The Triangle of Desire: Freud, Sidonie, and Lacan

Introduction

In 1920, Freud (1920/1953) described the romantic love expressed by his patient—a “shrewd” (p. 159) young homosexual woman—as that which revealed itself to be a knightly love complete with the aim of rescuing a damsel in distress. Forty-three years later, Lacan (2004/2014) applauded Freud’s analogy between the patient and the knight. He affirmed her demonstration of courtly love as that which placed her in the masculine position—a point of salience in Lacan’s return to the case—explaining the patient’s coquettish object choice as a repudiation of her father’s lack, not unlike another of Freud’s patients, Dora and her Frau K. In the case of the young homosexual woman the rescue fantasy—a variation of courtly love—is applied in Freud’s interpretation. However, there appears to be an important element missing. Traditionally, before the knight can win the lady’s love, an enemy or threat, perhaps a dragon, must be defeated. Who or what stands in for the dragon, in this case? When Lacan, speaking about the young homosexual woman and her lover says, “the knightly lass [sic] of Lesbos and her Anna Karenina object, if I may say so, meet the father [emphasis added]” (p. 110), the implication of the italicized text is that the young homosexual woman’s father, in keeping with the rescue fantasy metaphor, is the dragon that must be defeated. Whether Lacan intended this implication or not, it is certain that the missing dragon completes the triad and thus must be restored in the story. But first, who is this young homosexual woman, and what has been said about her?

The Young Homosexual Woman

The long-concealed identity of Freud’s patient was revealed in the first German edition of the biography, The Story of Sidonie C. (Rieder & Voigt, 2021); the biographers reveal the patient’s name but decide to honour her wish for a pseudonym: Sidonie Csillag.[1] According to Rieder and Voigt (2021), Sidonie was born in April 1900 and grew up in a well-to-do Viennese family along with three brothers. Her father was a successful businessman, her mother—known for her beauty—improved her social standing through marriage. Together, the Csillags moved to Vienna to start their family. Baptizing their children despite their Jewish heritage (a common practice at the time) furthered their social standing. In keeping with Freud’s account, the biography confirms that Sidonie held deep love and respect for her father, but her relationship with her mother was strained by jealousy over Sidonie’s youthful beauty. Thus, Sidonie took care to avoid conflict with her mother and focused instead on enjoying the benefits of her family’s wealth, to the extent that she could as a woman, including travel, socializing, and developing meaningful personal relationships. Throughout her life she remained devoted to her father and upheld high standards for herself and others. This attitude was often perceived as supercilious, though this was likely due more to her being an opinionated woman in 1920s Vienna than to the nature of her expectations. Sidonie engaged in many trifling romances, was married to a man for a short time, and had three great women lovers, the first of whom, Leonie Puttkamer, was the cause of her treatment with Freud. It was Sidonie’s father who contacted Freud and requested that he attempt to rid Sidonie of her homosexual inclinations. Despite acknowledging that she was not neurotic or suffering, Freud agreed to the treatment (Freud, 1920/1953). As one suspects when reading Freud’s case, the biography confirms that Sidonie despised her sessions and Freud himself, though she acknowledged he was not malicious in his intent (Rieder & Voigt, 2021).

Aside from Lacan’s analysis of Sidonie, the limited body of scholarly literature published before the biography primarily examines Freud’s (1920/1953) case, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” from the perspective of gender and sexuality within historical, cultural, and psychoanalytic contexts (see Lesser & Schoenberg, 1999). These feminist and queer critiques overwhelmingly adopt a critical view of Freud’s text “as a conservative text in which a misogynist, phallocentric Freud clashed with a young female homosexual patient in ways that led to the analysis’s failure and early termination,” (Shapira, 2024, p. 3). An earlier text looks at the impact of Freud’s failure to acknowledge Sidonie as an adolescent and offers a developmental critique of his case (Glenn, 1980). The posthumously published biography (originally published in German in 2000 and translated into French in 2003 and into English in 2020) brings the lived experience of Sidonie to light, providing details that serve as important inputs into any new research involving Freud’s original case. Texts published after the biography include Shapira’s (2024) historical analysis of the Freud and Sidonie dynamic from a cultural perspective. Shapira suggests that the modernization of Vienna, explored through its urbanization, provided a unique opportunity for Sidonie to express her same-sex love despite the “racist and homophobic realities of the time” (p. 5). Arguably, this is an idealized perspective that overlooks the significance of Sidonie’s three suicide attempts. In more recent psychoanalytic scholarship, Brousse (2012) looks at her from the feminine position and explores three possible ways to understand female homosexuality. Gherovici (2010, 2024) and Allouch (2004) have turned to the biography of Sidonie to develop nuanced triangulations between Freud, Sidonie, and Lacan. These contributions mark a shift from earlier feminist and queer critiques. This essay too follows that path. I have primarily focused my research on literature available in English and I acknowledge this may result in contextual limitations.

