“Jokingly I asked Hans if his horses happened to wear glasses, to which he responded negatively, then if his father wore glasses, to which he responded negatively again, against all evidence, and if, with black around the mouth, he didn’t mean the moustache : then I revealed to him that he was afraid of his dad, precisely because he loved his mom so much… After this consultation I received almost daily reports on the changes in the little patient’s condition… As it turned out, now the possibility of revealing his own unconscious productions, and of having his phobia expire had opened up to him.”[1]

“Oedipus is completely unusable, except for that crude reference to the character of obstacle, constituted by one’s mother towards the investment of an object as the cause of the desire… Yes, this recourse to Oedipus mith is truly formidable. It’s worth pausing for a moment.” [2]

The perception of reality triggers one's unconscious : not at all innate[3] and not yet collected, it remains silent, even conflicted, but it is already an assessment.

The perception itself of reality can be collected as a matter of fact, or instead suspended, slowed down, even inhibited : and all this, well before learning a verbal language.[4]

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – March 8, 2024

[1] ‘Il piccolo Hans’, by S. Freud (1908) / Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore - ‘Univ. Econom. Feltrinelli’ (2010) translation by M. Marcacci, pp.123-125

[2] ‘Al di là del complesso di Edipo’ – ‘Il padrone castrato’ in ‘Il seminario Libro XVII – Il rovescio della psicoanalisi 1969 - 1970’, by J. Lacan with J.A. Miller’ afterword / Bibliot. Einaudi (2001), p.120

[3] “Elsewhere I have already formulated the hypothesis that the real difference between a ‘inc’ representation (or thinking) and a ‘prec’ representation consists in the fact that the first one is produced in relation to some materials which remained unknown, while in the second one (‘prec’), a connection in addition with verbal representations occurs.” Cited from : ‘L’Io e l’Es’, by S. Freud (1923) in OSF Bollati Boringhieri - Vol 9, p.483

[4] “ ‘Father’ is the name of a legal law… of hereditary benefit : it establishes the Subject as beneficiary of all Others. The pair of terms Subject / Other, both Subjects as a matter of facts, is the legal concept of a legal inequality of places – not other real inequalitiy – as a condition of benefit. In this distiction, the beneficiary is a child by definition : ‘heir’ to the real of nature but a heir who is such by adoption… In other words : the law is posited, not presupposed… This is why it is a law ‘of’ nature : not because of the delirium by which such a law would be written in nature… but because of – a practical reason that is a legislative one indeed – an adoption of nature, starting from that privileged point of it which is man… The law of nature Freud encounters in its crisis… because permanently alive in the possibility of the so-called killing of the Father. Being excluded from the beginning that this is about killing a real person… it’s about killing the concept, that is the ‘thinkability’, in everyone’s thinking, of such universal legislation, that is of a killing-disauthorization of the subject’s thinking. Which is the very conceivableness of a law of satisfaction, or of benefit that, if it were and to be, it would and should be the law of the subject as a child, unequal in position with respect to every Other.” Cited from : ‘Cap. III ‘I sessi nella legge - 1. Padre come norma della legge di beneficio’ in ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, by Giacomo B. Contri - SIC Edizioni (1998), pp. 153-154