“First of all, I would like to begin by saying that I hold Melanie Klein’s work in great esteem. In fact, hers is a major work for anyone considering practising child analysis. It is a key work, but it also requires a reasoned approach, otherwise there ends up occurring what happened to her followers, that is, you go on an endless drift as we can see.

I would also like to point out that whether it was due to Melanie Klein’s or Anna Freud’s school of thinking, psychoanalysis was done for!  It would have been over, had it not been for Lacan who came along and precisely re-conceptualized it in the ordered fashion as we know it today.

The other element that I admire in Melanie Klein’s work is the fact that what she says in her texts addresses not only child symptoms, but also exactly what you can see in society today. So if you don’t understand a thing about society, go back to Melanie Klein’s texts, and there you will find the modern explanation of what is going on today. And therein I end my point.

When I suggested this theme as a study subject last year, I obviously didn’t agree with the work’s title and its mention of controversy. As you well know, controversy is a term that comes from Glover, who himself, during debates, never ceased to stress the extra-analytical value of Melanie Klein’s contribution, and constantly presented Klein’s theories as a threat to the analytical community of London at the time. Without a doubt, it is also Glover to whom we owe the split into the two distinct divisions of Freudians and Kleinians, a division which was precisely what Melanie tried to avoid. Moreover, it is obvious that we can no longer entertain the illusion that discussing the different opposing theses should or could be debated freely, nor that the debate could ever be encapsulated in any sort of summary. Melanie Klein’s contribution is etched in the same vein as Freud’s work, there is no doubt about it, in spite of the obvious weakness in several of her observations. Lacan certainly knew what he was doing when after hearing her speak at a conference after the War, he offered to translate one of works.

Any innovation in psychoanalysis always entails a certain degree of initial uncertainty which cannot be immediately verified.  What is interesting about the accounts presented in the work by the different major players is the fact that they felt obliged to specify their theses, whereas in any other circumstances, they probably wouldn’t have felt so inclined. As for the possibilities left open for them and the listeners to check the validity of Melanie Klein’s theories, it goes without saying that in the field of psychoanalysis, and therefore all that deals with the unconscious, it would be presumptuous to want to immediately establish the relevance of the theories being suggested. And to prove the point, I would like to highlight that none of these discussions ever lessened the fact that Melanie Klein’s theses have always been difficult to understand, and nor did they alter the practice of designating two theoretical frameworks, namely Kleinian and Freudian.

So now I will address the question of the death instinct. Why make such a choice? The reason is that the death instinct is the key point on which hinges the link between the work of Melanie Klein and that of Freud. Melanie Klein herself, quoting Hightington, echoed that the discovery of Freud’s text – “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” – had made sparks fly at the time, and that this had been her most intense experience – and what an experience it was! In the spring of 1941 she revealed to Jones: “There is a path which leads straight to the heart of understanding depression, and which has occupied my mind ever since. I began to understand the origins and nature of depression and of the huge spectrum of human emotions, of the power of love and the power of hate, of sadness and hope, and once I had understood all this, I perceived the world as a much richer place. But it is an extremely difficult undertaking to describe this knowledge to those who don’t see it. Freud would have had the calibre, the strength and the power to describe it to the world.” Later on, she returned to the same question in a letter addressed to Jones, in which she wrote: “My research on depression is equally too much to take in and develop, even for those who accepted my work on internal objects, or even on persecuting fears. ‘You will never manage,’ Glover said to me, ‘it goes too deep’. I am still very far from reaching the end goal, as we well know, and in a way, I am even further than I was a few years back, and I am now faced with new difficulties, possibly even greater still. Yet have you know that I am far from despairing. Rather, I am calculating how hard it is, and how much power of explanation I will need in order to prove the validity and importance of the discoveries.” An extraordinarily frank letter – Melanie Klein’s texts still ring out with striking relevance to those who read them today. As for the new difficulties that her theories faced, or rather her difficulties in managing to specify the terms of her arguments – that is the precise subject of this discussion. She foresees the fact that her rather precise clinical observations are lacking in foundation, or an organizing base. And this is what she reveals when she confides in Jones. As she says, it questions the idea of the ability to prove things. Her critics however, make no further headway than her on the question, since they are not able to come forward and offer any more congruent elements than what she has already produced, other than dismissing her for her superficial reading of Freud. It is easy to see here in this example how futile and powerless criticism is in the domain of analysis. One may wonder why question her concept of premature depression, and why contradict the notion of unconscious phantasy in infants, and why debate her hallucinatory concept of desire, and therefore its potential psychotic effects on the notion of reality. Because if all of this isn’t examined, then it may be deemed being no more than an inattentive observation. And in fact, all of these points are already implied in Freud’s theories, whatever Anna maintains. The only pertinent arguments put forward don’t belong to Anna, but to other Viennese, as you well know, such as Kate Friedlander or Willi Hoffer.  As for the rest, it is mostly protracted discussions, and the work’s title should be ‘Misunderstandings’ rather than ‘Controversies’.