Lacan’s (2004/2014, 1994/2020) texts concerning Freud’s original case—published after many of the early feminist critiques—build and expand on Freud’s findings. Lacan revisited Sidonie’s analysis with Freud in detail; her experience and relationships helped demonstrate key aspects of his evolving theory of desire. It was in 1957 when Lacan (1994/2020) first specified the importance of the then anonymous woman in Freud’s case. He concluded that her desire aimed at something behind her object choice: “what is sought beyond her [Sidonie’s lover] is that object that is central to the entire libidinal economy – the phallus” (Lacan, 1994/2020, p. 102). Six years later, Sidonie resurfaced in a critical moment for Lacanian theory, one that helped crystallize the function of object a. In 1963, Lacan (2004/2014) replaced the object of Sidonie’s aim, though he is careful to maintain the integrity of his original claim. She aims not at the phallus, but at something Lacan says is behind the phallus—what Sidonie points at is the gap or phantom object known as object a, into which she has “promoted the phallus” (Lacan, 2004/2014, p. 112). This is where Lacan inscribed her as the knight of courtly love. What follows in these paragraphs is my endeavor to provide yet another reading of Sidonie, an encore if you will, and one that closely follows Lacan’s (1975/1998b) lead as he conceptualized Other jouissance in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: Encore. Following from Brousse’s (2012) insightful questioning, I argue that Sidonie can be read as a subject in the feminine position, oriented toward the lack in the Other, and that her suicide attempt is a protective act that aims to preserve her desire. Reading Sidonie from the feminine position affirms Lacan’s (1958/2006) insights that same-sex love between women is a locus for Other jouissance and contends with the limitations of sexuation. My argument will be supported by a specific and interrelated reading of two schematics from Seminar XX and a reinterpretation of the niederkommen from Sidonie’s case. I then return to Freud to explore how his termination of Sidonie’s analysis (Lacan, 1994/2020) helps further illuminate Sidonie’s position.

Sexuation and the Triangle of Desire

To support my reading of Sidonie, I will briefly explain the key Lacanian concepts and schematics that require contextualization. For further reading, Evans (1996) provides a useful introductory overview of these and other key Lacanian concepts. Sexuation[2] refers to one of two positions a subject assumes in relation to the phallus: masculine or feminine. It has nothing to do with anatomical sex. Sexuation emerges through the process of castration, traditionally linked to the father’s imposition of symbolic law intended to separate the child from the mother. Although, Lacan later clarifies sexuation is a structural effect of the social-symbolic order, rather than the action of a parental agent (Lacan, 2004/2014). During the formation of sexuated positions, a subject identifies with having the phallus in the masculine position or not having the phallus in the feminine position. Thus, “the only sexual signifier is the phallus” (Evans, 1996, p. 179), and there is no sexual relation between masculine and feminine subjects. This is known as sexual non-rapport. In the schema of sexuation (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 78), sexual non-rapport is implied by the absence of a vector between the feminine subject (Woman) and object a (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Sexuation

This is a reproduction of Lacan’s structure of sexuation as found in Seminar XX (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 78). For this essay the bottom of the diagram is central, and it is important to keep in mind that the formulas in the top section indicate that the masculine subject (on the left) is entirely mediated by the phallic function whereas there is some part of the feminine subject (on the right) that is not mediated by the phallic function. For a more detailed explanation, see Evans (1996) page 180.

The process that leads to a sexuated subject position is important in shaping desire. The originating source of desire is jouissance, “the incestuous desire for [and of] the mother” (Evans, 1996, p. 38), which involves the mother or primary caregiver serving as the first Other who interprets the child’s demands and provides satisfaction and love. After the imposition of symbolic law upon the subject (symbolic law is, at base, the acquisition of language and signification through relations with the Other) the originating jouissance is experienced as a loss and lack. This leaves the subject split between what has been lost on one side and the newly acquired symbolic law on the other side. This fundamental loss constitutes the social-symbolic subject, what Lacan calls the split subject, and gives rise to the object cause of desire: object a. In the child’s demand for satisfaction and love, they realize the mother desires things other than the child and the child is left to question what the Other desires. This idea forms the basis of Lacan’s well know axiom, “desire is the desire of the Other” (Lacan, 1973/1998a, p. 38). In the process of this questioning the subject seeks different objects to desire and hopes it will find the one to fill the gap (the object a) left by the loss of originating jouissance. The Other is an important concept for this essay. It is the Symbolic order itself, represented by law, society, normativity, and figures of authority like parents. While it represents a totalizing whole, the Other is fundamentally flawed or lacking because it cannot be contained within the set it represents (Lacan, 1973/1998a, 1975/1998b). Lacan increasingly emphasizes the lack in the Other in his later teaching.

