ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts have located the moment when the subject becomes devoted to an ideal of mastery in the anal phase. But rather than wondering why the signification of mastery would attach itself to the exercise of a physiological function, i.e., the control of the sphincters, they believed that this bodily exercise was in itself the source of the signification in question. An organic function cannot draw meaning from itself, and certainly cannot endow the acts with meaning; only a fantasy, or a hastily constructed theory — in other words, a subject — has this capability. It is because of links between desire and the law that the excretory functions are transformed into behaviours in which mastery is symbolised. The chapter elucidates both the signification of the mastery and the nature of the links.