I will now turn to a small issue of translation, which seems to me to run right through this work on controversy, to remain true to its title – and that is the translation of the death instinct, todestrieb. The translators unfortunately translated it by instinct, death instinct: (and not death drive). It is an awkward translation based on a term that Strache introduced in his translation of Freud. Trieb, the Freudian Trieb is anything but an instinct. Firstly, there is quite a remarkable semantic flattening of the term. The trieb does not imply any genetic coding that is genetically innate such as in the case of animals. Instead, it suggests a thrust, an urge, or a drive. The German meaning of the word lies between thrust, inclination and an appetite for something. In other words, it suggests a relationship of desire. As for the verb trieben, it is particularly interesting as its meaning is a lot clearer – it clearly means to push, or to hurry but it also means to hunt down. Driving hard at work, pushing things to the limit etc. It also means to lead, to steer, and to take the driving seat. The trieber, that is the driver, means the oppressor, the slave driver, the leader and obviously the huntsman. I think it is important to highlight this term so that we are clear about its full assonance. But we must also approach this term trieb in a poetic light. When you look at the word the todestrieb, the death instinct (we should say death instinct to be perfectly rigorous) – that is, the way in which the subject is led by death – it is interesting to spot how critics of the term have made a mistake. They give a medical and physiological dimension to Freud’s theory. Several remarks made by Glover and others against Melanie Klein reveal to what extent they misunderstood the meaning of Freud’s thesis. Those who do not espouse the medical or biological dimension of the “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” read it as a metaphysical idea. One mustn’t forget to what extent this text ignited a veritable culture shock within the analytical community of 1920. And that is why an analyst had told Melanie Klein that it had made sparks fly, adding that Freud surely knew what he was doing. In 1920 this text was to rock the foundations of the accepted

analytical approach on two fronts. The opening of the text brings up the idea of trauma, yet instead of treating it as phantasy as when hysteria was discovered, it is treated as real. Freud illustrates how this Real dimension is at the root of repetition compulsion. That is as far as the description goes. Yet what are the implications of Freud’s formulation? It was a questioning of the hope ever to cure trauma, and therefore in some ways it belonged to a certain style of therapy linked to analysis. At the same time, if the roots of hysteria are attributed to sexual trauma, from that point onwards, the phantasy built on a trauma implies that about that reason, the hysterical person will never recover, and will continue to repeat out his or her phantasy. For some people who knew how to read the symptoms at the time, all of this called into question the precise aim that could be ascribed to analysis. It then became necessary to conceptualize the course of treatment in a different way. It would be the same if instead of a trauma we replaced it with the repressed traces of enjoyment, of lost enjoyment as Freud alludes to in his text for that matter. These repressed traces cause that same process of repetition. The second problem that arises from the repetition compulsion, beyond the repetition principle, is precisely linked to the death instinct. The initial interpretation of the term was as a tendency, a thrust towards an inanimate state of lifelessness, in the sense that life unravels towards its own destruction, its own end, all on a biological level. However, this interpretation is in part debatable from an analytical point of view because man’s desire is not necessarily channelled towards lesser tension, nor, it would appear a priori, towards its own slow destruction. In this case, the primacy of the pleasure principle as linked to a lesser tension collapses completely. And this brings us to the metaphysical interpretation, in that life entails death, and that the life and death instincts therefore constitute a relationship of polar opposites, connected to life. This is what Canon was to later explore with his concept of homeostasis, in other words physical and psychological equilibrium; and Barbara Low’s Nirvana Principle, or even the status quo that Ella Sharpe refers to in her contribution. One would need only to balance the life instinct on the one hand, represented by desire, sex, libido, and the death instinct on the other hand, represented by a tendency, by an ego, in a motionless status quo. This would appear to be the ultimate Freudian representation! But indeed, certain readers at the time realized that with the “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud was shaking up this traditional pair of polar opposites. On the one hand there is the pleasure principle, and not just the forces that may possibly oppose it, but in addition, there is something beyond it, which both contributes to and escapes these dialectics. Because Freud was never a dualist. For example, if you refer to the beginning of the article entitled “The Economic Problem in Masochism”, you will see in the first two pages how much care is taken by Freud to avoid such dualism. To give some examples: the soldier who is willing to spare his life for his country, and for his son; the member of the resistance who, with his country lost, kills himself to save his honour and to escape his victor’s glory – both these situations show how desire is part of a final aim that goes far beyond living. In some respects, the death instinct becomes a form of life protection. The hero is an example of someone who plays out this reversal. So as we can see, the death instinct poses a lot of complex problems in analysis, and the London analysts were far from fathoming the full difficulty involved.  

