Canonical lacan 353 occurrences

Foreclosure

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ELI5

Foreclosure is what happens when a crucial organizing rule for a person's inner world was never registered in the first place—not forgotten or hidden away, but simply never written in—so that whenever the world seems to demand it, it erupts back not as a memory or symptom but as something terrifyingly real, like a voice from outside or an unshakeable certainty that the normal rules of reality no longer apply.

Definition

Foreclosure (forclusion) is Lacan's translation of Freud's Verwerfung—a psychical operation radically distinct from repression (Verdrängung), negation (Verneinung), and disavowal (Verleugnung). Where repression pushes a signifier into the unconscious (such that it can return symbolically through symptoms, dreams, and slips), foreclosure ejects a signifier entirely outside the symbolic order, as if it had never existed. The foreclosed element is not buried and available for symbolic return; it is absent from the very register within which such a return would be possible. The structurally decisive consequence follows directly: what is foreclosed from the Symbolic does not return through the Symbolic but "appears in the real"—as hallucination, as an erratic eruption of castration without transference, or as the dissolution of phallic signification. Lacan formally articulates this in "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (Écrits): foreclosure is the absence of Bejahung (primordial affirmation/inscription), meaning the foreclosed signifier was never admitted into the symbolic order in the first place. This distinguishes it from repression: the repressed is something that was symbolically admitted and then pushed below; the foreclosed was never admitted at all.

The specific signifier that Lacan, by the end of 1957, identifies as the object of foreclosure in psychosis is the Name-of-the-Father—the fundamental signifier that grounds the paternal metaphor, anchors the symbolic order, regulates jouissance, and makes phallic signification possible. When the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, a constitutive hole opens in the symbolic order (denoted P₀) and a parallel absence in the imaginary register (Φ₀): there can be no paternal metaphor, no transformation of the (m)Other's jouissance into organized desire, no quilting point that holds meaning stable. The subject can acquire language and even use it competently, but lacks the unconscious background that gives words their libidinal weight. Clinical consequences include the characteristic psychotic phenomena—hallucination, delusion, interrupted sentences, the "basic language"—all of which Lacan analyzes in detail through Schreber's Memoirs. Delusion itself is reframed not as illness but as the psychotic subject's attempt at self-cure: a compensatory reconstruction of meaning around the hole left by the foreclosed signifier. The triggering of manifest psychosis requires two conditions: the subject must have a psychotic structure (the structural foreclosure) and the Name-of-the-Father must be "called into symbolic opposition to the subject"—summoned at a critical biographical juncture where it cannot answer. Lacan's extended formulations in Seminars III, V, and the Écrits show that foreclosure is also the structural mechanism underlying the absence of the unconscious as a functioning formation in psychosis: not that there is no unconscious, but that it is "present but not functioning."

Evolution

Lacan's route to foreclosure runs through two distinct but converging threads, both traceable back to his pre-psychoanalytic work. The first is his long-standing insistence that the origin of psychosis lies in an "exclusion of the father" from family structure (1938), with psychosis linked to the reduction of the child's world to a mother-child dyad without symbolic triangulation. The second is his 1954 rediscovery of Freud's Verwerfung in the Wolf Man case (Seminar I), where he identifies it as a primitive mechanism distinct from repression: the Wolf Man's refusal of the genital plane was not a repression of something symbolized but an exclusion such that "it was as if it didn't exist." At this early stage, Lacan translates Verwerfung variously as rejet, refus, retranchement—the concept is in place but still lacks its definitive name and object.

The decisive synthesis arrives in Seminar III (1955–56) and reaches its canonical form in "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (written December 1957–January 1958, published 1959). Here Lacan proposes forclusion as the stable French rendering of Verwerfung, borrows the term from French legal discourse (where foreclosure means the permanent lapsing of a right), and formally identifies what is foreclosed: the Name-of-the-Father. In this formulation, foreclosure is contrasted not only with repression but with the primordial Bejahung (affirmation) that Freud posits as the condition for any possible symbolization. The R-schema and I-schema in the same essay give foreclosure a topological articulation: P₀→Φ₀, the hole in the symbolic producing a corresponding hole in the imaginary, leaving Schreber's reality parabolic rather than well-formed. Seminar V (1957–58) develops the clinical implications: when the Name-of-the-Father is verworfen at the level of the schema, the broken messages and neo-code hallucinations that constitute Schreber's psychosis become legible as direct effects of its absence.

In the middle period (Seminars VII–XIV, roughly 1960–67), Lacan extends the structural formula of foreclosure beyond its clinical base. In "Science and Truth" (Écrits p. 760) he aligns Verwerfung with science's structural foreclosure of truth-as-cause, and in Seminars XIV and XV he redeploys the formula "what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real" to explain how analytic knowledge passes into the real (through the rejection by trainees who want to know nothing about it), and to characterize the analyst's office as the site where the sexual act is foreclosed (Verwerfung). Seminar VI uses foreclosure to mark the difference between neurotic and psychotic negation, and introduces it as one of three modes ("foreclosure, discordance, negation") through which the subject manages the unsaid. In Seminar XIX and onwards, Lacan reconceptualizes foreclosure in relation to the "not-all" (pas-tout): foreclosure (associated with le pas in French grammar) is sharply distinguished from discordance as two structurally different modes of negation, with foreclosure bearing on what cannot be said at all—on the level of the dit (the said), not merely the diachronic chain.

The late Lacan (Seminar XXII–XXIV, Borromean topology) introduces a further complication: if the sinthome (Joyce) can compensate for a "de facto Verwerfung" by the father without triggering full psychotic decompensation, then there exists something "more radical" than the clinical foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father—a structural foreclosure of meaning by the Real itself. This reopens the question of the boundaries between psychosis and other clinical structures, as commentators including Fink, Evans, Hook/Neill/Vanheule, and Gherovici note: psychosis, in the Borromean topology, becomes one solution among others to the problem of tying together the three registers when the fourth ring (sinthome or paternal function) is absent or weakened.

Key formulations

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in EnglishJacques Lacan · 2006 (p.483)

I will thus take Verwerfung to be 'foreclosure' of the signifier. At the point at which the Name-of-the-Father is summoned... a pure and simple hole may thus answer in the Other.

This is Lacan's definitive formulation in 'On a Question': it nominates the term, identifies its object (the Name-of-the-Father), and states the structural consequence (a hole in the Other), condensing the entire theory of psychosis into a single formula.

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in EnglishJacques Lacan · 2006 (p.341)

Verwerfung thus cut short any manifestation of the symbolic order—that is, it cut short the Bejahung that Freud posits as the primary procedure in which the judgment of attribution finds its root... what did not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real.

From the 'Response to Hyppolite': this establishes foreclosure as the structural failure of primordial affirmation and states the axiomatic consequence—the foreclosed returns not in the symbolic (as symptom) but in the real (as hallucination), which is the master formula of the whole theory.

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in EnglishJacques Lacan · 2006 (p.497)

It is an accident in this register and in what occurs in it—namely, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other—and the failure of the paternal metaphor that I designate as the defect that gives psychosis its essential condition, along with the structure that separates it from neurosis.

The Postscript to 'On a Question': Lacan crystallizes the thesis that foreclosure is a structural condition (not an episode), that it concerns the Other's own locus, and that the failure of metaphor is its clinical signature—distinguishing psychosis from neurosis at the level of the signifier itself.

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.189)

Characteristic of psychosis is the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (465, 9), denoted by the symbol P0. This crucial absence at the level of the symbolic engenders a parallel hole in the imaginary, where phallic signifiers remain lacking, denoted by the symbol Φ0.

Vanheule's commentary gives the structural formalization its most explicit topological statement: P₀→Φ₀, the cascade from symbolic hole to imaginary hole, which is the technical core of the R-schema's clinical application.

Seminar III · The PsychosesJacques Lacan · 1955 (p.163)

What is at issue when I speak of Verwerfung? At issue is the rejection of a primordial signifier into the outer shadows, a signifier that will henceforth be missing at this level. Here you have the fundamental mechanism that I posit as being at the basis of paranoia.

From Seminar III, chapter X: this is Lacan's first sustained technical definition of foreclosure as a theoretical concept distinct from both repression and Verleugnung—positioning it as the exclusion of a primordial signifier into 'outer shadows,' and directly linking it to the aetiology of paranoia/psychosis.

Cited examples

Judge Daniel Paul Schreber's case—his paranoid psychosis, delusional feminization, interrupted sentences ('Thou art the one who…'), hallucinated voices in the fundamental language, and the construction of a delusional world centered on divine emasculation and becoming God's wife (case_study)

Cited by Écrits: The First Complete Edition in EnglishJacques Lacan · 2006 (p.483). Schreber's case is Lacan's master example throughout 'On a Question': the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (evoked by Schreber's promotion to Senatspräsident, a position that symbolically called the paternal signifier into play) leaves a hole that organizes the delusional reconstruction. The interrupted sentences stop at the point where the structuring signifier should appear but cannot; the neo-code of the Grundsprache and the divine jaculations are the return in the real of what was foreclosed from the symbolic.

The Wolf Man's hallucination of his severed finger while playing in the garden, and his refusal—as if it did not exist—of the genital plane: 'It was for him as if the genital plane did not exist' (case_study)

Cited by Seminar I · Freud's Papers on TechniqueJacques Lacan · 1953 (p.63). Lacan introduces Verwerfung by reading Freud's Wolf Man case: the subject did not symbolize (repress) castration but foreclosed it so radically that the genital plane is 'as if it didn't exist.' The hallucinated severed finger is then explained as the return in the real of what was excluded from the symbolic: castration manifests not as a repressed memory but as a bodily hallucination.

The clinical case of Mark—a man whose absent, legally non-recognizing father (named Joseph, to a Mary, making Mark a Christ-figure) developed an elaborate delusional system incorporating Caribbean curse-mythology, a divine trial, and a messianic identity as 'their savior' (case_study)

Cited by Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian KeyBruce Fink · 2014 (p.202). Fink reads the delusional elaboration (explaining the family curse, filling in the gaps of an enigmatic history) as precisely the psychotic subject's compensatory construction to supplement the foreclosed paternal function. The legally non-recognizing father is the correlate of the structurally absent Name-of-the-Father; the delusion fills the hole where symbolic anchoring should have been.

