You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
May 14, 1982
I recently re-read the account of the Seminar on “The Object-Relation.” In it, Lacan clearly grasped what Freud failed to see: that it is less a matter of owning a big penis than picturing it to oneself as a spare part.1 That a young boy may represent his penis to himself as removable is not, according to Lacan, a mere fantasy. And it is not blind chance if Little Hans experienced the plumber fantasy at the moment when his phobia was about to be resolved. The fact that he imagined his member as an instrument that can be dismantled, replaced with another, then screwed back on again—means that the status of the latter object had just changed. As a real penis, it had just been struck down with nullity. Conversely, it had attained the function of “signifier” i.e. a verbal element that can be displaced by thought, that may take on all sorts of meaning, depending on its relation to other elements, like a pawn on a chess-board. Though simply stated, this hypothesis is not so easy to follow, however, for the term “signifier,” having been used every conceivable way for twenty years, has floating meanings and consequently lands anyone who uses it on slippery ground. To solidify our ideas, as well as to grasp what was at stake for Lacan in this term (in ), we shall have to go back to the Seminar and its topic: the clinical case of Little Hans.
When his horse phobia began, making a nightmare of his walks through the streets of Vienna—then filled with omnibuses,