Desire defends against jouissance, and by association, the lack in the Other. It drives the subject to pursue objects (or part objects) in a metonymic chain aimed at filling the constitutive lack, though such fulfilment is ultimately impossible since it would risk the return of the forbidden jouissance. In the schema of sexuation, this metonymic process occurs on the masculine side, represented by the vector that connects the split subject ($) with the object cause of desire (object a). Because the source of the original jouissance is imagined, after the experience of loss, this metonymic process is like the formula of fantasy ($ <> a). In Seminar XX, Lacan (1975/1998b) makes a clear distinction between phallic and Other jouissance. Lacan describes the latter as ineffable and unsymbolizable. In the schema of sexuation it is represented by the vector connecting the feminine subject (shown as Woman in Figure 1) to the lack in the Other (shown as the Lacanian matheme S(A)[3] in Figure 1). Because part of the feminine subject’s jouissance ex-sists outside the phallic function, her relation to desire is structurally contingent. She is fragmented both symbolically and in the masculine subject’s imaginary idea of her as a part-object (in denial of the sexual non-rapport) upon which he believes all his enjoyment depends.

The presentation of a triangle-shaped schema or “graphicization,” as Lacan (1975/1998b, p. 95) calls it, emphasizes the process of desire circulating around jouissance (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Triangle Schema or the Triangle of Desire

This is a reproduction of the schema found at the start of chapter eight in Seminar XX (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 90). The vectors of the triangle represent the vector of the masculine subject ($) from the structure of sexuation in Figure 1. Lacan does not name the schema. I call it the triangle of desire based on interpretations of Lacan’s description of it in the text.

The vectors that make up the triangle form the metonymic process that connects the masculine subject to the object a. This continuous cycle of desire for the subject in the masculine position is what gives jouissance, represented by a kind of well in the middle of the triangle, its phallic meaning. Phallic jouissance always fails because it denies sexual non-rapport while Other jouissance does not because it does not follow the same metonymic process of desire. Though not accounted for in Lacan’s drawing of the triangle, the three possible positions of the feminine subject can be included by adding markers from the corners of the triangle towards either the lack in the Other, the object a, or the phallus (see Figures 3, 4, and 5).[4]

Figure 3: Feminine position behind object a

My interpretation of the feminine subject in this position is shown here suspended above the well of jouissance in relation to object a, represented in the structure of sexuation by the absence of a vector in Figure 1. In this placement, a barrier between jouissance and the imaginary is also shown.

Figure 4: Vector of the feminine position pointing towards the phallus

In this position, I interpret the feminine subject as contingently mediated by castration and representative of the multiplicity of woman which when symbolically constructed might be signified as mother, wife, virgin, hysteric, femme fatale, witch, daughter, etc. The vector is sized similarly to the way it appears in the structure of sexuation and thus is shown here pushing the well of jouissance.

Figure 5: Vector of the feminine position pointing towards the lack in the Other

In this position I interpret the feminine subject approaching both the lack in the Other and the opening of the well of jouissance. This is the feminine subject in her most impossible position as not-all. Again, the vector is sized similarly to the way it appears in the structure of sexuation.

The position that orients the feminine subject to the lack in the Other (shown in the drawing by the vector pointing to S(A)) places jouissance between the feminine subject and the lack in the Other.  This proximity constitutes the position of “not whole” (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 73) or not-all, meaning that in this position, the feminine subject has a relation to that which ex-sists outside the symbolic (represented by the lack in the Other). This relation is what gives jouissance its feminine or Other meaning—ineffable, mystical, and impossible to speak of because Other jouissance exceeds the phallic function. Following Lacan’s hint that he refers to the graph of desire when he calls the triangle a “graphicization” (p. 95) but specifically not “a graph because that term has a precise meaning in mathematical logic” (p. 95), the triangle schema will be referred to as the triangle of desire in this essay.

Sidonie’s Encore

At one point in Seminar XX, Lacan (1975/1998b) summarizes his work and his teaching in a singular aim:

To dissociate a and A by reducing the first to what is related to the imaginary and the other to what is related to the symbolic. It is indubitable that the symbolic is the basis of what was made into God. It is certain that the imaginary is based on the reflection of one semblable in another. And yet, a has lent itself to be confused with S(₳) … and it has done so by means of the function of being. It is here that a scission or detachment remains to be effectuated. (p. 83)

Throughout the remainder of the text, Lacan moves us toward a concept of the real, or perhaps better stated, a concept of how to approach the real. His intention in separating the Other from object a is to reveal the Other’s constitutive lack, thereby opening a space through which something of the real might emerge. In this sense, Lacan’s claim that his teaching aims to detach the Other from object a is in service to the real and by extension Other jouissance. Based on his argument that the feminine subject is not wholly mediated by the phallic function, and part of such a subject ex-sists outside the symbolic, we can extrapolate that Lacan’s aim may be to help all subjects—regardless of their gender or sexuality—find a relation to Other jouissance.

