropriateness of the sexual organ for enjoyment and the constitutive failure of truth when it encounters the sexual field.

    it is object relations that is at stake, and as I explain, I am dealing with Maurice Bouvet

57. #57

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.32

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critique of Ego Psychology's normative ideal (Fenichel's "genital character") and Winnicott's object-relations framework to establish that the psychoanalytic act — constitutively tied to the manipulation of transference — is precisely what analysts have most systematically evaded theorising, and that there is no analytic act outside this transference dimension.

    some derisive remarks about what was put forward about it, in another context, and in a form that is even literally much more vulgar... about the primacy of object relations and the perfections in which they reached the effusions of internal joy which came from having reached this highest point

58. #58

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.54

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a triangular mapping of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as cardinal poles to locate the Barred Subject, the unary stroke (first Identification), and the objet petit a, arguing that Truth belongs to the Other/Symbolic, Jouissance to the Real, and Knowledge to the Imaginary—positioning the analyst in the void between them. He then reads Winnicott's transitional object as an inadvertent, incomplete articulation of the objet petit a, showing how object-relations theory approaches but fails to theorize the subject commanded by that object.

    Let us take an excellent author: Mr Winnicott. It is remarkable that this author to whom we owe one the most crucial discoveries... the transitional object... only lacks one thing, which is that one sees that everything that is said about it means nothing but the bud, the point, the first emergence from the earth of what? Of what the o-object commands, namely, the subject.

59. #59

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967.**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "stupidity" (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function irreducible to a mere insult, arguing that the psychoanalytic act must grapple with the overlap between truth and stupidity—specifically, that the sexual act (marked by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment) renders truth irreducibly compromised, which is the very dimension the psychoanalytic act operates within.

    it is object relations that is at stake, and as I explain, I am dealing with Maurice Bouvet

60. #60

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.57

    **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's true/false self distinction as a symptomatic case of misrecognition of the analytic act: the analyst who posits a "true self" waiting behind a "false self" covertly installs himself as the locus of Truth, thereby negating the properly analytic position—an error all the more consequential in a capable analyst.

    I am quoting this author because I consider that there is no one who comes near him in English

61. #61

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.304

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anaclitic relation is structurally grounded in the operation of objet petit a as a masking of the Other, that perversion consists in returning o to the big Other, and that phobia reveals the true function of anxiety-objects: the substitution of a frightening signifier for the object of anxiety, marking the passage from the imaginary (narcissism) to the Symbolic field.

    it reposes this lucubration which that I went through that year, because it was still lively, on object relations, with the whole myth of the so-called oblative stage, also qualified as genital

62. #62

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic order of marriage is constitutively androcentric (drawing on Lévi-Strauss), positioning the woman as an object of exchange rather than a subject, which generates an irreducible structural conflict between the symbolic pact (fidelity directed toward the universal) and the imaginary vicissitudes of libidinal relations; the myth of Amphitryon reveals that only a triangular structure involving a transcendent "god" (Name of the Father) can sustain the conjugal bond above imaginary degradation.

    Reread what Balint says about this - you'll find that when authors are somewhat rigorous and experimental. they reach the conclusion that this famous love is nothing at all.

63. #63

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

    the Fairbairns turn into an enrapturing discovery. Within the psychology of the subject, there are, Fairbairn notes, many more than just the three characters Freud talks of

64. #64

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.312

    XXIII > Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the -nature of language > LECTURE ^I

    Theoretical move: By contrasting the symbolic with the imaginary through a cybernetic lens, Lacan argues that the symbolic order has an irreducible autonomy—it governs human beings from the outside, constitutes their non-mastery over language, and grounds the Freudian insistence of the repressed as the relation of non-being to being.

    the coaptation of the subject by an elective, privileged, prevailing object, which gives the modulus of what is called, in what has now become a fashionable term, the object relation.

65. #65

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.105

    THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > O. MANNO N I: After GaliIeo, though.

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes 'drive' (pulsion) from 'instinct' to frame the object relation not as a direct ego-world bond but as always already mediated by a narcissistic imaginary relation to the other, making the mirror-stage formation of the ego the primary condition for any objectification, and opens this toward psychosomatics via the scopic organ.

    The object relation has become an empty catch phrase, allowing one to avoid lots of problems.

66. #66

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.262

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Object Relations theory (Fairbairn) for collapsing the imaginary and the real, and for reducing analytic action to an ego-normative dual relation; he argues instead that the imaginary only becomes analytically operative when transcribed into the symbolic order, where the subject's account of itself in speech constitutes the true lever of analysis.

    any theorisation of analysis organised around the object relation amounts in the end to advocating the recomposition of the subject's imaginary world according to the norm of the analyst's ego.