The clinical case of José (presented by Jorge Alemán), a man whose father 'never had the courage to intervene with my mother, the brute,' who laughed at his father's funeral, and who constructed a fictional 'parenthesis' as a narrative device to limit jouissance (case_study)

Cited by Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian KeyBruce Fink · 2014 (p.206). José's case illustrates the structural logic of foreclosure: his father's failure to intervene between him and his mother is equivalent to the absence of the paternal limit, leaving jouissance unbarred. The invented 'parenthesis' functions as a sinthome-like supplement that creates a limit where the Name-of-the-Father failed to operate.

The clinical vignette from Lacan's Seminar III of the woman who, accosted by her lover's wife in the corridor, muttered 'I've just been to the pork butcher's' and then hallucinated the word 'Sow!' (case_study)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.172). Lacan uses this vignette to show how a suspended signifying chain (the sentence 'I've just been to the pork butcher's...' breaks off without completing its subjective import) creates a gap that gets filled by a hallucinated word from outside. This illustrates the mechanism of foreclosure in miniature: where a signifier is absent that would name the subject's position, something erupts in the real ('Sow!') rather than returning symbolically through a blaming moral framework.

Joyce's 'epiphanies' as instances of 'radical foreclosure' in which 'the real forecloses meaning,' and Joyce's writing as the sinthome that compensates for a de facto Verwerfung by the father (literature)

Cited by An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown). In Lacan's late topology (Seminar XXIII), Joyce's artistic practice is read as a supplement to a structural weakness in the paternal function—a 'de facto foreclosure'—that is repaired not through the classical Name-of-the-Father but through the sinthome as a fourth Borromean ring. This shows the concept's extension in the late period beyond clinical psychosis toward a topology of how subjects compensate for structural holes.

Tensions

Within the corpus

Is foreclosure strictly a clinical mechanism defining psychosis, or does it name a more general structural feature of the symbolic order (and beyond) applicable to science, capitalist subjectivity, and the subject as such?

Lacan (early-middle period, Écrits/Seminars I–V): Foreclosure names the specific psychopathological mechanism of psychosis—the non-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father. It is contrasted rigorously with repression (neurosis) and disavowal (perversion) as the defining operation of a particular clinical structure. When asked whether there are 'other foreclosures' than the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, the early Lacan resists. — cite: jacques-lacan-ecrits p. 483
Lacan (middle-late period, Seminars XIV–XIX, 'Science and Truth'): Verwerfung is extended structurally—science forecloses truth-as-cause (Écrits p. 760); the analyst's office forecloses the sexual act ('a bedroom in which the sexual act is presented there as foreclosure, properly speaking: Verwerfung,' Seminar XIV p. 276); the subject is constituted from a 'rejected, verwerfen, signifier' (Seminar XII p. 242); Seminar XXIII proposes 'something more radical about foreclosure' than the clinical variety. In the late Lacan, foreclosure becomes a structural-ontological operator, not exclusively a clinical one. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-14-1 p. 276

This tension generates the debate between Fink/Evans (who defend the strict clinical sense) and Žižek/Rousselle (who generalize it to 'generalized foreclosure' as a socio-political epoch).

Does the psychotic's structural foreclosure entail the complete absence of the unconscious, or is the unconscious present but non-functional?

Fink (Against Understanding Vol. 1, p. 55–59): In psychosis, 'there is no unconscious in psychosis, strictly speaking—nothing repressed.' The absence of internalized parental prohibitions means no repression occurs; slips are rare, wordplay fails, jokes don't land—all signs of a structural absence of the unconscious as a functioning formation. — cite: against-understanding-volume-1-bruce-fink p. 55
Vanheule/Hook/Neill reading of Lacan (Reading Lacan's Écrits, p. 189/Evans p. 181): 'The unconscious is present but not functioning' (Seminar III, p. 208 cited by Evans). The psychotic structure results from a malfunction of the Oedipus complex and forecloses phallic signification, but this is not equivalent to the complete absence of unconscious material—the psychotic has an unconscious, but it cannot be engaged by ordinary analytic technique. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t p. 189

The tension has direct clinical stakes: if the unconscious is simply absent in psychosis, the analytic relationship is structurally impossible; if it is present-but-non-functioning, modified forms of analytic work remain conceivable.

Is foreclosure properly reserved for the psychotic exclusion of the Name-of-the-Father, or can it serve as a general name for any constitutive exclusion that structures a symbolic field (social, political, epistemological)?

Žižek defends reserving 'foreclosure' for its psychotic meaning: 'I prefer Freud's name Ur-Verdraengung, primordial repression, since foreclosure stands for psychotic exclusion.' He explicitly resists Rousselle's 'generalized foreclosure' diagnosis of contemporary politics, arguing that symbolic castration and its operations remain locally operative even if globally attenuated. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 p. 227
Rousselle argues for 'generalized foreclosure' as the defining political-clinical structure of the contemporary era: 'My conviction is that we are now in an era of foreclosure, such that traditional notions of political uprisings, civil wars, and revolutions... seem increasingly impotent.' The collapse of the big Other's consistency means that foreclosure has become universal, not exceptional. — cite: todd-mcgowan-dominik-finkelde-eds-zizek-responds-bloomsbury-publishing-2022 p. 302

This debate recapitulates the clinical/structural tension at the socio-political level and determines whether psychoanalytic categories can be applied directly to collective phenomena.

Across frameworks

vs Ego Psychology

Lacanian: For Lacan, foreclosure is a structural failure at the level of the signifier—the non-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father—that cannot be repaired by strengthening the ego or improving the subject's relationship to reality. In fact, Lacan diagnoses ego psychology itself as operating through a collective Verwerfung: having never symbolically assimilated the concept of the unconscious, ego psychologists repudiate it rather than repress it, making their theoretical stance structurally analogous to psychosis rather than neurosis. Clinical work with psychosis, from a Lacanian perspective, aims not at ego-strengthening in any ordinary sense but at supplementing the hole in the symbolic through imaginary or sinthome-based compensations.

Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein) treats psychosis as a failure of ego-organization, secondary-process functioning, and reality-testing. The therapeutic goal is to strengthen the ego's autonomous functions, improve its capacity to mediate between id, superego, and reality, and restore the dominance of secondary process. From this perspective, the analyst works to bolster the patient's reality-orientation and build a 'therapeutic alliance' with the healthy part of the ego—a technique Lacan explicitly criticizes as failing to address the actual structural dimension of psychosis.

Fault line: The central disagreement is whether psychosis is a deficit of ego-organization (remediable through developmental reinforcement) or a structural failure at the level of the signifier that is irreparable in its primary form and can only be compensated through supplementation.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Lacan uses foreclosure in an extended sense to characterize science's and capitalism's structural exclusions: science forecloses truth-as-cause, and capitalist discourse forecloses castration (Seminar XIX). These are not simply ideological distortions but structural operations of a different kind of symbolic order. The return of what is foreclosed from capitalist discourse takes the form of symptomatic eruptions—jouissance, fundamentalism, forms of raw Real—that cannot be processed symbolically within the dominant discourse.

Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) analyzes capitalism's exclusions through the lens of reification, instrumental reason, and repressive desublimation. For Adorno, the administered society forecloses genuine experience and critical thought not through a structural mechanism of signification but through ideological totalization—the culture industry, identity thinking, and the eclipse of the non-identical. The remedy lies in negative dialectics, mimetic rationality, and art's capacity to preserve the unredeemed particular against conceptual subsumption.

Fault line: The Frankfurt School locates exclusion in the logic of capital and instrumental reason as socio-historical forces; Lacan locates foreclosure in the structure of the signifier and the symbolic order, making it a formal-topological rather than primarily historical-materialist phenomenon.

vs Cbt

Lacanian: Lacanian theory holds that psychosis is constituted by a structural absence at the level of the signifier—the non-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father—which means its characteristic phenomena (hallucination, delusion) are not cognitive distortions to be corrected but are the structure itself, making its own disturbing logic visible. Clinical work with psychosis requires radically different technique from neurosis: reinforcing rather than deconstructing the patient's worldview, avoiding the position of symbolic authority, and facilitating sinthome-based stabilization.

Cbt: CBT treats psychosis (especially schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) as a cluster of cognitive distortions, dysfunctional beliefs, and information-processing anomalies. Hallucinations are reframed as misattributed internal events; delusions are targeted through Socratic questioning and reality-testing. The therapeutic goal is to modify distorted beliefs and develop coping strategies, operating within a general model of cognition that does not distinguish structural clinical categories.

Fault line: Lacan insists on the ontological reality of the psychotic's symptom as the structure itself (not a distortion of a healthier underlying cognition), and on the irreducibility of clinical structures; CBT presupposes a normative cognitive baseline that treatment aims to restore, eliding the very structural difference that Lacanian diagnosis is designed to identify.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: From a Lacanian perspective, the humanistic ideal of self-actualization presupposes a unified, developing subject capable of realizing its potential—a conception that foreclosure as a concept directly undermines. The psychotic subject cannot 'develop' through the actualization of inherent capacities because the very structure that would make such development possible (the paternal metaphor, the installation of lack-in-being as generative) is absent. Therapeutic approaches premised on empathy, unconditional positive regard, and the removal of obstacles to growth cannot address the structural hole foreclosure creates.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) locates therapeutic change in the actualization of an innate human potential that has been blocked by environmental conditions, shame, or negative self-regard. The therapeutic relationship provides unconditional positive regard and empathic mirroring to restore the subject's capacity for growth. Psychosis is understood as a failure of self-concept integration or an extreme response to unbearable environmental conditions rather than as a structural deficit in the signifying chain.

Fault line: Humanistic approaches presuppose a unified, pre-linguistic self capable of growth; Lacan's theory of foreclosure is premised precisely on the constitutive incompleteness of the subject as an effect of the signifier, making any notion of a self that merely needs its natural growth unblocked theoretically incoherent from a structural perspective.

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (316)

#01

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.49

LACANIAN CLINICAL PRACTICE

Theoretical move: The passage deploys transitivism as a developmental marker differentiated by Oedipalization and clinical structure: it persists in psychosis (where the paternal function has not operated) and declines in neurosis, generating radically opposite therapeutic aims for each structure—ego-strengthening for psychosis versus ego-loosening for neurosis.

The psychotic, on the other hand, for whom Oedipalization has not occurred (as I shall argue)
#02

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

**Two Different Ways to Speak a Language**

Theoretical move: Fink argues that the presence or absence of the symbolic dimension generates two fundamentally distinct modes of speaking — neurotic and psychotic — grounding this structural difference in the Freudian mechanism of repression, whereby internalized prohibition does not eradicate desire but forces it into a persistent, insisting unconscious register.

for psychotics—those for whom the symbolic dimension has not been instated
#03

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.55

*Slips of the Tongue*

Theoretical move: The differential frequency and productivity of slips of the tongue in neurosis versus psychosis is used to argue that the unconscious (as a formation of repression) is structurally absent in psychosis, and that this clinical distinction demands differentiated analytic technique rather than a universalized psychoanalytic method.