To understand what is at stake in this detachment, it is crucial to distinguish between two versions of the “fall” of the Other. The first is the fall of the Other into object a, which occurs when the subject projects desire onto the Other, concealing the constitutive lack and allows the symbolic to function as a totalizing structure. This fall is presupposed in the quote above. The second is the fall of the Other from its pedestal, which occurs when a subject exposes the failure or incompleteness of the symbolic order. Like Lacan’s aimed-at scission, this fall reveals the lack in the Other through which something of the real might emerge. Both falls are explained in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference (Lacan, 1991/2015) and form a central dynamic to Lacan’s reading of Symposium (Plato, 385-378/1989). As he concludes his analysis, Lacan explains that Alcibiades’s desire—his attempt to make Socrates his object of desire—was in fact the desire of Socrates all along. In other words, Alcibiades’s “desire is the desire of the Other” (Lacan, 1973/1998a, p. 38). His attempt to make Socrates into his object of desire is a way to dissimulate, confuse, or conflate the lack in the Other (in this case, Socrates) by reducing him to an object that can stand in for object a. As Lacan (1991/2015) puts it, “the ultimate mainspring of desire…is the fall of the Other, A into the other, a.” (p. 176) At the same time, Lacan notes that Alcibiades’s public confession constitutes a different kind of fall—an attempt to make Socrates fall from his pedestal and reveal something hidden in him. Whether lack is concealed or revealed is what distinguishes the two falls. The first fall (of the Other into object a) conceals lack and establishes the Other as a hegemonic, normative structure through which a subject enters the symbolic order and gains access to meaning via the phallic function. The second fall (of the Other from its pedestal) reveals the lack in the Other, disrupting symbolic coherence—an event that potentially opens a space for something of the real to emerge through which the subject might gain access to a different mode of jouissance, beyond the phallus.[5]

The fall—niederkommen in German—is a word that Sidonie used to describe her suicide attempt in one of her sessions with Freud (1920/1953). Niederkommen has a dual meaning: “falling down” and “giving birth.” Sidonie’s fall becomes an important part of Freud’s analysis, and he uses it to privilege Sidonie’s identification with her father in the masculine position as the defining feature of her homosexuality. Freud claims that because Sidonie was denied the wish of giving birth to her father’s child, she shifts from desiring him to identifying with him to preserve her attachment. In this way, Freud’s interpretation of Sidonie follows the axis of the masculine subject in the triangle of desire. Moving from the imaginary towards the symbolic Freud reduces Sidonie’s experience to an Oedipal logic, ignoring the possibility of same-sex female sexuality beyond the masculine position, even though when she throws herself off the bridge, she unconsciously attempts to fulfill the wish to bear her father’s child.[6] Schematically, I read Freud’s Oedipal reduction on the triangle as a striking out of the lack in the Other when the masculine subject follows the metonymic chain of desire on its way to object a. The masculine position is also how Lacan (1994/2020) reads Sidonie in his first encounter with her in 1957. Then in his 1963 return to the case, Lacan (2004/2014) maintains his positioning of Sidonie as a masculine subject but takes her trajectory further along the vector from symbolic to real. This move frees Sidonie from the Oedipal reduction—but not from the masculine position—and moves her towards object a (see Figure 6) where Lacan notes she attempts a “promotion of the phallus…in place of the a” (p. 112).

Figure 6: Sidonie placed along the vector of the masculine subject

The square indicates my interpretation of where Freud (1920/1953) placed Sidonie in 1920 and the circle indicates my interpretation of where Lacan (2004/2014) placed her in 1963.

Lacan (2004/2014) concludes that Sidonie’s suicide attempt is an act of subjective destitution when she is confronted by the fact that in her father’s eyes, she is not a masculine subject in possession of the phallus in place of object a (through her female lover) but instead she herself is the object a. In this context, Lacan explains the fall as a universal experience that occurs when a subject suddenly sees themselves in the position of object a. From the masculine position, this would be an unbearable realization of lack and incite a violent response to the rupture of the Other from object a. The implication is that Sidonie jumps from the bridge because from the masculine position she is unable to bear the realization that she is lacking; that she is not in possession of the phallus. Thus, Lacan’s account of the universal fall relates to the first fall of the Other when a subject attempts to conceal lack with an object of desire. However, drawing from Lacan’s (1991/2015) reading of Alcibiades and Socrates, I suggest that rather than escaping or concealing lack, Sidonie’s act aimed to reveal lack. In other words, Sidonie’s fall is not based on the unbearable fact of castration but instead on a desire to reveal that which is lacking in the Other; it is the second fall—the fall of the Other from its hegemonic pedestal—that brings meaning to a reading of Sidonie in the feminine position of not-all, situated at the corner of the real and aiming at the lack in the Other. Sidonie’s fall, in service to her lack, reveals the feminine position of not-all shown in Figure 5.