67. #67

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.231

    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.

    This famous object relation, which we are gargling with these days, has a tendency to be employed as a model, a pattern of the adaptation of the subject to its normal objects.

68. #68

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Fairbairn's object-relations reformulation of analysis as exemplary of a deeper theoretical error: the confusion of the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers under the single undifferentiated term 'object', which transforms analysis into an ego-remodelling exercise grounded in the specular/imaginary relation rather than the symbolic register of speech.

    Today the object relation is what is on the agenda. I've told you how central it was to all the ambiguities which now make it so difficult to recapture the meaning of the last segments of Freud's work

69. #69

    Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    On Feminine Sexuality The Limits of Love and Knowledge > On jouissance

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sexual jouissance is structurally defined by an impasse—the impossibility of the sexual relationship—and uses topological concepts (compactness, open sets, finity) to articulate how phallic jouissance constitutes an obstacle to jouissance of the Other, while the Not-all marks the female pole's irreducible remainder. Love is revealed as narcissistic, and its object-like substance is in fact the objet petit a as remainder in desire.

    the substance of what is supposedly object-like (objectal) - what a bunch of bull - is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause

70. #70

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.314

    **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structurally precipitated when a primordial signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—is foreclosed (verworfen) and thus cannot be received from the field of the Other, reducing the subject to a purely imaginary, dual relation of mutual destruction; this is contrasted with the authentic symbolic invocation that addresses "all the signifiers" constituting the subject, including symptoms.

    Those who operate with object relations believe they are actually designating them, and consequently it's only rarely, and then by pure chance, that any beneficial effect is produced.

71. #71

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.28

    **I** > **1**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinction between neurotic repression and psychotic repression is a matter of their different positions within the symbolic order, and that misrecognizing the autonomy of the symbolic—substituting imaginary recognition for symbolic exchange—is the structural cause of analytic-triggered psychosis; verbal hallucination is theorized as the moment the subject collapses into identification with the ego, speaking to itself in the real.

    The current handling of the object relation in the context of an analytic relation conceived as dual is founded on a misrecognition of the autonomy of the symbolic order.

72. #72

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.247

    **XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's discovery belongs irreducibly to the field of the signifier — not to biography, sexuality, or intuition — and that the current deformation of psychoanalysis into ego-orthopedics and object-relations represents a fundamental misrecognition of this literal, deciphering dimension that Freud himself enacted in dream-interpretation.

    bastardized notions like that of the object relation, the recourse to the ineffability of affective contact and of lived experience - all of this is strictly foreign to the inspiration behind Freud's work.

73. #73

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.178

    **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.

    an exclusive preponderance of the world of imaginary relations is responsible for the emphasis in analysis on the object relation, which has elided what is properly speaking the field of analytic discoveries.

74. #74

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.333

    **XXV** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan consolidates his theory of psychosis around the foreclosure of the paternal signifier, arguing that the psychotic's structural "askewness" in relation to the signifier — exemplified by Schreber — is not a deficiency of object-relating but an impossibility of access to the Name-of-the-Father as signifier, and uses this to polemicize against object-relations theory's reduction of analytic experience to imaginary absorption.

    Recent analytic technique is clouded by the object relation. The supreme experience that is described, this famous distance taken in the object relation, ultimately consists in fantasizing the sexual organ of the analyst and imaginarily absorbing it.

75. #75

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.323

    **XXV** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan defends Freud's account of Schreber's psychosis—centered on castration, the Phallus, and the paternal function—against Macalpine's pre-oedipal/imaginary fantasy alternative, arguing that only a framework grounded in speech and the function of the father can account for the "verbal auditivation" and structural features that distinguish psychosis from neurosis.

    Delusion may be regarded as a disturbance of the object relation and is therefore linked to a transference mechanism.

76. #76

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.308

    **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **"Thou art"**

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the existentialist notion of "openness of being" as philosophically inadequate for analytic work, proposing instead that being's openness must be re-situated within determinate "gaps of being" that psychoanalytic experience reveals—while also previewing the following year's seminar theme on object relations, phobia objects, and fetishes.

    Next year... I shall take as the theme of the seminar the object relation or purported relation.

