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. . . . ·• Birth o ft he Other Rosine Lefort, in collaboration with Robert Lefort Translated by Marc Du Ry, Lindsay Watson, and Leonardo Rodriguez Foreword by Russell Grigg University of Illinois Press Urbana and Chicago Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA EJoc.. R.J' 504-.2.. , L4'-{I~ \1'14 N•w"u tie l'A•m O 1980 by Editions du Scuil English-language ttanslation, foreword, and translators' note 0 1994 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Published by arrangement with Editions du Scuil, Paris Manufactured in the United States of America l 2 3 4 S C P S 4 3 2 l Libnry of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lefort, Rosine [Naissance de l'auttc. English] Birth of the other / Rosine Lefort, in collaboration with Robert Lefort : ttanslatcd by Marc Du Ry, Lindsay Watson, and Leonardo Rodriguez ; foreword by Russell Grigg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-252-01900-8 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-252-06393-7 (pbk.) 1. Child analysis-Case studies. 2. Autism in children-Case studies. 3. Psychoanalysis-Case studies. I. Lefort, Robert. II. Title. RJS04.2.L4413 1994 618.92'89'17-dc20 93-40386 CIP Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA . .. . Contents •• Foreword by Russell Grigg vu Translators' Note n•n•• .. Preface by Rosine Lcfon XVll Part 1: N 11,dia or the Mirror 1. The Small Other: lnPulill 3 2. The Big Other: The Separable Object 11 3. The Scopic Drive: "Getting Oneself Seen" 19 4. The First Identification: The Transitive Relation to the Other 26 5. The Fundamental Fanwy: Primary Repression 42 6. The Pre-Specular: Ambivalence 51 7. The Small Other-The Doll: The Metaphorical Place of the Subject 76 8. The Mirror I-Our Image: From Metaphor to Metonymy 92 9. The Mirror 2-The Turning Around: From Surface ro~~ 132 10. The Mirror 3-The Third Tenn: The Name-of-the- Fathcr; the Ego Ideal 146 11. The Holed and Torie Body 167 12. The Exchange 191 13. Life 200 Part 2: Marie-Franfoise or Autism 14. Madness-Neither «a' nor "A": Convulsions in Front ofFood 219 15. The Other-A Real Absence: The Call to the Window 228 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 16. The Real and the Hole of the Body: Mine and Hers 237 17. Really Filling in the Hole of Her Body 244 18. The Real and the Signifier Separated: Psychosis and Structure 252 19. The Real, the Demand, and the Signifier: Surface Relations and Distance Relations 265 20. The Double and the Real: The Loss Revealed in the Scopic and the Absence of the Gaze 278 21. The Temptation of the Other, Holder of the Object 289 22. The Mirror in the Real: The Topological Inversion in Psychosis 301 23. The Emergence of a Call to the Other 319 Conclusions 323 Index 351 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA - . . ..•.. Foreword Russell Grigg The pages that follow, in which Rosine Lefort and Robert Lefort relate and discuss the psychoanalyses of two young children, consti tute a major contribution to the literature ofp sychoanalytic case stud ies. Rosine Lcfort's case notes, recorded every evening after the ses sions with her two young patients, arc set out here in their entirety. They arc meticulous in their recounting of day-to-day df'tails of two children taken into treatment by her in the early 1950s at the Fon dation Parent de Rosan, a clinic in the unit headed by Jenny Aubry, a pediatrician. These notes arc accompanied by, but clearly distin guished from, a theoretical commentary written in the late 1970s that, in centering on an argument about the emergence and structure of subjectivity in relation to the Other, presents an analysis of the treat ment that is explicitly Lacanian in orientation. We should be grateful for the circumstances that produced this un usual separation in time between the original case notes and the sub sequent commentary, as it renders the case notes all the more valu able, having been recorded without any commitment to a particular theoretical framework. These circumstances arc quite fortuitous: Lacan had only just begun to give his now famous Seminar and the theoretical advances that made the commentary possible here were only to unfold in Lacan's teaching over subsequent years. Neverthe less, Rosine Lcfort's treatment with these young children was of suf ficient interest to Lacan for him to invite her to speak of one of her cases, Robert the Wolf Child, at his Seminar in 1954. Rosine Lefort began working at Parent de Rosan in 1950 as an observer of a small group of young children, a number of whom she took into individual treatment. She had already been in analysis with Lacan since early that year and, she says, the treatment of the two children reported here was an integral part of her own analysis. Apart from a period of eight months at the William Alanson White Clinic in 1952-53, Rosine Lefort continued to work at Parent de Rosan until 1955. During this same period Robert Lefort was also employed at the hospital as a pediatrician. Rosine Lefort and Robert Lefort were both members of the Freudian School of Paris until its dissolution and arc currently prominent members of the Ecole de la Cause Frcu dicnnc, where the interest in their clinical and theoretical approach to psychoanalysis with children has led to the creation of an intcma- Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA viii / Foreword tional network, CEREDA, Centre d'Etudcs ct de Rcchcrchc sur l'Enfant dans le Discours Analytiquc. At the time of the Leforts' employment Parent de Rosan was an