By foregrounding the niederkommen as a universal phenomenon with its dual purpose—the fall of the Other to conceal its lack and the fall of the Other from its hegemonic pedestal to reveal its lack—we can read it from both the masculine and feminine position. On the one hand, the masculine subject continuously enacts the fall that conceals the lack. This corresponds to the translation of niederkommen as “falling down.” In contrast, the feminine subject initiates a different kind of fall: she attempts to bring the Other down from its hegemonic pedestal, and reveal the lack that sustains her. This fall corresponds to the translation of niederkommen as “giving birth.”  When Gherovici (2024) reminds us that femininity is missing from Freud’s analysis of Sidonie’s case, she suggests that Sidonie’s fall can be understood “in terms of giving birth, not to the Oedipal father’s child but to herself” (p. 88). In this suggestion, Gherovici remains true to Freud and Lacan’s original reading of the suicide attempt and the fall, but her insight about the meaning of niederkommen as a way for Sidonie to give birth to herself provides an important interpretive opportunity. Sidonie is not giving birth—she is delivering, generating, or revealing something of the real that supports her lack and relation to Other jouissance.

Restoring the Dragon

Just as Lacan (2004/2014) suspects, in The Story of Sidonie C. (Rieder & Voigt, 2021) we learn that the location of Sidonie’s fall is the Kettenbrücke (chain bridge) built in 1830 over the Wien River, which in 1920s Vienna was covered over. According to the biography, she accessed this bridge from Kettenbrückengrasse, a one-way street approximately 300 meters long. Whether reading Sidonie from the feminine position of not-all or from the masculine position, there is no mistaking that on that fateful day in the street when her father sees her with her lover, Sidonie responds to something in his gaze. She understands that her father’s efforts to detach her from her lover are intended to destroy what she wishes to preserve or, in Freud’s (1920/1953) words, “something about his daughter’s homosexuality…aroused the deepest bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it with all the means in his power” (p. 148). Another way to look at this is to revisit to the metaphor of courtly love and the rescue fantasy. Sidonie’s father is the knight in the masculine position. He wants to defeat the lack in the Other. By slaying the dragon, so to speak, he will rescue his daughter, a respectable lady, from danger. Berman (1997) explains how the dragon in the rescue fantasy can be understood as a psychic phenomenon—an internal dimension of the person to be saved. The idea of the dragon as an internal dimension of a feminine subject is one way to consider her Other jouissance. As such, the dragon is what must be confused by a certain “mirage-like path” of ignorance (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 145). This is the same confusion that Lacan speaks of when he refers to God in this passage: “the more a man can believe a woman confuses him with God, in other words, what she enjoys, the less he hates (haie), the less he is (est)…and since, after all, there is no love without hate, the less he loves” (p. 89).

In Some Remarks on The Love Letter, Collette Soler (1993) discusses at length chapter seven from Seminar XX (Lacan, 1975/1998b). At one point she refers to Lacan’s discussion of love and explains how the dynamics of love establishes the ground from which Lacan aims to detach the Other from object a.

The implicit hypothesis in all love is that there is a convergence of the good… Lacan’s chapter [seven] is presented to break with this supposition. It stresses that there is no convergence, no harmony between the different goods of everyone… On the one hand there is the dream of harmony and on the other real heterogeneity. This is why, after two pages in which he speaks about Aristotlean love, Lacan concludes that the object of his teaching is to dissociate (a) from the Other. (paras. 27-28)

The metaphor of the rescue fantasy helps align the triad of love, hate, and being from Lacan’s (1975/1998b) passage quoted above with Soler’s discussion of Aristotelian love. The knight “dreams of harmony” (someone to love in place of the object a), which can be achieved once the dragon, as “real heterogeneity” (someone/thing to hate in place of the lack in the Other), is defeated so the knight can rescue the lady, and they can converge (a function of being whole, without lack). Lacan (1975/1998b) explains this is a fantasy that can never be realized, “the invention of courtly love is not at all the fruit of what people are historically used to symbolizing … There wasn’t the slightest synthesis afterward, of course – in fact, there never is” (p. 86). This is the ultimate function of courtly love for Lacan, to perpetrate the ignorance required “to forget the real (which is not so agreeable), that it is not possible to share the jouissance of the Other” (Soler, 1993, para. 29).

