X8JKsF

judith feher-gurewich
is precisely because a slot must remain open in the system. Yet because the
psychic economy perceives this open slot to be that which can threaten its
search for satisfaction, which from the onset of life is bound up with the
Other, the subject will be led to plug this lack with a fantasy that attempts
to make sense of nonsense.
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality is indeed based on his patients’ reconstructions
of how they explain the difference between boys and girls. Yet such
a theory is not a closed system. If boys imagine that the little girl must have
lost her penis along the way, they will still wonder what crime she committed
to endure such a fate, and they will fear that the same punishment will be
inflicted upon them. Inversely, the little girl, appalled by such injustice, will
not cease trying to figure out what it takes to obtain such a precious object.
Thus the enigma persists, despite the false solutions that the ego continually
attempts to provide.
The goal of psychoanalysis
What Lacan offers psychoanalysis, therefore, is an understanding of how the
subject has been misled into believing that the access to his fantasy is bound
up with an all-powerful Other who will punish any form of transgression.
This is why the subject will devise the most elaborate neurotic scenarios to
lure this Other, to defend against it, or even to claim responsibility and guilt
so that the fantasy can remain intact. The process of psychoanalysis consists
in coming to realize that the fantasy that plugs the lack in the Other is only
an artifact meant to produce a wrong answer to a question that must remain
open-ended.
The structure of perversion
We are now equipped to turn to perversion. At which moment of the Oedipal
dialectic does the perverse structure come about?
While the neurotic invests all his psychic energy in creating barriers to
protect his Oedipal fantasy and prevent its realization, the pervert cannot
discover in the desire of the other the arguments that can justify the elaboration
of such a fantasy. The lack that he will undoubtedly encounter in the
mother, and that will enable him to constitute himself as her phallus, cannot
in turn be reliably translated into a desire directed towards the paternal
pole. The child is then stopped in his tracks. While he is confronted with
the enigma of sexual difference formulated in the question “What does she
want?” the child remains trapped between the mother’s desire for the phallus
200