When there has, however, been no internalization of parental prohibitions, there is no repression of wishes.
#04

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.57

**What Kind of Other Is the Analyst?**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the differential response to equivocation and metaphor between neurotics and psychotics marks a structural distinction in their relation to the symbolic dimension: neurotics implicitly grant the analyst the position of Subject Supposed to Know and allow double meanings to operate, while psychotics lack this symbolic attribution and are "blind to metaphor," making interpretive work structurally impossible with them.

there is no obvious denial, evasion, or defense but rather simply a failure to grasp what we are getting at, noncomprehension, and confusion.
#05

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.59

LACANIAN CLINICAL PRACTICE

Theoretical move: The passage uses the clinical observation that psychotics are devoid of genuine wordplay-based humor to mark a structural distinction between neurosis and psychosis: the capacity to register and enjoy linguistic ambiguity (double meanings, puns) presupposes the neurotic subject's relation to the signifier, which is absent in psychosis.

plays on words and double entendres lead nowhere with them
#06

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.61

LACANIAN CLINICAL PRACTICE

Theoretical move: The passage argues that clinical technique must be rigorously differentiated according to clinical structure: the analyst's gestures of skepticism that productively destabilize the neurotic (by opening a gap toward the unconscious) are contraindicated with psychotics, where such moves risk persecution and structural destabilization by introducing a symbolic third term into a purely imaginary dyadic relation.

This amounts to the attempt to instate the symbolic dimension when it is too late to do so.
#07

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.104

READING *HAMLET* [WITH LACAN](#page-7-0)

Theoretical move: Lacan's reading of Hamlet, developed across Seminar VI, is framed not as applied psychoanalytic interpretation of an author or text, but as a site for generating new psychoanalytic insights—specifically about desire, symbolic castration, and the theory of substitution—where the particular case acquires universal theoretical value.

how something comes to be equated with symbolic castration and serve the same purpose as the latter in a case where it had not taken place at the age at which it is generally considered to occur
#08

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.103

READING *HAMLET* WITH LACAN

Theoretical move: The passage argues that symbolic castration is the condition for the constitution of desire and the subject's liberation from the Other's desire in neurosis, while in psychosis the imaginary must compensate for the hole in the symbolic — thereby linking the clinical problem of the symbolic order's failure to the theoretical questions Lacan pursues through his reading of Hamlet.

something has to be found that can hold some semblance of structure together…when an essential link that should be there is not
#09

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.198

**Non-Insight-Oriented Psychotherapy**

Theoretical move: Fink argues that clinical work with psychosis requires an inversion of analytic technique: whereas neurotic treatment aims to deconstruct and "decomplete" a rigidly totalized ego, psychotic treatment must supplement and stabilize the hole in the ego/worldview, working within the patient's belief system rather than against it, and carefully avoiding the position of symbolic authority (the "Un-père") that risks triggering a psychotic break.

It is precisely when the analysand gets too close to the hole in his ego, which is arguably the same hole as that in his worldview, that things fall apart and he is more likely to have a psychotic break.
#10

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.202

**The Mark of Accountability**

Theoretical move: Through the case of Mark, Fink demonstrates how a fully elaborated delusional system functions as a stabilizing supplement to foreclosed paternal function, filling structural gaps with a psychotic construction that assigns the subject a grandiose cosmic role — a clinical dynamic analogous to Schreber's pacification through delusion.

The delusional system, elaborated within the traditional belief system of many of his Caribbean island family members, served to explain the unexplainable, to fill in the gaps in an enigmatic history, and supplement the paternal failings.
#11

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.206

**Establishing a Limit**

Theoretical move: Through the case of José, Fink/Alemán demonstrates how a psychotic subject can construct a substitute for the foreclosed paternal metaphor through a self-invented fictional "parenthesis" — a narrative device that installs a limit to jouissance where the Name-of-the-Father failed to intervene, functioning as a sinthome-like stabilization rather than a delusional resolution.

This limit, had the subject been neurotic, would have long since been established by the paternal metaphor; but, as the patient himself says, his father never intervened between himself and his 'brute of a mother.'
#12

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.209

**The Writing Subject**

Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink argues that the structural absence of the paternal function (rather than repression) produces a psychotic-adjacent subjectivity in which fraud/contradiction destabilizes the subject's entire meaning structure, and that writing may serve as an inventive supplement to the failed paternal function.

attempted to instate a position of symbolic third party to the mother–daughter relationship, unsuccessfully however
#13

Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.272

**Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE

Theoretical move: This is an index (back-matter) chunk from Bruce Fink's *Against Understanding*, listing key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as theoretical prose but its entries map the deployment of canonical Lacanian concepts throughout the book.

psychotics: "blind to metaphor" [39]; no need for recognition by Other [44]
#14

Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.87

[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Why and Wherefore of the Law**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis and psychosis are structurally differentiated by their relation to the Master Signifier (S1): the neurotic, however rebellious, always accepts the *position* occupied by S1, while the psychotic forecloses it entirely; and S1 itself functions as a founding act that retroactively creates its own legitimacy, establishing the Name-of-the-Father as the knot tying signifier to signified.

Lacan is well known to have associated neurosis with assimilation of the law, and psychosis with refusal or 'foreclosure' of the law.
#15

Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.149

[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

Theoretical move: This is a notes/commentary section providing bibliographic and clarificatory footnotes for the preceding chapter; it contains scattered theoretical asides but no sustained independent argument.

what is foreclosed from the symbolic order returns in the real. [. . .] what is foreclosed and what returns (in hallucinations, for example) are one and the same.
#16

Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.185

[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with Women**

Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Wesley, Fink demonstrates how the absence of a gap/lack in the (m)Other produces a subject unable to locate female sexuality, desire, or separation, and how the mother's persistent desire for something beyond the child (rather than paternal intervention) is what partially enables separation and forestalls psychosis.

not succumb to psychosis himself
#17

Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.285

[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > [INDEX](#page-8-0)

Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 285) from Bruce Fink's *Against Understanding, Volume 2*, listing key terms and page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the book including fantasy, fundamental fantasy, sexuation, Graph of Desire, and related Lacanian/Freudian concepts.

on treating a psychotic patient 65
#18

Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.142

**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Mode of production in Fight Club** > **Creative destruction**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* theorizes the structural entwinement of destruction and production under capitalism, advancing the thesis that psychic self-destruction is a necessary precondition for politico-economic revolution — that any change in the mode of production must simultaneously be a change in the mode of subjectivization.

we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other's suffering and pain, has first to be broken
#19

Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.44

BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > REALNESS

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's Real—irreducible to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary, tied to trauma, foreclosure, repetition, and the sexual non-relation—offers a more rigorous framework than either Heidegger's unconcealment or Butler's performativity for understanding trans "realness," insofar as the Real names the constitutive impossibility (of full symbolization, of sexual complementarity) that underpins both gender identity and psychic structure.

when the Name of the Father is foreclosed—when the symbolic structure of castration is repudiated—the disavowed signifiers of the father and castration reassert themselves as hallucinations… 'What does not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real'
#20

Bodies to Wear: Four Lacanian Takes on Trans · Patricia Gherovici · p.76

BODIES TO WEAR FOUR LACANIAN TAKES ON TRANS > FOUR LACANIAN TAKES TO RETHINK THE TRANS EXPERIENCE > BEAUTY

Theoretical move: The passage argues that beauty functions as a sublimatory and aesthetic mechanism through which Schreber negotiates the psychotic foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the impossibility of feminine representation, reclaiming Malabou's concept of plasticity as a creative act of self-transformation rather than merely a symptom of delusion. Lacan's reframing of Schreber's experience as "transsexual jouissance" and a "push-towards-Woman" is thereby grounded in an aesthetics of femininity that exceeds the phallic-Oedipal framework.

His delusions of divine emasculation reveal the psychotic foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and the unraveling of the symbolic order.
#21

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.26

[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > The thing’s order

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "thing's order" names the symbolic order as a self-relating system of signifiers—structurally homologous to Hegelian dialectics—that constitutes human subjectivity, the mirror stage, and the symptom, while ego psychology's failure to grasp the unconscious is recast as foreclosure (psychotic repudiation) rather than repression.

The talk of 'a repudiation' that does not rise to the level of 'repression' is a reference to Freud's mechanism of repudiation and Lacan's recasting of this same mechanism as 'foreclosure.'
#22

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.164

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > Context

Theoretical move: This passage provides a contextual and structural overview of Lacan's 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,' arguing that the text marks a pivotal shift in Lacan's theorization of psychosis as a unitary clinical structure grounded in the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, situated within a four-period developmental arc in Lacan's broader work on psychosis.

across all types of psychosis a single structural point can be found: the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which I discuss in detail below.
#23

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.171

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > I. Toward Freud

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes hallucination from a perceptual/cognitive phenomenon (scholastic-empiricist framework) to a fundamentally linguistic one: verbal hallucinations are events in the signifying chain that divide the subject, parallel to unconscious formations in neurosis, and must be approached via the symbolic structure rather than imaginary interpretation.

Much more important than these imaginary dynamics was the symbolic structure within which the destabilization takes place.
#24

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.172

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > I. Toward Freud

Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychotic hallucinations—both 'code phenomena' (autonomous neologisms) and 'message phenomena' (disrupted signifying chains)—are not symptomatic of an underlying illness but ARE the structure itself, revealing the subject's relationship to the signifier as mapped by the Graph of Desire; the subject is constituted as an effect of signifier-to-signifier reference, not of any neurological or imaginary substrate.

if the signifying chain is interrupted … the signifier manifests itself in the Real, through a hallucination
#25

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.181

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

The subject has no inherent identity, which is why Lacan says that it is 'foreclosed' at first.
#26

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.189

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.

Characteristic of psychosis is the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (465, 9), denoted by the symbol P0. This crucial absence at the level of the symbolic engenders a parallel hole in the imaginary, where phallic signifiers remain lacking
#27

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.193

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's reading of Schreber's psychosis through the I-schema, arguing that foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father produces a parabolic, delusional reality in which Schreber reconstructs subjectivity by occupying the position of God's phallus/wife—a process structured by the interplay of foreclosure, imaginary regression to the mirror stage, and the absence of fundamental fantasy.

