Chapter 4 The Space Where the I Can Come About

Every subject is born into a ‘speaking space’, which is why, before approaching the structure of the I, as an agency constituted by discourse, I shall analyse the conditions necessary for that space to offer the I a habitat suitable for its needs.

The infantile state is such that between this individual psyche and the ‘psychical environment’ a ‘micro-environment’—the family or what takes its place—will serve as an intermediary link and, during an initial stage, be perceived and cathected by the child as a metonym for the all. This tiny fragment of the social field becomes for him the equivalent and reflection of a totality whose differential characteristics it will discover only in the course of a series of successive elaborations. Hence the need to define the parameters proper to this micro-environment, the organisation of the libidinal forces that flow through its field and, more specifically, the action, for and on the infant's psyche, of those two essential organisers of family space, the parental couple's discourse and desire.

The analysis of this psychical milieu privileged by the infant's psyche, and which will mark his destiny, will bear in turn on the following factors:

• the ‘word-bearer’1 and its repressive action, the effect and aim of the anticipation proper to the mother's discourse;

• the ambiguity of the relation between the mother and the child's ‘knowledge-and-power-to-think’;

• the duplication of the violence imposed by what I have called, paraphrasing Schreber, ‘the fundamental language’—in other words, that series of ‘performative’ statements that will name that which is experienced, and which, by that fact alone, will transform affect into feeling;

• what comes from the couple's discourse returns to the child's psychical stage to form the first rudiments of the I; these are the external ‘objects’ already

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  cathected by the libido, which, after the event, give birth to the I by denoting it as that whic