However, Melanie Klein’s take on the “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” is in an altogether different league, since it is not a question of interpreting the text in the same way as I have just tried to outline to you, that is, just as it appears in its structure, but it receives an interpretation of sorts for its own theoretical development – and you can certainly see the difference! Thus, the death instinct is directly viewed in her clinic as being a drive to destroy. The misunderstanding arises originally from the fact that effectively, in certain parts of his works, Freud explores this question and even hints at this dimension at times, yet later on, and particularly in the abridged version, he clearly changes his position on the question, and ceases to express the death instinct as synonymous with the destructive instinct.

The second shift that Melanie Klein introduces lies in the fact that the hate and primal aggression that is found in infants as they develop their first rudiments of relationships and drives, this hate and aggression are taken to reveal a tendency towards destructiveness, and therefore as being linked to the death instinct. Clinical observation therefore leads to an opposing couple, such as Empedocles and Heraclitus to take an example, in other words, an existential opposition that operates on a level that alternates between harmony and discord, between love and hate, between envy and gratitude, etc.  What appears fundamental is that all of a sudden from then on, dualism is similarly held in contrast with the death instinct, with an imaginary and negative significance, thus opposing the libido and the life instinct with something else which is the destruction of the object, an oral bite, an attack on the mother’s body, a tearing apart of her body and its substance, and of objects etc – facts, which according to Melanie Klein, originated from the oral, anal and urethral sadistic states, and which go on to represent the death instinct in the primal psychological system. Clinical facts which clearly cannot be denied, and which Melanie Klein insists however hadn’t been given sufficient importance because psychoanalysis was only concerned with the libido, and had therefore previously forgotten or censured this dimension of destructiveness, deeming that it didn’t belong in the realm of the libido. And here is where the problem lies in her formulation – this destructive instinct is placed outside the realm of the libido. We need to examine further to understand what Melanie Klein argues, and to draw possible conclusions.