Lacan draws a parabolic line between the points I and M from the I-schema (470, 6), which delineates the gap created by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.
#28

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.197

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

Theoretical move: The I-schema formalizes Schreber's psychotic structure as the product of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (P₀→Φ₀), while demonstrating that his delusion constitutes an efficient stabilizing solution rather than mere deterioration; madness is re-theorized as the extreme limit-case of human freedom in the face of constitutive lack.

Starting from the theory of foreclosure, we can indeed assume that P₀ produced Φ₀.
#29

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > V. Postscript

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's central thesis in "On a Question" is that psychosis is constituted by the Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which prevents metaphorization of the lack-of-being and produces a fundamental disorder in the subject's relation to the Other, the Symbolic, and the Real—a structural claim that post-Freudian authors systematically miss by failing to distinguish the symbolic father function from its imaginary and real counterparts.

Lacan's suggestion that in psychosis the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed and as a result the metaphorization, by means of which the lack-of-being is processed in neurosis, fails to occur (479, 4). This is Lacan's central thesis concerning psychosis.
#30

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (F–I) from a scholarly volume on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

foreclosure [verwerfung] 26, 164, 166, 188–189, 191–193, 195, 197–198, 200–203
#31

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego functions as a structural misrecognition-faculty — a lens that distorts rather than corrects — and that the proper distinction between the ideal ego and ego-ideal (as well as the difference between Verwerfung/foreclosure and repression) requires a topological-optical model rather than behavioral observation, demonstrating how the symbolic and imaginary registers differently shape (intra)subjective structure.

Lacan argues that the possibility of a Verwerfung, an initial refusal of signifiers, must exist prior to the capacity for repression... involves the basic non-inclusion of a certain key signifier in the unconscious
#32

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.105

Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers

Theoretical move: The philosophical revolution initiated by early Greek thinkers (from Thales onward) constitutes a sacrilegious transgression against the mythopoetic ethos by replacing the unknowable sacred void behind appearances with conceptually knowable first principles — a move that Heidegger reads as the "oblivion of Being" and that the passage reframes as the birth of metaphysical dualism and disenchantment. Socrates's condemnation is reread as the guardians of archaic culture punishing this desecration of the sacred unknown, though Socrates's own profession of ignorance gestures back toward the mythopoetic reverence for unknowable depths.

The philosophers audaciously colonized this dark source of all presencing by offering a range of conceptual schemas to account for it... the original enigma of physis finally became the realm of mere 'nature.'
#33

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.110

Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Madness of the Philosophers > What Women Know

Theoretical move: The passage argues that feminine knowledge constitutes a structural threat to both archaic and philosophical Greek culture, and that Jocasta — as the figure who *knows* yet remains silent — is the ultimate embodiment of *das Ding*, the unrepresented abyss of the Real, making her the traumatic locus of the Other's desire that Greek culture could not confront.

the archaic preference for maintaining a kind of sacred ignorance about the darker things amounted in itself to a mode of defense against them
#34

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.185

Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > A Broader View? > Along the Path of the Fourth Prophet

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Islam, like Christianity before it, enacts a symptomatic defensive closure against the radical opening toward das Ding that its own mystical and ethical traditions intimate: it re-transcendentalizes the divine (al-Ghaib, Allah's ineffability) and amplifies the letter of the Law, thereby countermanding the Jesusian gospel of love and the neighbor, making Islam the strongest rival to Christianity as the religion most tensed between an opening toward das Ding and defenses arrayed against it.

God has sealed their hearts and their ears… God rejects those who disbelieve.
#35

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.225

I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Making the Impossible Possible

Theoretical move: Fantasy is theorized not merely as ideological compensation for lack but as a genuinely subversive political force: by directing desire toward impossibilities that the symbolic order cannot contain, fantasy opens subjects to possibilities that ideology forecloses, thereby serving as the weak point of ideological closure rather than simply its accomplice.

it opens us to possibilities that were previously foreclosed
#36

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.240

I > 9 > Life versus Death

Theoretical move: The death drive, understood as a third option beyond the life/death binary, reveals the falsity of the opposition between global capitalism (pure life, bad infinite) and fundamentalism (love of death), and shows that modernity's repression of finitude/death necessarily produces the fundamentalist eruptions it cannot accommodate — what it forecloses in the Symbolic returns in the Real.

Whatever is refused in the symbolic order, in the sense of Verwerfung, reappears in the real... Fundamentalist violence is blowback not simply in response to imperialist aggression... This violence marks the return of what modernity necessarily forecloses.
#37

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.287

I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Hermeneutic Ethos

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "hermeneutic ethos" (exemplified by *The Da Vinci Code* and theorized by Derrida and radical democracy advocates) fails because it oscillates between treating the missing signifier as transcendent and as merely empirical, whereas its true status is transcendental — shaping the signifying structure without being either present or simply absent within it.

Th e project of infi nite inquiry into the missing signifi er ensures that no disruption will occur. Th e hermeneutic subject never goes far enough to eff ect a foundational change.
#38

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.291

I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Th e Immanence of the Missing Signifi er

Theoretical move: The missing (binary) signifier is not absent from the symbolic structure but present as an absence that constitutes it from within; genuine political engagement therefore requires identification with this structuring absence rather than seeking to fill or eliminate it, inverting the hermeneutic pursuit into a psychoanalytic "finding."

there is no inclusion that does not partake of the fundamental exclusion that defi nes the structure. Legal citizens must come to recognize that legality doesn't exist.
#39

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.113

I > Sustaining Anxiety > Th e Paradox of Recognition

Theoretical move: Recognition's ethical value is undermined by its constitutive failure: it reduces the subject to a symbolic identity and never reaches the real other (the neighbor); genuine ethics and encounter with the other are grounded not in the sacrifice of enjoyment but in enjoyment itself, since it is the other's singular, untranslatable enjoyment that first constitutes the real other as such.

this action bespeaks the rejection of the psychotic alternative, which involves the foreclosure of the social bond and the refusal of the binding restrictions that other subjects accept
#40

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Structure**

Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

psychosis by the operation of foreclosure
#41

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **paranoia**

Theoretical move: Paranoia is theorised not merely as a clinical structure but as a privileged site for disclosing fundamental features of the psyche itself—ego, knowledge, and the analytic relation all share a paranoiac structure—while Lacan's replacement of Freud's homosexuality thesis with the concept of foreclosure marks his decisive theoretical departure from Freud on psychosis.

Lacan finds Freud's theory about the homosexual roots of paranoia inadequate and proposes instead his own theory of FORECLOSURE as the specific mechanism of psychosis.
#42

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***H***

Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

Lacan argues that psychotic hallucinations are a consequence of the operation of FORECLOSURE. Foreclosure refers to the absence of the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER from the symbolic universe of the psychotic subject.
#43

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***C*** > **castration complex**

Theoretical move: The passage reconstructs Lacan's transformation of Freud's castration complex: by redefining castration as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object (the phallus), articulated across three "times" of the Oedipus complex, Lacan universalises castration beyond anatomical difference and makes the assumption or refusal of castration the structural hinge for both clinical structures (neurosis/perversion/psychosis) and sexuation.

The psychotic takes the most extreme path of all; he completely repudiates castration, as if it had never existed (S1, 53).
#44

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > ***sinthome***

Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution from Lacan's linguistic conception of the symptom (as signifier/ciphered message) to the topological concept of the *sinthome* as an unanalysable kernel of jouissance that serves as a fourth Borromean ring binding RSI, with Joyce's writing as the exemplary case of *sinthome*-as-suppléance in the absence of the paternal function.

Lacan focuses on Joyce's youthful 'epiphanies'...as instances of 'radical foreclosure', in which 'the real forecloses meaning'
#45

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **foreclosure**

Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of Lacan's concept of foreclosure (forclusion) as the specific psychical mechanism of psychosis, arriving at the formula that it is the Name-of-the-Father that is foreclosed—a move that unifies two previously separate threads (paternal exclusion and Freudian Verwerfung) and distinguishes foreclosure from repression, negation, and projection.

it is not until 1956 that Lacan proposes the term forclusion (a term in use in the French legal system; in English, 'foreclosure') as the best way of translating Verwerfung into French
#46

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **paternal metaphor**

Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor is established as the founding metaphoric substitution (Name-of-the-Father for the desire of the mother) that structures the Oedipus Complex, grounds all signification as phallic, and whose foreclosure in psychosis abolishes phallic signification entirely.

If the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed (i.e. in psychosis), there can be no paternal metaphor, and hence no phallic signification.
#47

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **delusion**

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes delusion not as the illness of paranoia itself but as the psychotic subject's attempt at self-cure — a substitute symbolic formation compensating for the absence of the Name-of-the-Father — and situates it within the structural analysis of speech and signification.

the paranoiac lacks the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, and the delusion is the paranoiac's attempt to fill the hole left in his symbolic universe by the absence of this primordial signifier
#48

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **father**

Theoretical move: The passage systematically distinguishes three registers of the father (symbolic, imaginary, real) to show that the father is not a unified concept but a tripartite structure whose interplay constitutes the conditions of possibility for subjectivity, psychosis, and perversion — and to position Lacan's theory against object-relations prioritization of the mother-child dyad.

it is the absence of the symbolic father which characterises the essence of the psychotic structure (see FORECLOSURE).
#49

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **psychosis**

Theoretical move: The passage establishes the Lacanian theory of psychosis as a clinical structure defined by foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, producing a hole in the symbolic order and imprisoning the subject in the imaginary; it further articulates the later reformulation via the Borromean Knot and the role of the sinthome as a fourth ring.

In this operation, the NAME-OF-THE-FATHER is not integrated in the symbolic universe of the psychotic (it is 'foreclosed'), with the result that a hole is left in the symbolic order.
#50

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***N***

Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary provides canonical Lacanian definitions for five interconnected concepts — Name-of-the-Father, narcissism, nature, need, negation, and neurosis — showing how each is structured around the primacy of the symbolic order over biological/imaginary registers, and how Lacan transforms Freudian clinical categories into structural ones.

If this signifier is foreclosed (not included in the symbolic order), the result is PSYCHOSIS.
#51

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***D*** > **disavowal**

Theoretical move: Lacan systematically tightens Freud's concept of disavowal by restricting it exclusively to perversion and contrasting it rigorously with repression (neurosis) and foreclosure (psychosis), while reframing its object from the perceived absence of the penis to the structural lack of the phallus in the Other — making disavowal the denial that lack causes desire.