77. #77

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.418

    FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the scholarly correction of Freud's mistranslation (kite vs. vulture) in the Leonardo essay not to discredit Freud but to isolate what is genuinely original in that text: the introduction of the phallic mother as the child's imaginary relation to the phallus-as-lack, which also marks the inaugural structuring of the imaginary register and the first appearance of narcissism in Freud's work.

    the original structure is the one around which this year I have been making the fundamental criticism of the object relation revolve, in as much as the object relation is designed to instate a certain stable relationship between the sexes

78. #78

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.89

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations framework by showing that what is presented as successful therapeutic "accommodation" to the real object (measured by proximity to it, e.g., perception of the odour of urine) is not genuine analytic progress but an artefact—a constructed, fragile pseudo-perversion that collapses at the first intrusion of the symbolic (being caught by the usherette), demonstrating that the "real" in this framework is ideologically managed rather than genuinely encountered.

    the distance from the real object throughout the observation we are told that this is the point at which any neurotic relationship fails is finally accommodated within its exact scope

79. #79

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.10

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Lacan inaugurates Seminar IV by arguing that the Object Relations school's reduction of analytic experience to a dual subject-object relation (line a-a') is theoretically inadequate: against this, he retrieves Freud's own notion of the object as a *lost* and re-found object, constitutively marked by repetition and irreducible tension, which requires the full complexity of the L-Schema (subject/Other/imaginary axis) rather than a simple dyadic rectification.

    this experience is being reformulated by an ever larger number of analysts who give priority in analytic theory to the object relation as something primary, without for all that offering any further commentary. They have been realigning the entire dialectic of the pleasure principle and reality principle on the object relation

80. #80

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces a tripartite schema (castration/frustration/privation) to critique the "harmonic" object-relations conception of frustration dominant in post-Freudian analysis, arguing that frustration must be understood through the asymmetric interplay of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers rather than as a quantitative deficit in a natural complementarity between infant and mother.

    it's amusing to see from what angle the theoretical reconstruction that she proposes comes under attack, especially given that object relations are at issue.

81. #81

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.297

    XVIII CIRCUITS

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the horse in little Hans's phobia functions primarily as a "polarising" signifier — not because of its symbolic content but because of its formal structural role: introduced at a critical moment, it reorganises the field of the signified, constitutes limits and transgressions simultaneously, and operates as a signal that restructures Hans's world. The analysis pivots on the priority of the signifier over the signified, against any object-relations or content-based reading.

    What can it mean in the register of the object relation, which is conceived of as a sort of developmental evolution that is immanent to itself, arising by way of successive thrusts that it would be a mere matter of fostering?

82. #82

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.168

    THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Freudian impasse between identification and object-choice by grounding both in the symbolic structure of the love relation and the oral drive, arguing against the Kleinian symmetry of introjection/projection and proposing instead that the drive always targets the real object as a part-object of the symbolic object—a dialectic of frustration and need that structures the constitution of the object from the outset.

    They would evoke, for instance, the infamous constitution of primordial objects that divide in just the right way into good and bad objects that are alternately introjected.

83. #83

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.74

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations school (Marty, Fain, Bouvet) for reducing the analytic situation to a real dyadic relationship aimed at collapsing imaginary distance, thereby foreclosing the symbolic dimension of speech and the Other — and shows that this technical orientation produces paradoxical perverse reactions, particularly in obsessional cases. Against this, he reaffirms that the symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes must be held in their mutual, crossing functioning, with the paternal function and Oedipus complex as the fourth term that re-situates the preoedipal imaginary triad.

    The analytic conception of object relations has already become something of an historical reality. What I've been trying to show you takes this up in a sense that is in part different and in part the same

84. #84

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.62

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that frustration must be re-theorized through a structural distinction between the real object and the symbolic agent (the mother), showing how the presence-absence opposition introduced by the fort-da game grounds the virtual origin of the symbolic order, and how the mother's failure to respond converts her from symbolic agent into a real power, causing a reversal whereby the object becomes symbolic (a gift-token) rather than merely real.

    the notion of the totality of the mother. On this basis, the so-called depressive position is established

85. #85

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.25

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object relation cannot be theorized without the phallus as a third-party element disrupting any dual (imaginary) subject-object relation, and that the dominant object-relations practice errs by reducing the analytic situation to an imaginary dyad (identification with the analyst's ego), as exemplified by its mishandling of obsessional neurosis.

    resulting in what I shall call an imperialism of identification... the furtherance of the analysis would be dragged, in a pure stripping back, towards an identification with the analyst's ego.