institution in the French public health system for the temporary care of young children between the ages of one and four who had either been abandoned by their parents and were awaiting placement or had been left in respite care during extended periods of illness of their mothers. This was still the time of large institutions with residents living in a highly structured environment, and Parent de Rosan was no exception. Forty-five to fifty children resided in two villas in the northwest of Paris and were lodged in dormitories of eight to ten beds. Although most suffered no illnesses, and indeed the ailments they did contract were often due to the circumstances of their hos pitalization, they all were still treated as hospital patients. The med ical staff did daily rounds and the children had their temperatures taken morning and evening.The children would often pass the en tire day in bed, with perhaps the exception of a couple of hours spent in the hospital nursery, and during their residence they at no time left the confines of the hospital. They were fed individually by a nurse who would pass from bed to bed, while the other children waiting would be crying for their turn. Today Parent de Rosan still operates as a hospital for young children, now largely as a service for mental ly ill children; it should be noted, though, that the strict and rigid medical regime is a thing of the past. The first subject of the cases reported here, Nadia, who was thir teen and a half months old at the beginning of her treatment, was seen by Rosine Lefort for a period of ten months between October 1951 and July 1952. The following pages describe her condition at the beginning of the analysis, recount the course of her progress, and end with a description of the treatment's conclusion. Though brief, Nadia's treatment contains the three logical moments of a complete analysis: establishment of the transference, the process of working through that locates her as a subject in the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, and the dissolution of the transference and "fall" of the object. The case is of special interest not just because of its rich and detailed account of an analysis with a child but more particular ly because it is a child who is at an age where she is beginning to speak. The momentous consequences oft his step for the human child arc captured in the discussion of the analysis, where the focus is on the creation of the subject's lack and the emergence of what Lacan calls object the primordial lost object, as the cause of desire. We 11,, find confirmation here that this lack is initially located, not in the Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ix / Foreword subject, but in the Other, which is the place or locus occupied here in the transference by Rosine Lefort. This function of a lack, located both at the level of the subject and the Other, can arguably be re garded as the key to the dialectical unfolding of the emergence of the subject, Nadia. It is important in this respect to observe Rosine Le fort's refusal to occupy the maternal position of satisfying Nadia's needs and demands, thereby confronting her with her own lack, ini tially in the Real and the Imaginary, and subsequently, through sym bolic castration, in the three registers together. It is noteworthy that in the anonymity of the care provided in the hospital setting at Par ent de Rosan, at a time when the concept of "maternal deprivation" was dominant, Rosine Lefort nevertheless assumed the properly psy choanalytic role of interrogating Nadia's demands and interpreting her desire, rather than satisfying her at the level of her needs-a po sition that enabled the introduction of the lack essential to the ad vent of subjectivity. While Nadia's treatment had a logical conclusion, Maric Fran~oisc's treatment was prematurely interrupted, which inevitably leaves some questions unresolved, not least that of diagnosis. On admission to Parent de Rosan Maric-Fran~oisc was diagnosed as schizophrenic or autistic, and in Rosine Lcfort's view the treatment tends to confirm this diagnosis ofp sychosis, since for Marie-Fran~oise the absence of the Other meant that the object remained in the Real, unable to be raised to the dignity of the signifier. While certain sig nificrs were present for Maric-Fran~oise there was no Other to give them a place and a structure, thus the issue for Rosine Lefort was not that of securing Maric-Fran~oisc's desire by refusing the position of satisfying the child's needs, but of providing the conditions for the emergence of the Other for a psychotic subject. This gives a certain poignancy to events at the end of the treatment, just prior to its in terruption, which led Rosine Lefort to speculate that, while the ev idence is inconclusive, these conditions had perhaps been successfully met. The role of play, gesture, and nonverbal behavior in the treatment of children has always led to the question whether such treatment can be properly called psychoanalysis, and the two cases presented here raise this issue in a stark form. At first sight, whereas psychoanalysis with adults takes place within the strict limits of speech between an alyst and analysand, the introduction of nonverbal techniques and the treatment of children who, as here, arc at the limits of language in dicate that psychoanalysis with children is at the very least an adap tation of the technique with respect to adults. This would make child Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA x / FD1'ewtml psychoanalysis, with its special technical