The title of the fourth seminar does not refer to any theory of object relations. The primary “object relation” of the speaking being, as emphasized by Sigmund Freud, is the relationship with the lost object, that is, with the absence of the object.

In the fourth seminar, this absence is shaped into three versions –privation, frustration, castration– depending on its actual, imaginary, or symbolic derivation. A privileged “object” –the phallus– is elevated to a signifier of absence and signifies the Aufhebung of the imaginary, that is, the symbolization of enjoyment and thus the separation from it.

This process of symbolization will be termed by Jacques Lacan “paternal transference,” because it will be linked to the effect exerted by the symbolic father, the Name-of-the-Father, on the insatiable and unbridled Desire of the Mother.

We are literally in the laboratory processing the paternal transference. Here, Lacan demonstrates in an unparalleled way that the fearful signifier –the horse that scares the little patient– takes the place of the Name-of-the-Father insofar as it allows the entire drive turmoil caused for little Hans by the libidinal play with the mother –especially when it is complicated by the arrival of a little sister and by the first pleasurable stirrings of his actual penis– to be subsumed into the symbolic order, the order of castration.

Thus, as Jacques-Alain Miller notes, the true title of the fourth seminar would be “The Function of Castration.” Despite its patriarchal culmination, however, the essential, constantly lurking focus of the fourth seminar concerns the mother.

Lacan deconstructs the so-called “simple” mother-child relationship and emphasizes that the mother acts as a bearer of symbolic gift, transforming the real object into a signifier of her desire. The latter remains insatiable and enigmatic, to the extent that a mother is also a woman, that is, a gendered being subjected to the phallic dialectic.

The way in which the child will be inscribed as a phallic substitute opens a wide field of clinical destinies, of neurotic or perverse character, which this book clarifies with timeless analyses. The mother, the father, castration – thanks to this thematic triptych, the fourth seminar emerges as the most representative document of the first “classical” period of Lacanian teaching.