86. #86

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.284

    HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a "golden rule" for analytic reading: signifier-elements must first be defined by their articulation with other signifiers, never reduced to a univocal signified. This principle, illustrated through the polysemic horse in the Little Hans case, is grounded in the structural study of myth (Lévi-Strauss) and simultaneously critiques object-relations theory as trapped in the contradictions of the Imaginary.

    the currently used notion of the object relation was founded. In our time, object relations, with everything that is normative and progressive about them in the subject's life… belong to the register of the imaginary.

87. #87

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Lacan contrasts his own structural account of the subject—grounded in the tension between pleasure principle and reality principle, the mirror stage, and the primacy of the unconscious—with the object-relations and ego-psychology tradition (traced through Abraham, 1924) that reduces analytic experience to ego-adaptation, subject-object reciprocity, and the ideal of a "genital" normalisation, arguing that this reduction is fundamentally foreign to Freud's point of departure.

    They refocused everything in accordance with an object — the terminal point of which is not the same as our point of departure... This ideal object is literally unthinkable.

88. #88

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish is constituted not through metaphor but through metonymy: it is the point in the symbolic-historical chain where the subject's history is arrested, functioning as a screen-memory that marks the onset of repression and veils the beyond-zone where the phallus-as-presence-absence should appear, while the subject's erotic life oscillates between imaginary identifications due to insufficient symbolization of the ternary (Oedipal) relationship.

    The Kleinians won't ascertain anything for you in this matter... Just look how comfortable the members of the English school are—fair to middling, actually—thanks to Mrs Melanie Klein's system.

89. #89

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.83

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the normal Oedipal resolution installs the subject symbolically as bearer of the phallus through a paternal pact, and that when this symbolic mediation fails, imaginary solutions (fetishism, perversion) emerge as substitute modes of binding the three imaginary objects — with fetishism paradigmatically analysed as an oscillating specular identification between mother and phallus that can never achieve symbolic stabilisation.

    This is what happens when this relationship is focused entirely on the object relation in so far as only the imaginary and the real are allowed to intervene

90. #90

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

    Texts like those by Glover, for instance, will refer you to a very different notion of the exploration of object relations, and which are even named and carefully defined as such.

91. #91

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the child's passage through the Oedipus complex requires moving from an imaginary dialectic of veiling/unveiling around the phallic object (as the mother's imaginary phallus) to the symbolic register of castration in relation to the father, and that little Hans's phobia enacts this transition mythically. The scopic drive is shown to be structurally distinct from the purely imaginary dual relation, grounding the analysis of perversion and the misrecognition of female castration.

    It's been a matter of preserving the depth and the Freudian articulation of what is infamously claimed to be an object relation, which on examination, as they say, proves not only to be not so straightforward

92. #92

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.122

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's case of the young homosexual woman through the L Schema's symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes, arguing that the phallus functions as the imaginary element through which the subject enters the symbolic dialectic of the gift, and distinguishing between frustration of love (intersubjective, symbolic) and frustration of jouissance (real, non-generative of object-constitution) against Klein and Winnicott's formulations.

    This distinction between the breast and the mother as a complete object is made by Mrs Melanie Klein. She distinguishes between, on the one hand, the partial objects, and on the other, the mother who is established as a whole object.

93. #93

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.270

    **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues against Jones's naturalistic account of the phallic phase by insisting that the phallus is only conceivable as the signifier of lack — the signifier of the distance between demand and desire — and that entry into femininity requires inscription in the signifying dialectic of exchange (as theorized by Lévi-Strauss), not a return to a primitively given female position; the child's entry into this same dialectic is conditioned by the mother's desire, itself signified by the phallus she lacks.

    One only has access to the child's original experience from a distance, but Melanie Klein has come as close to it as one possibly can by analysing three- to four-year-old children, and has given us the discovery of a relationship to the object that is structured in a form I have characterized as the empire of the maternal body.

94. #94

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.415

    **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference and suggestion constitute two distinct but constantly confused lines in analytic practice, and that it is desire — as the field of the divided subject — which resists the collapse of transference into suggestion/demand; neurosis is reframed not as a quantitative deficit of desire but as a structural arrangement that maintains desire's articulation against this collapse.

    the fascination with the notion of frustration, hence the various formulations that are expressed in a thousand ways in object relations and the conception of analysis that follows.

95. #95

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.397

    **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structurally maintained through prohibition rather than satisfaction: the obsessional turns the evanescence of desire into a forbidden desire supported by the Other's refusal, while clinically demonstrating that drive-stage 'fixations' are not imaginary regressions but signifying articulations of demand at the level of the unconscious—thereby critiquing developmental object-relations theory in favour of a structural account of desire beyond demand.

