ABSTRACT
In his commentary on transference in his 1958 Direction of the Treatment paper, Lacan invites his students to find it deplorable that in her treatment of a case of transitory perversion, Ruth Lebovici didn’t have the chance to benefit from his establishment of the principles that distinguish the phobic object from the fetish. These were the principles he claimed he had laid down in Seminar IV, just a year before, to distinguish the phobic object as “an all-purpose signifier to make up for the Other’s lack [from] the fundamental fetish in every perversion as an object perceived in the signifier’s cut” (Lacan, 1958, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power”. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [p. 510]. B. Fink [Trans.]. London & New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). This chapter traces the pathway in Seminar IV along which Lacan lays down these guiding principles, and from which we can, as analysts, benefit from the distinction he is making between phobia and fetishism. The chapter illustrates moments in the development of his ideas by making use of material from the cases of three little boys plagued by phobia, and in some way tormented by fetishism: Freud’s little Hans case especially as this is the pivotal case Lacan takes for examination in this respect in the seminar; the character Jack from the novel Room by the Irish novelist Emma Donoghue; and the exemplary case of John (Jean) by René Tostain.