She identifies the basis of the newborn child’s conflictual situation as being founded in the association between lack of satisfaction and helplessness. This is therefore quite a common experience for a newborn child, and one which is the trigger for the emergence of anxiety. All of this is laid out in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict”: “It is the association between the infant’s helplessness and lack of satisfaction which brings on the transformation of the libido into anxiety, although this association also generates fury.” For Melanie Klein, the association between anxiety and rage represents the link between libido and the destructive instinct. I’ll repeat again her very clear logic, which is this association of a helpless lack of satisfaction, which leads to anxiety, itself the transformation of the libido. Here she is taking up Freud’s thesis, revealed round about the year 1895, in which he stated that sexual inhibition or sexual frustration brought on anxiety, which itself led to a state of rage. This polar opposite of rage and anxiety is what she revisited in her clinic, and represents on the one hand the destructive instinct, and on the other hand the libido. She therefore manages to arrive at a definition that fits perfectly with anxiety – that is, that anxiety is the result of the aggression of the subject, or of his perception of the death instinct within him. Here however as a reminder I would like to highlight Freud’s interpretation of the question – anxiety remains fundamentally derived from the anxiety of castration, and as a result anxiety is conceived essentially as a defence mechanism against castration. Here however Melanie Klein makes a slight shift away from Freud’s thesis in situating the function of the newborn child’s death instinct. Where does she place it? She explains it, or rather tries to explain it in the following terms. I will read you an extract: “I have never ceased to reflect on the following contradiction: the death instinct must contribute to the hostile attitude of a newborn child towards stimuli, and initially contribute to any negative reactions that he has in his relationships with the outside world.  Of course, the life instinct is equally at work, and the newborn child tries to protect himself from any stimuli that he sees as dangerous. The contradiction originally appeared to lie in the fact that at the start of the newborn child’s life, his libido is more of a sucking kind, than a sadistic sort, as is the case a few months later. A newborn child’s libido is directed towards the inside of his mother, from where he has just emerged, and turned away from the outside world, and its stimuli etc (…)  What organizes the oral drive is said to be the most accessible element, and the one which offers what comes nearest to the fullest experience of a situation.  In addition, it should be added that the distribution of the libido, which remains directed towards this interior situation, and the mother’s interior, is an integral part of that complicated problem in which the destructive instinct seems weaker in relation to the mother’s breast, whilst remaining as virulent in relation to the outside world.” And as you know, it is on that basis that Melanie Klein developed her theory of the super-ego, stating quite simply that the super-ego is not borne out of the Oedipus complex, but that it develops a lot earlier than this. What conclusion can we draw from that? Well, the answer comes from another remark made by Melanie Klein which is also found in “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict”. She tells us that: “The Oedipus conflict begins in boys as soon as they feel hatred towards their father’s penis, and want to be fused with their mother in a genital sense, so as to destroy the father’s penis that they imagine to be inside their mother’s body.” It would appear to me that this is clear to all of us. What is indisputable is that a child enters the world in a conflictual environment, and that everyone who surrounds him is not there for his sole satisfaction. On that point, Melanie Klein’s observations are sound: however, her interpretation remains partial and laden with implications. Here, she reduces the function of the phallus to a part object, the penis, from which derives the imaginary dynamic that she propounds. Just as the death instinct is progressively situated as the intention to be destructive, here also, she places this drive in an imaginary dimension. All of this is lifted exactly from the modal of the oral drive, which is expressly referred to, but, as we proved during our symposium in Grenoble, its clinical problems are mainly linked to its symbolic inscription. Not only here, I mean, not only according to Melanie Klein is the phallus conceived of as a part object, but from that standpoint the whole Oedipal dialectic is presented in an imaginary light in an unfathomable conflict. And here is precisely where the Viennese analyst Willi Hoffer comes in, to remind Melanie Klein of a certain number of references that I maintain to be fundamental to psychoanalysis. With this interpretation of the phallus as a part object, what exactly does it mean? It is castration which has lost its symbolic meaning, with the Oedipal phantasies being located in the mother’s body; it is the whole paternal function reduced, which explains why Melanie Klein is so heedless about the father’s position, as her daughter Mellita Schmideberg, as you know, reminded her. In fact, if the mother contains the penis, this part object, so cherished by the child, for the child I mean, it all amounts in the end to the mother’s castration and not his own castration. Since you can see what he is aiming at in what she says about the Oedipus complex – the small child wants to have a concrete genital relationship with his mother in order to destroy the father’s penis. In other words, it means that either the father must be gelded, or the mother must be gelded of this penile part object. But, beyond all this, what does Melanie Klein’s description of the primal conflict mean?  What does this war of drives that she refers to mean?  And here is where, with Freud and Lacan, we have to return to the question of the death instinct from a different angle, following the Kleinian school of thought. The death instinct enters into the subjectivity of the small child insofar as it objectifies the original split between the subject and himself. The wrenching pull that he experienced the moment he saw the full image of the other, and which anticipated his feelings in connection with his own initial lack of coordination, due to his motor immaturity – a moment of jubilation which is straight away followed by the depressive position. This is what Melanie Klein describes to us, and I am simply repeating it to you word for word from the Mirror Stage. It’s this brush with death that marks the child at birth, which the subject confirms in his own state of disorder through the image – the imaginary concept of another. And from then on, he maintains his desire under the power of the other, under the power of this other being, whose image determined him as an instant in life, whilst the subject in return feels as if he is dead. What I am describing here is nothing more than what I would only call the paranoiac constituent seeds of all human subjectivity, and which Melanie Klein, as you can re-read in her own text, describes exactly in this fashion, without knowing anything about the Mirror Stage. Therefore, it is a relationship built on the alienation between the subject and the Other, and one already directed towards all-embracing rivalry as in a duel, all imposed by reciprocal fascination in one’s fellow beings. This is also what our friend Jean Bergès described on the subject of transitivism: that is, what Melanie Klein clearly shows us in this dialectic of drives, whether they obviously be oral, anal or relating to the gaze etc, that the negotiation of these drives is played out in an environment of duel-like rivalry. In other words, what she describes as the destructive instinct is effectively where the subject receives this brush with death. And it is in this framework, that of the satisfaction or frustration of drives, that the good object is determined, or where the shadows emerge of the wrong internal objects, whose persecuting essence takes over the primal relationship with the Other.  Effectively, Melanie Klein is right at this stage to describe a true paranoiac-schizoid position.