Lacan, however, works the term into a rigorous theory, relating it and contrasting it specifically with the operations of REPRESSION and FORECLOSURE.
#52

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***R*** > **real**

Theoretical move: The passage traces the genealogy and theoretical transformations of Lacan's concept of the Real across his career: from an early ontological absolute opposed to appearance, through its elevation to one of the three fundamental orders in 1953 as that which resists symbolisation absolutely, to its late-Lacan distinction from 'reality'—all while maintaining a constitutive indeterminacy (internal/external, unknowable/rational) that is itself theoretically productive.

When something cannot be integrated in the symbolic order, as in psychosis, it may return in the real in the form of a hallucination
#53

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Science**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving and ambivalent relationship to science, arguing that his model of psychoanalysis oscillates between claiming scientific status (via mathematical formalisation, the isolation of objet petit a as its object) and disavowing it (as a "delusion" awaiting science), while insisting throughout that psychoanalysis operates the "subject of science" and must align with structural linguistics rather than natural sciences.

science is in fact based on a foreclosure of the concept of truth as cause (Ec, 874)
#54

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***I*** > **International Psycho-Analytical** **Association**

Theoretical move: The passage uses the IPA as a foil to articulate Lacan's institutional and theoretical positioning: his excommunication from the IPA becomes the occasion for defining his own school's aims (La Passe, cartels) and his "return to Freud" as a corrective to the IPA's betrayal of psychoanalysis, particularly through its embrace of Ego Psychology.

Lacan argued that Freud had organised the IPA in such a way because this was the only way of assuring that his theories, misunderstood by all his first followers, would remain intact for someone else (Lacan) to disinter and resuscitate later on.
#55

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***R*** > **religion**

Theoretical move: The passage maps Freud's and Lacan's shared atheist alignment of psychoanalysis with science against religion, while showing how Lacan reframes religion's theoretical content—redefining God as unconscious, as a metaphor for the big Other, and grounding the Name-of-the-Father and feminine jouissance in theological metaphors even as he argues for religion's structural opposition to psychoanalytic truth.

a fundamental signifier whose foreclosure leads to psychosis
#56

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***T*** > **truth**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of truth is irreducibly plural in its functions: it is always particular (not universal), tied to desire and speech rather than exactitude or science, and structurally intertwined with deception, fiction, and the Real—making it impossible to reduce to a single definition while remaining central to psychoanalytic ethics and treatment.

Lacan later argues that science is in fact based on a foreclosure of the concept of truth as cause.
#57

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **projection**

Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures projection as a strictly imaginary-neurotic defence mechanism, distinguishing it sharply from foreclosure (a symbolic/psychotic phenomenon) and from introjection (a symbolic, not imaginary, process), thereby refusing the classical psychoanalytic conflation of projection across clinical structures.

Lacan understands the term 'projection' as a purely neurotic mechanism and distinguishes it clearly from the apparently similar phenomenon that occurs in psychosis (which Lacan calls FORECLOSURE).
#58

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***R*** > **repression**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

Whereas psychotics foreclose, and perverts disavow, only neurotics repress.
#59

Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

2

Theoretical move: Freud surveys the available techniques for achieving happiness and avoiding suffering—art, love, beauty, narcissistic withdrawal, religious delusion, neurosis—and concludes that none can fully satisfy the programme imposed by the pleasure principle; the best strategy is a flexible economy of the individual libido rather than any single exclusive technique.

Here the link with reality is loosened still further; satisfaction is derived from illusions, which one recognizes as such without letting their deviation from reality interfere with one's enjoyment.
#60

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

Theoretical move: Fisher uses Joy Division as a cultural symptom—their music indexes the threshold moment (1979–80) when social-democratic, Fordist modernity collapsed into neoliberal control society, arguing that the band's depressive, catatonic expressionism is not merely aesthetic but diagnostic of a historically specific breakdown of subjectivity, community, and futurity.

overshadowed by a deep foreboding, a sense of a future foreclosed, all certainties dissolved
#61

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and ‘the 70s On Trial’

Theoretical move: Fisher uses the Jimmy Savile scandal to theorise how power structures warp the experience of reality itself—what was "out in the open" could not be acknowledged because institutional authority produces a cognitive dissonance that forecloses the naming of abuse in the present, confining it structurally to the past; fiction (Peace's noir) functions as the only available register for a Real that consensual reality cannot accommodate.

it mattered that the abuse was never acknowledged in his lifetime. For while the story remained unofficial Savile would not only go unpunished, he could continue to comport himself as a celebrated entertainer
#62

Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.99

**5** > He continues:

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian mirror stage is always-already co-constituted by the Symbolic (signifiers, parental language) interpenetrating the Imaginary body-image, that the symbolic order as transsubjective big Other structurally exceeds any aggregation of individual needs, and that ego psychology's rejection of the unconscious operates via foreclosure/repudiation rather than repression—making it a collective psychosis rather than mere resistance.

a reference to Freud's mechanism of repudiation als Verwerfung and Lacan's recasting of this same mechanism as 'foreclosure' (forclusion)…Repudiation-as-foreclosure is the key mechanism in the psychoses by Lacan's lights.
#63

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.24

JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > Overture to this Collection

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "Purloined Letter" to demonstrate that the subject is constituted by the trajectory of the signifier—not by any imaginary substance—and introduces the Objet petit a as the "falling away" that marks the gap between truth and knowledge, while also establishing the primacy of the symbolic chain over imaginary effects in determining psychoanalytic outcomes including foreclosure, repression, and negation.

I posit that it is the law specific to this chain which governs the psychoanalytic effects that are determinant for the subject—effects such as foreclosure (Verwerfung), repression (Verdrangung), and negation (Verneinung) itself
#64

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.466

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > /. *Toward Freud*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that verbal hallucination cannot be explained by appeal to a unifying percipiens, because the signifying chain imposes itself on the subject in its own right; the hallucination must therefore be understood structurally—at the level of the signifier itself—rather than psychologically, and this structural approach is what distinguishes a genuinely Freudian reconceptualization of psychosis from all prior frameworks.

the function of unrealization is not entirely located in the symbol. For in order for its irruption in the real to be incontrovertible, the symbol need but present itself, as it commonly does, in the form of a broken chain.
#65

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.469

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > /. *Toward Freud*

Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's hallucinatory phenomena as structured by the signifier—autonymous messages, interrupted sentences cut at the point of the shifter, and a code constituted by messages about the code—Lacan demonstrates that psychosis exhibits a topology of signification irreducible to neurological localization, while also showing that the notion of metalanguage is improper if meant to designate elements differentiated within language itself.

a relationship to which the messages give the form of a challenge or an endurance test... his partner's voice limits the messages in question to the beginning of a sentence whose complement of meaning poses, moreover, no problem to the subject
#66

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.478

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 77. *After Freud* > *III. With Freud*

Theoretical move: Lacan consolidates the theoretical architecture of the L schema and R schema to articulate that the subject's existence is constituted not through imaginary proliferations but through signifying articulation in the Other (the unconscious as the Other's discourse), and that the field of reality itself is circumscribed by the double ternary of symbolic and imaginary relations, with phallocentrism following necessarily from the intrusion of the signifier.

The fourth term is given by the subject in his reality, foreclosed as such in the system and entering into the play of signifiers only in the form of the dummy [mort], but becoming the true subject as this play of signifiers makes him signify.
#67

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.483

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 557 *IK Schreber's Way*

Theoretical move: The passage formalizes the Lacanian theory of psychosis through the paternal metaphor: Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father leaves a hole in the Other and in phallic signification, which is demonstrated through a close structural reading of Schreber's delusion as manifesting a Creator/Creature/Created triad mapped onto the R schema.

I will thus take Verwerfung to be 'foreclosure' of the signifier. At the point at which the Name-of-the-Father is summoned... a pure and simple hole may thus answer in the Other.
#68

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.488

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 557 *IK Schreber's Way*

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Schreber's psychosis as structured by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which excavates a hole in the signifier that the subject attempts to suture through imaginary reconstruction—becoming the phallus rather than having it—culminating in a delusional redemptive feminization that substitutes for the absent symbolic metaphor.

conceived as skirting the hole excavated in the field of the signifier by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father
#69

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.493

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 557 *IK Schreber's Way*

Theoretical move: The passage deploys the I Schema (as a distortion of the R Schema) to map the final state of Schreber's psychosis, arguing that psychosis reveals—rather than obscures—the structural efficiency of the signifier's alienating impact on the imaginary; and concludes that madness is not an accident but the constitutive limit of man's being as a speaking subject.

the futile appeal made in the symbolic to the paternal metaphor? Or must we conceive of it as produced at one remove by the elision of the phallus
#70

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.497

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > *V, Postscript*

Theoretical move: Lacan consolidates his structural account of psychosis around the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, showing how its absence triggers a cascade from signifier to delusional metaphor, while simultaneously critiquing empiricist/biographical approaches (exemplified by Niederland on Schreber) for failing to grasp the distinction between subject and signifier that alone makes the paternal function theoretically legible.

It is an accident in this register and in what occurs in it—namely, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other—and the failure of the paternal metaphor that I designate as the defect that gives psychosis its essential condition
#71

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.502

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > *V, Postscript*

Theoretical move: The passage culminates its analysis of Schreber's psychosis by showing how the father's failure (embodied in the Schreber family's hygienic ideology and the figure of Flechsig) triggers Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, unleashing the signifier in the Real and producing the psychotic "divine jaculations"—a process that demands a rethinking of transference in the treatment of psychosis, while Lacan insists that going beyond Freud is impossible until psychoanalysis returns to its Freudian foundations.

the limits at which the pure verges on the evil realm; and at which we will not be surprised if the child...sends packing (verwerfe) the whale of imposture
#72

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.568

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *Structure and the Subject* > / /. *Where Is Id?*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the three seemingly incompatible Freudian propositions about the id (its lack of organization, its foreclosure of negation, and the silence of the death drives within it) can only be reconciled by recourse to the function of the signifier, thereby displacing Lagache's personalist framework and grounding the subject—and primal judgment—in the structural materiality of the signifier rather than in ego autonomy.

This foreclosure of negation was, of course, corrected, already in The Interpretation of Dreams, by the analysis of the detours that prop up something equivalent to negation
#73

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.579

The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's ego/id topology, Lagache's distinction between ideal ego and ego-ideal, and an optical model (the inverted bouquet/vase illusion) to demonstrate that the ego's structural function is méconnaissance—occupying the empty place of the subject—and to distinguish the imaginary from the symbolic registers, showing that psychoanalytic theory must resist personalist and autonomy-of-ego readings.