For Sidonie, the dragon represents Other jouissance and her relation to the lack in the Other. Sidonie seeks to preserve and protect the dragon and the impossible enjoyment she experiences outside of the phallic function, which remains a mystery to her father, Freud, and even Lacan in 1957 and perhaps still in 1963. The dragon in Sidonie’s story is not just figurative; it is symbolized in a meaningful way. The 300-meter street that led Sidonie to the bridge where she attempted suicide runs in a one-way direction (not unlike the vector of the masculine subject) from the bridge out towards the city limits and ends when it meets Margaretenstraße. With traffic moving one-way from the bridge towards Margaretenstraße, Sidonie must move against the flow (the wrong way on the one-way street or in opposition to the masculine subject’s trajectory), away from Margaretenstraße to reach the bridge and enact her fall. Margaretenstraße marks the border of the district of Margarete, established in 1850 and named for Saint Margaret, also known as Margaret the Virgin. The historical narrative of Saint Margaret involves her “being swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon from which she escaped alive when the cross she carried irritated the dragon’s innards” (“Margaret the Virgin,” 2025). In many of these stories, Saint Margaret slays the dragon. Thus, Sidonie’s fall is quite literally an attempt to run away from the symbolic representation of the dragon slayer (Margaretenstraße, the district of Margarete, and her father). In that moment, she aimed to destroy herself as a potential object a to prevent the dragon and lack in the Other from collapsing. To further emphasize the symbolic resonance, let us not forget that Sidonie’s real name was Margarethe.

How would Sidonie have known the story of Saint Margaret, a saint well known and revered by the Greeks? “Sidonie’s closest friend at Semmering is a cheerful brunette named Xenia Afenduli. The Afendulis are among the many Greek trading families that had settled in the harbor city of Trieste and accumulated considerable wealth” (Rieder & Voigt, 2021, chapter 1, para. 21). It is likely Sidonie was teased by Xenia during one of their many summer vacations for her namesake, perhaps as she donned in playfulness the identity of various Greek Goddesses. Indeed, I suspect that Sidonie’s rhetoric around the negative aesthetics of her name, and her intent to maintain a pseudonym in the telling of her biography is a last and final act of compassion and protection for the dragon, just as we should understand her running away from Margaretenstraße towards the Kettenbrücke as an attempt to preserve the dragon and sacrifice herself as the object. Isn’t this exactly what we should take Lacan (1958/2006) to mean when he suggests that what is at stake in feminine desire is “a sublation [relève] of the object: one might say a challenge that is accepted [défi relevé]” (p. 618)?

The Locus of Other Jouissance

Shortly after suggesting that the sublation of the object is at stake in feminine sexuality, Lacan (1958/2006), in a section titled, “Female Homosexuality and Ideal Love” (p. 618) states that “feminine sexuality appears … as the effort of a jouissance enveloped in its own contiguity … in order to be realized in competition with the desire that castration liberates in the male in giving him the phallus as its signifier” (p. 619). The Latin root of competition, competere, originally denoted a mutual striving rather than an adversarial struggle (Etymonline, n.d.). While Lacan emphasises the competitive position of the female homosexual, he remains set on understanding the female homosexual as the knight of courtly love. Can we converge these lines of thinking: that the female homosexual may offer an alternative position to that of the masculine subject using the metaphor of courtly love? If the lady in courtly love embodies an inaccessibility that hints at Other jouissance, does a female lover approach differently than a male knight? Brousse (2012) suggests the answer is yes, “it would be a solution…to limit sexual meaning, not in the way in which psychoanalysis does it with ‘there is no sexual relation’, but in raising the flag of love: a kind of sublimation by the soul” (p. 196).

We can return to Seminar XX to look for further proof. In reference to courtly love, Lacan (1975/1998b) says “You may have noticed… that now and then, there is something that, for a brief moment, shakes (secoue) women up or rescues them (secourt). When you look up the etymology of those two words… you’ll see the relationship between them” (p. 74).[7] Indeed, the etymology points to a shared Latin prefix “sub-” meaning from below, underneath, or in response to (Wikimedia Foundation, n.d.-a, n.d.-b). Though not explicitly, Lacan brings the two words together in their etymological relation in the schema of sexuation: we can place secourt underneath the formula of the masculine subject where we find the first fall of the Other in the rescue fantasy when the knight “slays” the dragon to conceal the lack in the Other and save the lady from herself; we can place secoue underneath the formula of the feminine subject where we find the second fall of the Other, pushed off the hegemonic pedestal, leaving the subject shaken, jolted and momentarily outside, or in the very least, at the limits of the symbolic. The etymology reveals their structural placement on either side of sexuation and suggests that the female homosexual does in fact operate from the feminine position. Furthermore, as homonyms, the two words also risk collapsing into one another. When secourt and secoue come together in their homophonic relation, they conceal the impasse of sexuation—that there is no sexual rapport capable of supporting a subject in experiencing jouissance. In resisting this collapse, Sidonie reasserts the difference between the masculine position relative to secourt and the feminine position relative to secoue. Her resistance restores object a and the lack in the Other to their respective place in the structure of sexuation and establishes space for herself in the position of the feminine not-all.[8]

Sidonie’s Jouissance

The structural dynamics of sexuation, read through a reinterpretation of the niederkommen and a reassessment of Lacan’s references to courtly love, attest to the possibility that Sidonie is in the feminine position of not-all. The details of Sidonie’s life offer further insight into her specific relation to Other jouissance. The Story of Sidonie C. (Rieder & Voigt, 2021) releases Sidonie from her decades-long concealment, and reveals several insights that help to reinforce a reading of Sidonie in the feminine position of the not-all. These include her experiences with sublime beauty, her insistence on a pseudonym, and her limits on sexual relations.

