ABSTRACT
Taking the example of Bernard Shaw’s fictional Professor Higgins as an illustration of someone who lives in the obsessional mode of existence, this chapter explores Lacan’s thought on the obsessional’s relation to the signifier in Seminar V. How does an obsessional man love and desire, and what are the effects of castration on his love life? How can a highly civilised man, obsessed with proper speech, fall in love with an uneducated flower girl who has an accent “painful to his ears”? How can women become so problematic and make many such men discontent, and what are the conditions revealed behind this situation?