When people contest the function I define, following Freud, as Verwerfung (foreclosure), do they think they have refuted me by noting that the verb, of which this is the nominal form, is applied to judgment in more than one of Freud's texts?
#74

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.650

Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *On a book by Jean Delay and another by Jean Schlumberger1*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Delay's biography of Gide to argue that proper psychoanalytic method—deciphering signifiers without presupposing the signified—reveals the subject's structure more faithfully than "applied psychoanalysis," and that Gide's case illustrates Spaltung (splitting of the subject) as the specific clinical phenomenon, grounded in the mother's discourse, fantasy transmission, and jouissance, over and against ego-psychological notions like "weakness of the ego."

the constitution of the 'Persona'... refers us back to the analysis of the Voyage d'Urien—a work which is interpreted by Delay... as the Voyage du Rien [Voyage of the Nothing]
#75

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.760

On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Science and Truth

Theoretical move: Lacan advances a structural typology of relations to truth-as-cause (magic, religion, science, psychoanalysis), arguing that science operates through a foreclosure of truth while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by foregrounding material cause in the form of the signifier's impact—and that the phallus, as gnomon of lack, knots together the division of the subject, fetish, and the analyst's own position.

You may recognize therein my formulation of Verwerfung or 'foreclosure,' which forms a closed series here with Verdrängung, 'repression,' and Verneinung, 'negation,'
#76

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.768

On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Appendix I: A Spoken Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" by Jean Hyppolite

Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" argues that negation is not merely a logical operation but a constitutive act — the Aufhebung of repression — whose structure (presenting being in the mode of not-being-it) yields a genesis of thought itself, readable through Hegelian dialectics (negation of negation, Aufhebung) and implicating the primordial couple of Eros/expulsion as the mythical ground of both attributive and existential judgment.

The process that leads to this point, which has been translated into French as rejet [rejection], even though Freud did not use the term Verwerfung here, is still more strongly stressed, since he uses Ausstossung, which means expulsion.
#77

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.814

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTES TO "RESPONS E TO JEAN HYPPOLITE' S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' "

Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial/translatorial notes to Lacan's "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung'," clarifying terminological choices, providing bibliographic references, and glossing key concepts (foreclosure, ek-sistence, acting out, primordial symbolization) as they appear in the Écrits text—without advancing a sustained independent theoretical argument.

Freud's clearest statement about foreclosure is found in 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' (SE III, 58), where the verb form verwirft is translated by Strachey as 'rejects': '...the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all.'
#78

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.817

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTES TO "RESPONS E TO JEAN HYPPOLITE' S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S T O "TH E FREUDIA N THING "

Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's and editor's footnotes to Lacan's "The Freudian Thing" and related essays in the Écrits, providing philological, lexical, and intertextual glosses on French terms, puns, and allusions; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

This seems to be a paraphrase of Freud's comment about the Wolf Man's Verwerfung of castration (SE XVII, 84).
#79

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.829

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S TO "TH E SITUATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAININ G OF PSYCHOANALYSTS IN 1956" > NOTES TO "O N A QUESTION \*

Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's Écrits, providing glosses on French/German terms, bibliographic references, and cross-references to seminars and other texts; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

Intention de rejet (rejecting intention) includes Lacan's first translation (rejet) of Freud's Verwerfung, which he renders further on as "foreclosure."
#80

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.871

Classified Index of the Major Concepts

Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

The Name-of-the-Father (instance of the symbolic, or dead, Father) and primal repression... (see: Foreclosure).
#81

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

Classified Index of the Major Concepts > C. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SUBJECT

Theoretical move: This classified index passage organizes Lacan's key theoretical concepts around the structure of the subject and intersubjective communication, mapping page references across the Écrits to show how concepts such as splitting of the subject, topology, the Other, and the unconscious-as-Other's-discourse form an articulated theoretical architecture.

Primal judgment, repression, negation, foreclosure: (see Index of Freud's German Terms under Bejahung, Verdrangung, Verneinung, Verwerfung).
#82

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > B. PSYCHIATRY'S CLINICA L CATEGORIES

Theoretical move: This is a classified index entry (non-substantive) listing page references for major clinical categories—neurosis, perversion, and psychosis—within the Écrits, organized under psychiatry's clinical taxonomy.

Psychosis (see: Verwerfung).
#83

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.880

Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > *2, Schreber's schema*

Theoretical move: This passage deploys Lacan's major schemas (Schreber's psychotic schema, Sade's fantasy schemas, networks of overdetermination, and the Graphs of Desire) as a classified index, showing how foreclosure, fading of the subject, overdetermination, and the logic of anticipation/retroaction structure the subject across psychotic, perverse, and neurotic clinical fields.

the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father (here P0), which leads to the absence of representation of the subject, S, by the phallic image
#84

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.887

Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *Position of the Unconscious*

Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it comprises editorial apparatus for the Écrits — bibliographic notes on individual essays' publication histories and a classified index of Freudian German terms with their page references — and makes no independent theoretical argument.

Verwerfung, 11, 360, 363, 386–88, 558, 577–78, 581–82, 670, 874
#85

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.316

Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *What the Psychoanalyst Must Know: How to Ignore What He Knows*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that analytic training cannot be grounded in transmitted knowledge (which only concerns the imaginary), but must be oriented toward a "passion of ignorance" that opens onto nonknowledge — a positive, elaborated form of not-knowing that is the true condition of the analyst's speech being identical to his being, and thus capable of producing true speech in the subject.

the obscene and ferocious figure that analysis calls the superego and that must be understood as the gap opened up in the imaginary by any and every rejection (Verwerfung) of the commandments of speech.
#86

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.321

Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *What the Psychoanalyst Must Know: How to Ignore What He Knows* > *Notes*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primacy of the signifier—grounded in the structural relationship between truth, the unconscious, and the letter of language—necessitates a rigorous "return to Freud" through literal reading, distinguishing this from mere regression to sources and positioning it against ego-psychological deviations that obstruct the constitutive gap (jouissance/impasse) at the heart of psychoanalytic practice.

the personal difficulties that make it hard for someone to grasp a notion like that of Verwerfung [foreclosure] when he himself may be characterized by it
#87

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.340

Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's "Verneinung" to establish Verwerfung (foreclosure) as the precise opposite of primal Bejahung—a symbolic abolition that is structurally distinct from repression—while articulating how the triad of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real can reconstitute psychopathological theory, exemplified through the Wolf Man's hallucination and his relation to castration.

Verwerfung is exactly what opposes the primal Bejahung and constitutes as such what is expelled.
#88

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.341

Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes Freud's Verneinung to establish that what is excluded from primordial symbolization (Verwerfung/foreclosure) does not enter the unconscious but returns in the Real—as hallucination, erratic castration, or acting out—while simultaneously critiquing ego psychology's failure to grasp this structure.

Verwerfung thus cut short any manifestation of the symbolic order—that is, it cut short the Bejahung that Freud posits as the primary procedure in which the judgment of attribution finds its root
#89

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.779

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > *Manque-a-etre*

Theoretical move: This passage is a translator's glossary note from the Écrits, explaining the English renderings chosen for key Lacanian/Freudian terms (manque-à-être, méconnaissance, negation, denegation, foreclosure, disavowal), with particular attention to the polyvalence and technical specificity of each term across German, French, and English — it is primarily philological and non-substantive theoretically.

The rarest, Verwerfung, is the easiest from a translator's standpoint; Lacan translates it first as rejet (rejection) and retranchement… and then more consistently as foreclusion (foreclosure).
#90

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' "

Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial endnotes to Lacan's "Introduction to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung'," providing bibliographic cross-references, translation glosses, and contextual annotations; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

Retrancher (Lacan's translation for Freud's Verwerfung, as we shall see in his 'Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary') means to suppress, cut off a part, prune, remove, amputate, excise, and eliminate.
#91

Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.862

Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject1 > NOTES TO IN MEMORY OF ERNEST JONES: O N HIS THEORY OF SYMBOLISM" > NOTE S T O "GUIDIN G REMARK S FO R A CONVENTIO N O N FEMAL E SEXUALITY " > NOTES TO SCIENCE AND TRUT H

Theoretical move: This passage is a set of scholarly translator's/editor's notes to Lacan's "Science and Truth" (and adjacent Écrits essays), clarifying word choices, tracing intertextual references, and glossing key Lacanian and Freudian technical terms without advancing an independent theoretical argument.

Rejet (rejection) was the first translation Lacan adopted for Freud's Verwerfung; he later preferred forclusion, 'foreclosure.'
#92

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.98

**vin** > **1**

Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Robert, Mme Lefort demonstrates how a near-total absence of the symbolic function (Name-of-the-Father, stable object relations, body schema) produces a child whose only self-representation is an anxiety-laden series of bodily contents, whose ego is indistinguishable from its objects, and where the sole "signifier" available — "Wolf!" — functions not as a metaphor but as a cry marking the threat of self-destruction and dissolution.

he had never stopped changing places, nor adults. It had become a real principle of destruction for him, one which had intensely marked the primitive manifestations of his activity of ingestion and excretion.
#93

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.63

**V**

Theoretical move: By reading Freud's *Verneinung* through Hyppolite's commentary, Lacan argues that *Bejahung* (primordial affirmation) is a precondition for symbolisation, and that its failure—*Verwerfung* (non-Bejahung)—causes what is excluded from the symbolic to irrupt back into the real as hallucination; this is illustrated through the Wolf Man's minor hallucination and Kris's clinical case, both showing how the symbolic and imaginary orders operate at structurally distinct levels.

the contradictions which are revealed by the traces through which we follow the specification of his position in the human world, point to a Verwerfung, a rejection - literally, it has always been for him as if the genital plane did not exist.
#94

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.49

**IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Verwerfung (foreclosure) names a primitive nucleus that is more foundational than repression — something excluded from the subject's symbolic history altogether rather than merely repressed — and then uses Freud's dream-theory and the Signorelli example to show that the most theoretically significant residue is precisely what is most absent, forgotten, or hesitant, because desire and its repressed substratum speak through the gaps in discourse.

In the structure of what happened to the Wolfman, the Verwerfung of the realisation of genital experience is a quite specific moment, which Freud himself distinguishes from all the others.
#95

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.72

**VI**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the theoretical claim that the Real is defined as what resists symbolisation absolutely, and uses Melanie Klein's case of Dick to demonstrate that without symbolisation the subject is trapped in undifferentiated reality with no ego-formation, no anxiety-signal, and no human world of objects—thus counterposing Klein's interpretive brutality (which introduces the Symbolic) against Anna Freud's ego-educative intellectualism.