The first time Sidonie saw Leonie, “she felt as if she’d caught fire, not a sexual fire but a deep and burning desire to adore and to worship” (Rieder & Voigt, 2021, chapter 1, para. 13). This description invokes the kind of mystical love Lacan (1975/1998b) explores in Seminar XX. That same sense of mystical, sublime awe is found throughout the biography in Sidonie’s expressed dedication to aesthetics and beauty. Gherovici (2010) discusses Michel, the cross-dresser analyzed by Lacan, who wanted above all to feminize his face and to become a beauty. She explains that for Michel, beauty is a denial of castration: it conceals lack. For Sidonie, her relationship with beauty must be understood from her position on the side of the feminine: it is an awe-inspiring experience. From the position of feminine not-all, lack is the beauty that Sidonie sees in the women she loves. Where Michel’s relation to beauty is organized defensively against lack—an attempt to feminize in denial of castration—Sidonie’s experience of beauty affirms lack as the very site of desire. The aesthetic of her jouissance is not phallic but Other and involves being shaken and moved beyond words.

Rieder (2021) explains how Sidonie wished to use a pseudonym to capture that special part of her: “shouldn’t she choose a different name, maybe that of a Greek goddess, one that would make her something special?” (para. 4). Many scholars have commented on the fact that Freud in his case study left Sidonie nameless (Frosh, 2024; Lesser & Schoenberg, 1999), without even a pseudonym. The decision by Sidonie’s biographers to maintain her wish for a pseudonym has also come under fire recently: “Since using the pseudonym perpetuates her obscurity, I will use her real name in what follows” (Shapira, 2024, p. 61). Her real name—that of the dragon slayer—is what inscribes her in the symbolic, ties her to the phallus, and reduces her to an object a. By rejecting the name assigned to her by her parents—Margarethe Csonka, a master-signifier from the earliest point of her symbolic inscription—Sidonie preserves a gap in the symbolic. Her pseudonym becomes a form of symbolic resistance that keeps the lack in the Other open. Jean Allouch (2004)[9] argues in favour of the pseudonym, suggesting that Sidonie is a master that does not dominate and “Sidonie Csillag” is her master’s name. But what is a master that does not dominate? This might be yet another way to signify how her mode of jouissance presents an alternative to the dominance of the phallus and contends with the limits of sexuation.[10]

When Lacan (1975/1998b) says that Other jouissance is “beyond the phallus” (p. 74) he is indicating that on the side of the feminine not-all, the phallus and the law of castration are ineffective in shielding the subject from the real of sexual difference – that there is no sexual rapport. The conflation of the Other and object a defend against the sexual non-rapport and enable the mediation of jouissance by the phallic function. This is why Other jouissance is “localized outside the sexual organs” (Brousse, 2012, p. 196). Sidonie’s agreement with the doctor who called her asexual, and her explicit disgust for the penis and disdain for the vulva (Rieder & Voigt, 2021) are significations of what she knows of sexual non-rapport. Sidonie’s first sexual encounter with a woman makes her knowledge of sexual non-rapport palpable: she “allows no touching, no caresses; her desire ebbs and turns to fear when it’s her turn. She lives only in her devotion to others” (Rieder & Voigt, 2021, chapter 6, para. 24). By resisting the concealment of the lack in the Other, Sidonie refuses to conceal the sexual-non-rapport.

Freud and Sidonie

In 1957, Lacan (1994/2020) interpreted Freud’s breaking of the transference with Sidonie as a defensive reaction. Freud felt deceived by what he understood as her seductive behaviour and acted to preserve his authority. By 1963, however, Lacan (2004/2014) had revisited this interpretation: now, he framed Freud’s act as one around the mechanics of the fall. To avoid being positioned as the object cause of Sidonie’s desire, Freud let her fall when he terminated her analysis and suggested she be placed in the care of another woman. While Lacan critiques Freud’s defensive withdrawal, Allouch (2004) pushes further, arguing that Freud restructures the triangle (of father figure-Sidonie-lady) to preserve his symbolic position as paternal authority. He reads Freud’s suggestion that Sidonie seek treatment under a woman analyst as a way to maintain his distance and still command the phallus as a supervisor. Allouch contextualizes this by linking Freud’s appointment of his daughter Anna to head the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), suggesting the IPA was set up as a symbolic “‘lesbian’ movement” (p. 56). In this structure, Allouch contends that Freud is positioned as the paternal authority over his (presumed) homosexual daughter and that Freud places Lou Andreas-Salomé in the position of the lady thereby remaking the triangle of Freud, Sidonie, and Sidonie’s lady love. In his discussion and reading of Lacan, Allouch reminds us that through the case of Sidonie and in Freud’s subsequent remaking of their dynamic in the structure of the IPA there exists a stumbling upon the answer to the question “what does woman want?”—namely, another woman.