However, she falls down in relating this position or state to the death instinct and the destructive instinct, whereas in reality, it is the result of the primordial capturing of the Imaginary order, which in return, determines the persecuting nature of being unsatisfied, and of the fellow being who leads to such lack of satisfaction. I would also like to repeat here that at that particular point, jealousy is precisely inscribed, and the primal relationship of jealousy and envy is primitively inscribed. The second mistake that Klein goes on to make is her attempt, and her yielding to the temptation, to reduce the full dynamic of phantasy to the Imaginary order. And this is how the Kleinian school of thought ends up falling down and hitting a dead-end and permanent misinterpretation. It fails to attribute these phantasies to the symbolic dimension that holds them together.  And this symbolic dimension which holds them together is the death instinct – the death instinct in the Freudian sense of the term, not the Kleinian sense. And it is indeed surprising to think that in the history of controversy, Jones, the person who wrote an article on symbolism and who claimed himself to be Melanie’s supportive and kindly protector, never entered in on this debate, and that undoubtedly his own wavering position on the concept of the death instinct must have been a deciding factor in his lack of participation. And this leads me to the second factor relating to the death instinct, that is, the deep relationship that links the death instinct with speech. And we must again return to Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” in order to find the key that you all know so well. In fact, if past trauma reveals itself in the present through repetition, this implies that the conditions in which a symbol is formed, just like the repressed traces of enjoyment, only work if they are formed in the same way, that is, as a symbol. If the symbol controls the interplay of repetitions, then it means that the subject is only the inactive part of the process. This emergence of a symbol simultaneously annihilates the subject, and retains its inanimate state through repetition. On the other hand, I would like to point out that in the fort/da experiment that Freud refers to in his text, the situation is slightly different: the child subject is in control, and controls not only his deprivation – that being derived from the absence of the object, and here as the symbol linked to the pairing of jaculation, and therefore to language – but he also links the formation of the symbol to the death of the thing. So, in a way, it is through controlling this deprivation that he manages to murder the thing, or murder the object. In these two forces orientated towards the same murder, we can identify the law of Desire; that is, on the one hand, it is the subject which is brought forward, yet does so in order to abolish the object and reduce his desire to the relationship with the symbol, or on the other hand, it is the object which manifests itself in the form of a symbol, but in that case there is an elision of the subject. In these two versions of the death instinct, which are closely aligned with desire, who could fail to recognize what Freud would formulate some years later in his theory of the process of negation and its effects? And Freud clearly specifies: “negation comes into play based on notions of primal drive.” It’s extraordinary! What I mean is that it encapsulates the whole of Melanie Kleins’s contribution in one phrase. It is in the game of introduction in the subject (Beziehung ins Ich), and the expulsion from the subject (Aussatussung aus dem Ich), where Freud identifies the destructive instinct in the Destructiontrieb text, that is to say the death instinct as a second term in the negation process. This negation is the pure working of speech, and in as much so, it thus defines an external Real, all the while hiding itself behind its symbolic form, behind the object, the object of desire, as either denied or abolished by the operation of the symbol. So in the destructive instinct, in the death of the object that Melanie Klein described so well, in the interplay of primal drives, there is also simultaneously at work both the desire of the subject, in its negated form, as well as the formation of the symbol. The whole Kleinian theory on destructiveness certainly has a degree of theatricality to it – a theatre of hate and aggression that can never be altogether avoided, and one could consider at this point when she talks of aggression and destructiveness, that she is in fact talking to us about forming the symbol. Now I would like to summarize what I have said about Melanie Klein. Reading between the lines, although it is described in a clinically clear manner, we are able to identify in her writings the primary constituent paranoia of every subject, as well as obviously, the imaginary dimension. Failing to make any reference to speech as a factor in the interplay of drives meant that she lacked the symbolic link in her clinical work, thus leading her students to the imaginary forcing that we know so well. The conclusions that I have just drawn may be informative. And therein I end my point.”