    Almost all analysts in their community presently take the summit and acme of the subject's happy attainment of what they call genital maturity to be access to 'oblativity'

96. #96

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Winnicott paradox—that optimal maternal satisfaction makes hallucination indistinguishable from reality—to expose the theoretical dead-end of grounding psychoanalytic development in a purely imaginary, hallucinatory primary process, and argues instead that desire, not need, is the originary term, requiring a structural (symbolic) account of the pleasure/reality principle opposition.

    the considerations by Mrs Melanie Klein on the role of symbols in the ego's formation... the register in which he inscribes the subject's relationship to the world becomes more and more exclusively one of a process of learning about the world carried out on the basis of a series of more or less successful experiences of frustration.

97. #97

    Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.214

    FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

    it's always, ultimately, the so-called depressive phase of the child's development that one is referring to whenever one brings this dialectic into play... the child doesn't simply have a relationship with an object that satisfies him or that doesn't satisfy him

98. #98

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

    THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

    people gave object relations a developmental definition...into modes of his relation to the world...A particular ego structure, specifying a certain type of relation to reality, was supposed to correspond to every form of libido.

99. #99

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

    Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VI by re-centering psychoanalytic theory on "desire" against the Object Relations drift toward "object-seeking" libido, arguing that desire—not affect, libido-as-energy, or object-relation—is the fundamental axis of psychoanalytic practice, and anchors this claim in a philosophical genealogy running from Aristotle's ethics of mastery through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence.

    Fairbairn...has written...that modern psychoanalytic theory has changed its axis somewhat compared to the one Freud initially gave it, inasmuch as it no longer considers libido to be 'pleasure-seeking' but, rather, to be 'object-seeking.'

100. #100

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.504

     MARGINALIA ON THE SEMINAR ON DESIRE

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial marginalia by Jacques-Alain Miller providing bibliographic references, personal anecdotes, and contextual notes on Seminar VI; it is non-substantive from a theoretical standpoint, though it contains brief allusions to several canonical concepts (Graph of Desire, Master/Slave Dialectic, Phallus, Hilflosigkeit) in passing bibliographic form.

     His Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality was published in 1952 by Tavistock... [Miller provides the Wikipedia article on Fairbairn].

101. #101

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.325

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Graph of Desire to distinguish fantasy's imaginary object (a) from the signifiers of demand, arguing that Object Relations theory errs by collapsing this distinction—Ophelia serves as the dramatic instantiation of objet petit a, and Hamlet's vacillating desire is theorized as the subject's fading (aphanisis) at the intersection of demand and fantasy.

     The confusion in question can be seen on our schema [the graph of desire]. It involves mistaking the dialectic of the object for the dialectic of demand. This confusion is understandable because in both cases the subject finds himself in the same position in his relationship with the signifier: he is eclipsed there.

102. #102

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.319

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is essentially the distance encoded in the barred subject's relation to objet petit a — the formula ($◇a) — and uses Ophelia as the paradigmatic figure of the phallus (girl = phallus) to dramatize how psychoanalysis has gone wrong by defining libido as object-seeking rather than grasping the object through the lens of aphanisis (fading of the subject).

     psychoanalysis has taken the wrong road. It formulates and defines this object in a way that misses its goal... libido, which was previously defined as pleasure-seeking, is now defined as object-seeking.

103. #103

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.457

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.

     Klein postulates two stages, the paranoid phase and the depressive phase that follows it.

104. #104

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.486

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has deviated from Freud by subordinating desire to object-relations and moralizing normalization; against this, he insists that desire must be theorized as irreducible subjectivity constituted through the signifying chain, whereby drives are decomposed and separated from their sources — making desire a mapping of the subject with respect to the Other's desire, not a vital impulse.

     with a surprising consistency, and almost regardless of which school an analyst gets his watchwords from, psychoanalysis is currently dominated by object relations. Everything is converging on object relations.

105. #105

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.302

     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.

     No one has ever discussed 'object relations' regarding Hamlet. People remain confused about this and yet it is the only thing that is at stake.

106. #106

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.475

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.

     This identification, which grows out of one of Melanie Klein's theories, is not, I must say, demonstrated in this case; it is simply assumed by the analyst at the end of the analysis.

107. #107

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a signifier—not a privileged object (contra Klein)—and that the subject's relation to it is structured by the dialectic of being versus having: men "are not without having it" (castration enables possession of objects), while women "are without having it," making the sexual positions asymmetrical and irreducible to each other.