Allouch’s (2004) insights show that Freud’s encounter with Sidonie’s “will, her insistence to love how and whom she wants, and her refusal to forswear her womanhood in the name of her father’s wishes” (Perez Foster, 1999, p. 130) had the power to shake (secoue) Freud, who himself was in a precarious position. We know that Sidonie was 19 years old when she was analyzed by Freud (Rieder & Voigt, 2021), which means at the same time, Freud was analyzing his daughter, Anna. Shapira (2024) reminds us that Freud struggled with the antisemitic and homophobic ideas of his time, and Lesser (2003) poignantly asks “could a Jewish man ever be in a position to depathologize homosexuality without risking that he himself would be seen as fitting the stereotype of a feminine, homosexual Jew” (p. 6)? Whether or not consciously intended, Freud’s (1920/1953) characterization of Sidonie as “shrewd” (p. 159) and vengeful was a defensive act: a phallic inscription in response to the disruption posed by Sidonie. The fact that Sidonie used Freud’s own techniques to avoid developing any real transference (the lying dreams, for instance) suggests that she is invoking the operation of the second fall, attempting to knock Freud off his pedestal from within Freud’s own symbolic language (like Alcibiades using oration to knock Socrates down). Freud sensed but could not express that a part of Sidonie was unknowable and in confrontation with the Oedipal and symbolic norms he sought to uphold. His defamation of Sidonie attests to this. As Lacan reminds us, “so that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman [on la dit-femme] and defamed [dif-fâme]” (Lacan, 1975/1998b, p. 85).

With this, I am left to question Freud’s decision to leave Sidonie nameless in his published case study, without even a pseudonym. Sidonie’s preservation of the dragon—her resistance to normativity and position relative to the lack in the Other—expressed by her love for another woman, made an impact on Freud, even if only unconsciously. By refusing to name her, Freud left a symbolic gap. In doing so, he held space for the possibility of her jouissance and allowed Sidonie to remain, for most of her life, an obscure subject.

Closing Thoughts

This essay has argued that Sidonie Csillag’s fall—the nierdekommen—long interpreted as the outcome of a failed masculine identification and subjective destitution, can instead be understood as a feminine act that resists the concealment of lack and preserves a relation to the lack in the Other. Her fall is reframed as the second fall from Lacan’s (1991/2015) interpretation of the dynamics of desire between Alcibiades and Socrates: the fall of the Other off a hegemonic pedestal. By reading Sidonie from the feminine position of not-all, outside the phallic field, and in relation to the ineffable Other jouissance, Sidonie’s fall is understood as an act that aims to reveal and preserve lack by resisting its symbolic reduction. In this position, Sidonie sits precariously close to the rim of the well of jouissance (Lacan, 2006/2023), the threshold where language fails and the subject risks dissolution (Figure 5). Here, she at times acted violently to resist the concealment of her lack. Given the historical limitations of signifying love between women within early twentieth-century Vienna, her multiple suicide attempts might be understood as desperate acts of resistance in the face of limited options for self-expression. Her willingness to sacrifice herself was, at those moments, the only way to protect the experience of a jouissance that was not bound to a sexual encounter. Her aim, to resist the collapse of the Other into object a, serves her impossible enjoyment, which depended on a relation to the lack in the Other, that is, Other jouissance.

This lack is symbolized by the dragon in a meaningful way in Sidonie’s story, in which her father becomes the knight seeking to slay the dragon and preserve Sidonie as a lady. Berman (1997), in his analysis of the rescue fantasy, argues that the knight, dragon, and lady represent three psychic dimensions of a single subject. The dragon, framed as dangerous or villainous, becomes a figure that supports the phallic mode of being. Although Berman’s interpretation is anchored in the phallic field, his insight that these three figures coexist within one subject offers a productive analogy for understanding the movement between positions in the triangle of desire. The idea that a subject can position themselves as masculine or feminine (Lacan, 1975/1998b) is represented in the triangle of desire by the interstices between the vectors that make up the three sides. A subject can move from outside to inside the triangle, from masculine to feminine (and vice versa), and within the triangle between the feminine positions. When a subject has a chance encounter with the real, this might be represented as a lingering in the interstice between the vector from the symbolic and the vector from the real. This is where we locate the position of the feminine not-all with its mystical, ineffable, and impossible experience of jouissance. As is often the tragic case, the sexuated positions one assumes are constrained by hegemonic norms and the persistence of binary thought in modernity (Rahimi, 2025). Yet some subjects manage to traverse these limits. Lacan devoted his teaching to showing how the subject might expose the lack concealed within them, making possible the assumption of the not-all position. Sidonie Csillag lived to preserve the lack in her and in the Other and protect her relation to Other jouissance—an effort she remained committed to throughout her life.