– So do you have any questions or thoughts …

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: “Or protests!”

– “related to this work?”

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: I’d just like to go on to add the following, and that is, as Melanie Klein spelt out very clearly in her letter to Jones in 1941, just as the debate was getting under way, she evidently saw that it wasn’t that these theories didn’t pose a problem, but that they didn’t manage to reach a neat conclusion. And the difficulty which she talks about is precisely the fact that she described the child observation work so brilliantly, yet didn’t manage to put the stress where it should have been, which is why it is very important that we grasp both a direct understanding of the way in which Melanie Klein develops her field, but also subsequently that we know where and how to place the punctuation marks. And in my opinion, it is the death instinct which shifts her into an impossible position – her interpretation of the death instinct is what renders it impossible for her to resolve it, because, if you are following, obviously she refers to Oedipus, and the way in which she describes the child observations, with its problems and its conflicts, doesn’t offer any obvious solution to these conflicts. What she lays out in her argument regarding Oedipus presents us with a deadlock. In effect, it is certainly the case as far as her theory, as her concept, is concerned, although this does not necessarily mean that it is equally the case in the way in which she treated children through psychoanalysis. This is the reason why I question the reality of the addition of this symbolic dimension, and to what degree it is even possible, because she didn’t have the conceptual tool with which to find anything that went in that direction. And that is what is so striking – isolating a clinical case, as she recounts it, and how she describes the child’s impulsive universe, which you cannot see a way out of, and this is one of the major difficulties. So, I would say that there is only one outlet, and that is paranoia, because we cannot see how, nor by which miracle, the child she describes would renounce his object relation – we cannot see for what reason he would do it.

– C.Robert-Brini : If you look at the facts in Klein’s work, is sublimation not a path that could possibly offer a way out of this situation?

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: My apologies, but I don’t know what sublimation is. Seriously, it’s true. I can’t answer you, as I don’t know what sublimation is. It must certainly be one of my handicaps. We cannot see for what reason a child would renounce his impulsive demands. Though Freud’s theory clearly outlines how to break with one’s impulsive demands, as is also the case with Lacan, who did nothing but highlight this way out. It was not Melanie Klein’s theories that were responsible for confusing the issue, but the theories of her followers, who came to infiltrate the theses in the Institute. And those theses offer no solutions, no apparent way out of the situation. Therefore, at some point, an inscription is needed to come along and shake up the game of rivalry and reciprocity being played out between the ego and the other with a little ‘o’.

– Marielle : I would like to know where in relation to these two theories you would place Nicolas Abraham’s theory, which claims that a symbol is the operation of a subject in relation to its objects, the operation of a subject vis à vis its objects.