For the Wolfman, the symbolisation of the meaning of the genital plane was verworfen.
#96

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan

**IV**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the critical distinction between Repression (Verdrängung) and Foreclosure (Verwerfung) by reading Freud's Wolf Man case, arguing that Verwerfung designates a rejection that forecloses genital realisation rather than repressing it, and that mistranslating Verwerfung as a mere "judgement that rejects and chooses" obscures the conceptual specificity Freud intended.

he refused, rejected the German word is verwirft - everything pertaining to the plane of genital realisation.
#97

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.293

xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\*

Theoretical move: Hyppolite argues that Freud's *Verneinung* cannot be reduced to positive psychology but must be read as a grand myth founding a fundamental asymmetry: affirmation (Bejahung) is the *Ersatz* of Eros/unification, while negation (Verneinung) is the *Nachfolge* of the destruction drive and expulsion (Ausstossung), and it is precisely the *symbol* of negation — not affirmation — that creates a margin of thought independent of the pleasure principle and makes possible the ego's méconnaissance-structured recognition of the unconscious.

The process which leads to that point, which has been translated by rejet [rejection], without Freud having used the term Verwerfung, is still yet more forcefully accented, since he uses Ausstossung, which means expulsion.
#98

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.310

xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is an index page from Seminar I, listing page references for key theoretical concepts; it is non-substantive as primary argumentation but does map the distribution and relational clustering of canonical Lacanian concepts across the volume.

and Verwerfwig 43, 44, 283 ... repudiation see Verwerfimg
#99

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.283

xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood through the dialectic of the imaginary and symbolic registers rather than reduced to the real (Ezriel) or to ego-normalization (ego psychology); the imaginary relation, rooted in the mirror stage and the ideal ego, crystallizes transference while the symbolic—via speech and the analyst as mediating Other—enables the subject's integration of repressed history.

Verworfen - the rejection is primal. For the present I don't want to talk at any further length about this distinction.
#100

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.17

The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XI by positioning psychoanalysis as a *praxis* — a concerted human action that treats the real by means of the symbolic — and uses his own institutional excommunication as an object-lesson that simultaneously illustrates the comic structure of subjectivity (truth of the subject residing not in himself but in a concealed object) and poses the foundational question of what grounds psychoanalysis between science and religion.

what it amounts to is something strictly comparable to what is elsewhere called major excommunication—although there the term is never pronounced without any possibility of repeal.
#101

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.295

IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

Theoretical move: This concluding passage makes two theoretical moves: (1) it positions the analyst's desire as a desire for absolute difference — the condition under which limitless love outside the law becomes possible — and (2) it provides a translator's glossary that operationally defines key Lacanian concepts (desire/need/demand, jouissance, the three orders, objet petit a, Name-of-the-Father, knowledge) as relational and context-dependent rather than static definitions.

the real in its 'raw' state... may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x... the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic.
#102

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.253

OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of "Unglauben" (non-belief) as structurally constitutive of psychosis and paranoia, arguing that belief is always grounded in the division of the subject — the fading of meaning — and that psychosis forecloses this dialectical opening by a mass seizure of the signifying chain.

This solidity, this mass seizure of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief.
#103

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.17

The Seminar of JACQUES LACAN

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XI by using his institutional excommunication as a theoretical object — illustrating that the truth of the subject (even the master) is concealed in an external object, and that exposing this structure is the essence of comedy — before defining psychoanalytic praxis as the treatment of the real by the symbolic, and posing the founding question of whether psychoanalysis belongs to science or religion.

major excommunication—although there the term is never pronounced without any possibility of repeal
#104

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.253

OF THE SUBJECT WHO IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW, OF THE FIRST DYAD, AND OF THE GOOD > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychotic foreclosure of the signifying chain from the structure of belief, arguing that belief is structurally constituted by the division of the subject and that its absence (Unglauben) — not mere disbelief but the missing term of subjective division — is what underlies paranoia's peculiar relationship to belief.

This solidity, this mass seizure of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief.
#105

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.294

IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

Theoretical move: This concluding passage of Seminar XI makes two theoretical moves: first, it articulates the analyst's desire as a desire for "absolute difference" that enables a love beyond the law; second, the appended glossary (translator's note) provides operational definitions of Lacan's key concepts—desire/need/demand, the three orders (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real), jouissance, objet petit a, and Name-of-the-Father—framing them as evolving and best understood contextually rather than statically.

the real in its 'raw' state... may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x... the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic.
#106

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.290

**PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

Theoretical move: Milner's presentation argues that Plato's *Sophist* anticipates the logic of the signifier by showing that non-being is not an additional term in a series but the very condition of computation itself — the 'locus of zero' — and that this structure is homologous to the Lacanian subject as non-being inscribed in discourse; Lacan closes by anchoring this in his tripolarity of subject, knowledge, and sex as derived from the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

Mr Milner: I foreclosed it from my discourse.
#107

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.86

**Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965** > PRESENTATION BY Mr YVES DUROUX

Theoretical move: Duroux's presentation reconstructs Frege's *Grundlagen der Arithmetik* to show that number cannot be grounded in a psychological subject's activity of collecting and naming, but must instead be derived from a purely logical relation between concept and object — with zero defined through the contradictory concept (non-identical to itself) and the successor operation grounding the entire sequence of natural numbers, thereby providing the philosophical-logical basis from which Miller will develop a Lacanian theory of the subject and lack.

it is necessary that there should be excluded from the field of these axioms a certain number of questions which are given as self-evident
#108

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's emergence as representation in the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing—a circular temporal structure in which the subject is simultaneously the origin of the signifier and excluded by it—and uses this logic to critique Aulagnier's notion of 'insertion' as neglecting the dimension of aphanisis, while grounding desire's pseudo-infinity and alienation in the metonymic function of the objet petit a.

this foreclosure, how is it conceivable without this relationship to this - (minus phi) essentially correlative to the S, in so far as that what is diminished here is barred there
#109

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.242

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a refused, foreclosed signifier (a "not-knowing"), and that the sexual dyad—whose nature remains fundamentally unknowable—is the radical foundation of all signifying opposition; this grounds Lacan's claim that the subject of the unconscious is precisely the subject who avoids knowledge of sex, linking the structure of the signifier to the biological fact that sex is not reducible to reproduction but is bound to death.

the subject is established from a rejected, verwerfen, signifier, from a signifier about which one wants to know nothing.
#110

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.252

**Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious, the subject, and sex form a triadic system of "rotating dominance" (analogous to scissors-stone-paper) in which knowledge is unconscious and indeterminate with respect to the subject, the subject finds his certainty only in the "pure default of sex," and sex itself remains the impossible-to-know pole that any game (including analysis) converts into a manageable stake—thereby grounding the analytic operation as a game whose rule excludes the Real as impossible.

this third term which is precisely sex in the measure that in this sphere, it is rejected from the beginning, in the measure that it emerges from the fact that one wants to know nothing about it
#111

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.290

**PRESENTATION BY MONSIEUR MILNER**

Theoretical move: Milner's presentation reads Plato's *Sophist* as a proto-logical account of the signifier: non-being is not a sixth genus but the very condition of computability (the "locus of zero"), and the subject—identified with non-being—disappears into the proper name, thereby anticipating the Lacanian structure of the subject as effect of the signifier. Lacan closes by anchoring his own project in the triad subject/knowledge/sex mapped onto the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real.

Mr Milner: I foreclosed it from my discourse.
#112

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Freudian subject is constituted by its relation to a *rejected* signifier (a not-knowing), and that this structure — the signifier representing the subject for another signifier — recapitulates the whole dialectic from Plato's Sophist to the present; further, it grounds the dyadic signifying opposition (Other/One, being/non-being) in the sexual dyad, while insisting that sex itself is radically unknowable and is not primarily a reproductive mechanism but a relationship with death.

the subject is established from a rejected, verwerfen, signifier, from a signifier about which one wants to know nothing.
#113

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.

the original covering over, the Verborgenheit, the fundamental exclusion of what through analytic doctrine itself constitutes its final link, namely, what is involved in the correspondence, whatever it may be, between the male and the female.
#114

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965** > **Presentation by Jacques-Alain Miller**

Theoretical move: Miller's presentation argues that the subject's insertion into the signifying chain is necessarily correlative to its vanishing — a circular, non-linear temporal logic — and that alienation is properly grounded in the division of the subject (not in consciousness), while the o-object, functioning as metonymy and as the logic of number (zero/one), structures the pseudo-infinity of desire.

this foreclosure, how is it conceivable without this relationship to this - (minus phi) essentially correlative to the S, in so far as that what is diminished here is barred there.
#115

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.32

II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan argues that the structure of numerical concatenation (zero as both excluded object and naming integer) mirrors the subject's constitutive exclusion from the signifying chain, and that the objet petit a is precisely what "subsists" from this nullifying operation, linking suture and cut to the subject–signifier relation.

the evocation and the elision of the non-identical to itself, with a blank at the level of the object subsumed permitting the number zero
#116

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.246

**Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not the object of need's satisfaction but the structural cause of desire, arising from the relationship between the subject's demand and the Other's desire — and that the scopic field (the gaze) occupies a privileged position in this structure precisely because Freud founded the analytic position by excluding the look, making it a paradigmatic object that reveals the subject's foundational relationship to the Other.

the whole of its physical field it has succeeded in foreclosing the subject
#117

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.104

Example

Theoretical move: The passage argues that predication operates across three registers (second-person, reflected first-person, first-person), and that Foreclosure of the Name of the Father is precisely the condition in which predication fails to break up the imaginary "it speaks" register—thereby abolishing Transference and constituting the clinical boundary between psychosis/narcissistic neurosis and analysability.

this predication, is in a way foreclosed, to take up Lacan's term in the exercise of its function and I think that this way of seeing things overlaps rather exactly what Lacan calls the foreclosure of the name of the father.
#118

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.19

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that topology—specifically two-dimensional surface theory—provides the structural model for the subject's constitution through the fall of the objet petit a, where the cut on a surface (not a metaphorical void in the real) is what determines the division of the subject; Bejahung/Verneinung, the phallus as attribute, and Stoic *ptosis* are marshalled to show that the subject is the effect of a structural cut, not merely a hole in the real.

there is the Bejahung, and the Bejahung is a judgement of attribution… alone makes the Verneinung conceivable
#119

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.104

Example

Theoretical move: The passage develops a tripartite grammar of predication (second-person, reflected first-person, first-person registers) as the structural basis for distinguishing transference, psychosis, and narcissistic defence, and links the foreclosure of predication's efficacy directly to Lacan's foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, while framing the analytic fantasy as an irreducibly unconscious "it says you are I" that is non-specularisable.