and clinical expertise, a sub specialization of psychoanalysis properly so-called. The position of Rosine Lefort and Robert Lefort on this issue is clear and unambig uous: the child in analysis is and remains a subject in his or her own right and in the full sense of the term. While the treatment may call, as here, for the presence of what Lacan called "the odd trifling ob ject," the structure of the analytic relationship remains essentially the same-it is a framework within which the subject speaks to the ana lyst who occupies the position of the Other, as the vehicle of object 11,, cause of the subject's desire. That there is no difference between analysis with children or adults is consistent with Lacan 's opposition to the developmental line of approach in psychoanalysis in which the child is seen as passing through a series of successive stages in his or her progression toward adulthood. Against this developmental ap proach Rosine Lefort and Robert Lefort argue that in the treatment of children-and the two cases presented here make this abundantly clear-the central issue concerns the binding or knotting together of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Their approach is consis tent with the view that psychoanalytic theory docs not describe the facts of actual development, but a structure that organizes and man ifests itself within an individual's history without being reducible to developmental processes. Can we say that Rosine Lefort adopts the position of analyst in these cases? Her own analysis had at the time not been long under taken, she had no supervision for these cases, and on her own ad mission she lacked the conceptual and theoretical framework that her subsequent psychoanalytic training would provide her with. Indeed, she characterizes herself as a "note-taker," which would seem to imply that the observations recorded here constitute what the psychoana lyst calls the "clinical material." At first sight it would seem that this material is not psychoanalytic because it describes only the behavior of the child and reports nothing of the speech of the subject. But closer examination reveals that, first, the signifier is not absent from Rosine Lcfort's sessions with Nadia and Marie-Fran~oisc. Not only do the various objects have a signifying function in the treatment, they arc also accompanied by the words and speech of both analyst and analysand. Indeed, at least in the case of Nadia, we find a descrip tion of the subject's emergence as what Lacan calls a p11,rletre, speak ing being, and, with this emergence, the entire structure of the sub ject is already given. The second point that should be made is that the behavior occurs within the session and thus within the transference, which is a nee- Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA essary condition for the behavior to be interpretable. Although nec essary, this condition is not sufficient, however, since interpretation requires that the signifier and the signified also be distinct and sepa rable. This is why it is crucial to note the signifying role played by the series of objects whose symbolic function emerges clearly in the transference relationship between Nadia and her analyst. The food cookics, candy, cereal, rice pudding-that Rosine Lefort offers Na dia during the sessions takes on a signifying role as gift or as object of demand in the transference. The various objects that feature in the account of the sessions arc the currency, at times oral, at times anal or phallic, of the exchanges between the child and her analyst. In deed, as the account shows, the progress of the treatment is reflect ed in the increasingly symbolic function that these objects come to acquire, converting them into objects of exchange and thereby ad vancing from the impasse in which the child confronts the real of her body when the Other is absent. The question of the transference is crucial when, as here, it con cerns an analyst Ill lett,e. Rosine Lefort is a young woman who 11p11,nt is extremely attentive to the smallest details in the session, which she records faithfully and rigorously. It is obvious that her work is sus tained by her own analysis and that it is therefore sustained by her own transference not only onto her young patients but also, via her own analysis, onto psychoanalysis itself. While it could be said that she adopts an extremely passive position, particularly with respect to the aggressiveness of her patients, in allowing herself to be smeared with cereal, slapped, bitten, hit with toys, and so on, at the same time she nevertheless constructs limits at the level of her response to the subject's demand where, refusing to satisfy needs, she facilitates the creation of the lack in the Other where the subject will come to lo cate her own lack. In both his teaching and his clinical practice Lacan undertook a return to the first principles of psychoanalysis ( this is the meaning of his "return to Freud") in order to overcome the pervasive conserva tism in the psychoanalytic community that discouraged innovation and ritualized a technique generally misunderstood by its practitio ners. We can therefore understand why Lacan gave his encouragement and support to the Lcforts' ground-breaking work on psychoanaly sis with children. We arc fortunate that Lacan was insistent, since this turned out to be decisive for the authors' decision to write up and publish the case studies that appear here as Birth of the Other. Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
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