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: I don’t know where to place this theory. I think that Abraham found himself in the same difficulties that we saw later with Melanie Klein, but we cannot know to what degree. I hinged my argument on the death instinct because it seemed to me to be the key point at the heart of the whole system, yet the big problem with M. Klein is not that you don’t hear the mother’s speech, but that you don’t hear any speech at all; the function of speech is what you don’t hear. And so this theory doesn’t offer any possible introduction to language. Indeed it is plainly obvious that the child is not going to wait around for Madame Klein to come along before beginning to use language. Nevertheless M. Klein doesn’t offer any real understanding of the function of speech. And if the function of understanding speech doesn’t exist, then you cannot sustain any theories relating to drive and the object at play. The theory simply can’t hold. Why not? Because the precise function of a drive is to represent sexuality or even eroticism within the unconscious. And if we don’t use speech, then this sexuality cannot be represented within the unconscious, or even this sexuality will not be marked by a gap. In other words, the sexuality will be the total object that Marcel Czermak talked of – the tyranny of the subject. If this mediation of speech is lacking, the drive cannot represent sexuality or eroticism in the unconscious. You may remember how just before I spoke of dualism. Here, we are no longer in the realm of dualism, since we have the symbolic term, speech, drive and the object. So with Freud, this is always how the object is represented.

– J.P. Bergès :

I thought your lecture was tremendous. There is possibly a point which could be developed further on what you just said in your penultimate answer, and that is the following: that it was by adopting a thesis on paranoia that Lacan was able to reach the point he did on what he said about the mirror, and that by some sort of alchemy which still remains a mystery to me, he turned precisely to speech, quite obviously. If you imagine at what stage psychoanalysis was during the period I refer to, as in 1930….

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: and 1949 when he met M.KLEIN…

– J.P. Bergès: 1949 is still quite late, he had already…

– J.P. Hiltenbrand: it was the second conference he gave on the Mirror Stage.

– J.P. Bergès: Indeed, but my point is simply that what I find really interesting in what you said, is effectively the fact of introducing the conceptual dimension of the death instinct, exploring what its substance truly is and going beyond mere image – because basically, even for Lacan, it was impossible to envisage the child outside the bounds of an imaginary context, which goes some way to explain all the work done either by psychologists, by Piaget, by Vallon, or by the analysts to whom we have referred today. As you explain very well, Jones, who had just finished a long study on symbolism, didn’t just have the concept that for the child, that’s what I mean, the symbolic dimension could also be foremost, and that in brief I think that it was his idea, borne of the work he had just finished, but that it didn’t refer to the child because the child operates in the Imaginary order. So, for me, this was the excuse that I found for M. Klein; that in the end, it was the shock she had when faced with the revelation of the death instinct, which meant that she transferred it, in a way, onto the super-ego. If I can permit myself to say so, given that she herself said that this element was for her the most inspired part of Freud’s work. So as regarding M.Klein, I would say that her problem was to assume that the question of the death instinct could be resolved through the super-ego. However, as for Lacan, I am yet to fully understand how his journey through the paranoia of guilt, and how everything he managed to link together from the prevailing ideas concerning the Mirror Stage, how all of this ended up with what you rightly called his meeting in ’49, and which in fact culminated in this certitude that what came first, was the symbolic dimension. That is the part which interests me.

– The Symbolic order is what comes first for the child in the form of speech, but as for the Mirror Stage, it is the Imaginary order which comes first. What is interesting is that Lacan linked both questions to the death instinct, though he started from that concept familiar to us all – it simply needs to be reflected on – which is that it is the inert part, the residual waste of the ego, the result of the Mirror Stage, and it is this that he defines as being the product, the residue of the death instinct which results from the relationship between the subject and the Imaginary order. Meanwhile the symbolic function, the symbolic register – and neither Freud nor Lacan inscribe this symbolic dimension in a passive relationship but as being the active crux of speech –  is what moves towards this split, and is exactly what I was referring to when speaking about Paula’s contribution. It is this possibility of a split, and not everyone makes a split, and in today’s society we can clearly see how it is perfectly possible to make a language work without any split, without making any separation between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation. This split between the signifier and the signified which depends on language, is where Lacan subsequently goes on to hinge his theory of the death instinct. That is the reason why he makes so much reference to the Verneinung, and also to the “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” text, and to fort/da.

– We must stop there as our friends have a train to catch, and it certainly isn’t Dick’s!