The fantasme: Confusions and clarifications

Abstract

 It is known that the fantasy of beating described by Freud in three phases and called A child is punished, presents a series of problems very difficult to solve. Freud has said that it lacks real existence, that it is a constructed notion and that, in a way, it never existed; At the same time, as if oscillating in his description, he maintains that he remains unconscious. What is its status?

At this arduous point, Lacan discovers or better invents, already in his fourth seminar, a valuable notion, which must be distinguished from the various forms of fantasy, and calls it phantom. If we can justify this invention-discovery, it is because it introduced into the sphere of psychoanalysis a capital notion: the notion of demand, which is what is implied in the loving bond between the subject and the Other: there is demand because someone has been quoted, and quoted with his body, imaginary or real.

There are two texts of Lacan decisive Kant with Sade and the other, less known, but fundamental, is the transcription of a lecture that Lacan gave at the College of Medicine in 1966, in the Salpêtrière. To the first of them I will stick to it, since the so-called formula of the ghost ($ <> a), in the various readings that it admits, does not allow to differentiate the ghost from the symptom, from the affections, from the drive, from the failed, from the dreams.

The pleasure principle embodies the paradox of the ghost: it claims its support, but constantly tends to stay here to go further, in a game of endless oscillation.