     The most striking among them are those that Melanie Klein's theory translates and betrays [traduit, trahit], when, as we know, she makes the phallus into the most important object.

108. #108

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

     the reduction of the notion of sublimation to a restitutive effort of the subject relative to the injured body of the mother is certainly not the best solution to the problem of sublimation

109. #109

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **IX** > On creation *ex nihilo*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of sublimation grounded in the topological function of Das Ding: the Thing is that which "in the real suffers from the signifier," is constitutively veiled, and is represented—never directly encountered—by the created object, whose paradigmatic form is the potter's vase, a void-around-which that enacts creation ex nihilo.

     Melanie Klein finds confirmation of a structure that seems to her illustrated admirably there... Klein's conception, functions in the child that are sufficiently libidinalized through sublimation are subsequently subjected to an effect of inhibition.

110. #110

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-179-0"></span>**TRANSFERENCE IN THE PRESENT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, and uses this to reread Socrates' role in the Symposium as an unwitting analyst who redirects Alcibiades' transference love toward his true desire — thereby grounding the analytic situation in the structural relation between two desires rather than in object-relations theory.

     modern theorists thought, not groundlessly, they had to construct the whole theory of object relations, as well as that of projection... all the content of what occurs at the imaginary level

111. #111

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's investigation of narcissism and the mirror stage reveals that self-love is always love of an imaginary other, and that the unconscious—structured like language—marks the place where the subject is split from the Thing (Das Ding), making any ethics grounded in ego-psychology or object relations insufficient for the demands of scientific modernity.

     This notion of object relations harbors within itself a profound ambiguity, if not a pure and simple confusion, for it gives a natural correlate a characteristic of value that is camouflaged behind reference to a developmental norm.

112. #112

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.141

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter03.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that reading Marx through Hegelian dialectics, Platonic anamnesis, and Lacanian subjectivity reveals: (1) capitalism's internal contradictions become visible only at its full realization; (2) liberation requires a master-function that constitutes volunteers as such; and (3) Hegel's theory of labor as negativity corrects both workerist and OOO misreadings of the subject.

     object-oriented ontology maintains and defends the autonomy of objects, regardless of the specificity of the relation in which they occur… this is also the reason why there is neither place nor space for the subject in this theoretical orientation.

113. #113

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.213

     The Search for a Möbius Topology and Extimate Causality

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) unwittingly presupposes the very Lacanian framework it tries to circumvent: the "object-in-itself" it posits is nothing other than the Real of the cut (objet petit a), which functions simultaneously as object-cause and void of desire, thereby demonstrating that a dialectical materialist account of objet a—with its Möbius topology and extimate causality—supersedes OOO's subject-less ontology.

     objet a is both substantialized (object of desire) and permanently inaccessible (a void). If such an object has 'allure,' this is because it is an object-cause of desire objet a—not a 'withdrawn' object among other objects.

114. #114

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.209

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Object (a): Cause of Desire

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage does substantial theoretical work in clarifying the concept of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) as structural surplus analogous to Marxian surplus-value — not an end or excess of jouissance but an additional, supplemental jouissance — while also distinguishing imaginary, symbolic, and real registers of the object, and situating objet petit a as the real cause of desire rather than a symbolically constituted object of demand.

     Lacan clearly implies that 'object relations theory' is barking up the wrong tree.

115. #115

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.108

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-105-0"></span>*The Other as Object, Symbolic Relations*

     Theoretical move: By tracing the analyst's proper position through a critique of both imaginary and symbolic identifications, Fink argues that situating the analyst as the omniscient Other of demand traps the analysand at the level of demand rather than desire, and that only by relinquishing the position of subject supposed to know—redirecting knowledge-authority to the analysand's own unconscious—can analysis constitute the subject as desiring rather than demanding.

     Certain analysts (including, for example, Winnicott) believe that it is the analyst's duty to play mother to the analysand, as the analysand's neurosis is indicative of 'inadequate mothering.'

116. #116

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

     "Object Relations"

117. #117

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.56

     **Object Relations Psychoanalysis**

     Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Object Relations Psychoanalysis for treating the lost object as empirically contingent rather than ontologically constitutive, contrasting Fairbairn's 'paradise lost' with Freud's priority of loss; (2) it elaborates the big Other as the symbolic order that mediates desire, whose constitutive non-existence is the very condition of both freedom and capitalist ideology's grip on the subject.

     This is often visible in object relations psychoanalysis, which understands the subject as first and foremost relational rather than traversed by loss.