this predication, is in a way foreclosed, to take up Lacan's term in the exercise of its function and I think that this way of seeing things overlaps rather exactly what Lacan calls the foreclosure of the name of the father.
#120

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.32

II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan articulates the structure of suture: the subject is constituted by the same operation of evocation-and-exclusion that generates the number zero, such that the subject is repeatedly expelled from the signifying chain it produces, with the objet petit a as the trace-remainder (the 'having') that subsists under the chain.

the evocation and the elision of the non-identical to itself, with a blank at the level of the object subsumed permitting the number zero
#121

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246

**Seminar 20: Wednesday 1 June 1966**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structure of the subject necessarily bears the mark of a gap or wound that "full objectification" forecloses, and that the objet petit a—specifically as it appears in the scopic field and in oral/anal dialectics—is not the object of need-satisfaction but the cause of desire, which emerges only when the subject's demand is articulated in relation to the desire of the Other.

in the whole of its physical field it has succeeded in foreclosing the subject, can only give its foundation, its mathematical principle, by rediscovering the same gap, in the form of a certain number of paradoxes
#122

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.72

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as a structural foreclosure of being—a "rejection" (Verwerfung) that installs the Other in the place of Being—and uses this to ground the psychoanalytic Id not as a "bad ego" or first-person subject but as the grammatical remainder of discourse once "I" is subtracted, thereby articulating alienation as the rejection of the Other rather than capture by it.

to take up one of my familiar formulae that of Verwerfung - it is indeed something of this order that is at stake … What is rejected from the symbolic, I have said from the beginning of my teaching, reappears in the real.
#123

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

the Verwerfung that it constitutes only arises precisely from the following: that love does not think
#124

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.110

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic knowledge "passes into the real" via the same mechanism as Verwerfung (foreclosure): what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real. He then grounds this in a rigorous reading of Freudian repetition (Wiederholungszwang), demonstrating that repetition is irreducible to the pleasure principle, necessarily entails a lost object, and constitutes the subject through a retroactive, non-reflexive logical structure rather than a simple return to sameness.

I am here alluding to nothing else than the formula that I gave of the Verwerfung or rejection, which is that everything that is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real.
#125

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.88

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration is not a biological or imaginary fact but the logical result of language's constitutive inadequation to sexual reality: at the level of Bedeutung, language reduces sex to the binary of having/not-having the phallus, and it is precisely this structural lack that grounds the o-object (objet petit a) and distinguishes the alienating operation of logical subjectivity from the alienating operation of unconscious sexual meaning.

this truth - that of the *you are not, therefore I am not* - is rejected (*verworfen)* in love. The manifestations of love in the real is very precisely the characteristic that I state of every *Verwerfung*
#126

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

a bedroom in which there happens … nothing except that the sexual act is presented there as foreclosure, properly speaking: Verwerfung. It is what is commonly called the analyst's office.
#127

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.121

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

Theoretical move: The Act is defined not as motor discharge but as the intrinsic repetition of the signifier upon itself—a double loop that constitutes the subject as pure division; its effects are measured topologically by the mutation of surface produced by the cut, and Verleugnung is specifically identified as the rubric for the ambiguity that results from these effects.

I spoke enough about the latter, since today's discourse, not to have to go back on it. I simply highlight here that what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what is concerned with the ambiguity that results from the effects of the act as such.
#128

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

a bedroom in which there happens … nothing except that the sexual act is presented there as foreclosure, properly speaking: Verwerfung. It is what is commonly called the analyst's office.
#129

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.88

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 8: Wednesday 18 January 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that castration is not an empirical but a logical-structural fact: at the level of Bedeutung (meaning), language constitutively fails to articulate sexual reality, reducing sexual polarity to having/not-having the phallus, and this failure—the "minus phi" of phallic signification—is precisely what the analytic operation of alienation reveals, pointing toward the logical status of the objet petit a as the core-object around which the subject turns.

the most inconvenient and the most depressing effects … in which the paths of love are nowhere to be designated as so easily traced out … this truth - that of the you are not, therefore I am not - is rejected (verworfen) in love.
#130

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.110

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian Wiederholungszwang constitutes the logical foundation of the subject, irreducible to the pleasure principle, by demonstrating that repetition produces a lost object retroactively—the originating situation is lost as origin by the very fact of being repeated—and that this structure, grounded in the unary trait, is what allows analytic knowledge to pass into the real via Verwerfung.

the path through which what I am teaching passes into the real is none other, bizarrely, than the Verwerfung, than the effective rejection that we see happening at a certain level of the generation of the position of the psychoanalyst
#131

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.96

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation sharply from both Marxist and idealist-philosophical senses, then develops the Objet petit a as the structural support of the subject's "I am not" — the analyst occupies the position of objet a in the analytic operation, while the breast-as-object exemplifies the fundamentally non-representable, jouissance-laden character of the partial object that supplies for the lack of Selbstbewusstsein.

the Verwerfung that it constitutes only arises precisely from the following: that love does not think
#132

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.121

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage defines the Act as structurally equivalent to repetition-in-a-single-stroke (the double loop of the signifier), grounded in the topology of the Möbius strip cut; it argues that the act constitutes the subject as pure division (Repräsentanz), and that Verleugnung names the ambiguity produced by the act's effects, distinguishing the act from mere motor performance, imitation, and acting-out.

I simply highlight here that what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what is concerned with the ambiguity that results from the effects of the act as such ... I spoke enough about [Verwerfung]
#133

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.72

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 11 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian cogito founds the subject as an empty set through the evasion of Being, and that this Verwerfung (foreclosure) of Being—reappearing in the Real—is the structural basis of alienation; the resultant "I am not" opens onto Freud's Id (Es), which Lacan re-articulates not as a person but as everything in the logical-grammatical structure of discourse that is not-I, grounding the drive's fantasy in that impersonal remainder.

to take up one of my familiar formulae that of Verwerfung - it is indeed something of this order that is at stake... What is rejected from the symbolic, I have said from the beginning of my teaching, reappears in the real.
#134

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the "events" of May '68 as occasion to articulate the structural relation between the Other as locus of knowledge, truth as what is refused from the symbolic and returns in the real as symptom, and the subject's secondary determination by knowledge — positioning psychoanalysis as a radical modification of the subject-Other relation that goes beyond mere discovery.

Everything that is rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real.
#135

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

Theoretical move: Lacan reflects ceremonially on the interrupted Seminar on the psychoanalytic act, arguing that the act's constitutive paradox—that the analyst must operate from a position that gives the lie to their own position—requires the concept of Verleugnung (fetishistic disavowal) rather than Verwerfung (foreclosure), while also registering the political events of May 1968 as an index of a structural gap in the universe of knowledge.

When I spoke about Verwerfung, which is an extremely precise term, and which situates perfectly what is involved in psychosis, people reminded me that it would be cleverer to use Verleugnung.
#136

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.67

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of an analysis (which belongs to the analysand as task) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and its replacement by the objet petit a as cause of the subject's division constitutes the act that makes one a psychoanalyst — thereby grounding the logic of the phantasy in the structure of alienation, desire, castration, and the lost object.

The rejection of the body outside of thinking is the great Verwerfung of Descartes. It is stamped with its effect that it reappears in the real, namely, in the impossible.
#137

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Frege's Begriffschrift to ground the logical function of "the all" (universal quantification) in the structure of the subject constituted by the lost object and repetition, arguing that the psychoanalytic myth of primal fusion with the mother (via Rank's birth trauma) is a symptomatic misrecognition of the subject's constitutive relation to the all, which is itself an effect of the o-object mediating between the original repressed signifier and its substitutive repetition.

it is only recognised authentically by being forgotten, or it is only sincerely recognised by being mis-recognised
#138

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.125

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the logical distinction between universal and particular propositions—demonstrated through French/English linguistic examples and the Aristotelian square of opposition—to argue that the introduction of quantifiers reveals a fundamental structural asymmetry in the relation between universal and particular, which he frames as the key logical tool for psychoanalytic thinking about the subject.

concerning what he calls the rather discordant function of the ne and the rather foreclusive one of the pas
#139

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.189

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > *Lecture of 19th June. 1968*

Theoretical move: In this closing ceremonial address, Lacan reflects on the interrupted transmission of his theory of the psychoanalytic act, identifying Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved to articulate the analyst's position in relation to the Subject Supposed to Know, and situates the May '68 events as an unexpected enactment of the 'act' dimension his seminar had been developing.

When I bespoke about Verwerfung, which is an extremely precise term, and which situates perfectly what is involved in psychosis, people reminded me that it would be cleverer to use Verleugnung.
#140

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.67

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**

Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of analysis (on the side of the analysand) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know gives way to the Objet petit a as cause of the subject's division — and it is this terminal act that grounds the analyst's capacity to begin each new analysis.

The act of the Cogito is error about being, as we see in the definitive alienation resulting from it of the body, which is rejected into extension, the rejection of the body outside of thinking is the great Verwerfung of Descartes.
#141

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.125

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968** > **Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of French and English negation ('pas tout' / 'anything') to motivate a transition from Aristotelian syllogistic (subalternation from universal to particular) to the logic of quantifiers, arguing that the latter—by expressing the universal affirmative through double negation ('there is no man who is not wise')—better captures the structural relationship between universal and particular that psychoanalytic theory of the subject requires.

concerning what he calls the rather discordant function of the ne and the rather foreclusive one of the pas.
#142

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.327

Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the "missing signifier" because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolization and can only reappear in the real; the castration complex, illustrated through the case of Little Hans, marks the precise joint between the imaginary and symbolic where this structural lack is registered, with the phobia functioning as a symptomatic "paper tiger" that mediates the subject's intolerable anxiety before the phallic mother.

the conventional one to designate what is involved in sexual enjoyment as radically foreclosed... it is here that it must be seen, that the point must be designated where it cannot be revised.
#143

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 > (12) OK, let's go and after that we'll leave it.

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the "Copernican revolution" not as a change of centre but as the discovery that knowledge can be structured without a knowing subject, paralleling Newton's "unthinkable" formula for gravity and Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that escapes consciousness—both pointing to the impossible as the Real; simultaneously he argues that the concept of "revolution" only acquires structural dignity from Marx's discovery of surplus value as foreclosed in the capitalist discourse, and that being itself is born only from the flaw (lack) introduced by the speaking being.

foreclosed from the symbolic, this knowledge reappears in the real of hallucination
#144

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.39

*[A porter appears]*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transition from the ancient Master's discourse to modern capitalism/bureaucracy involves a displacement of knowledge (S2) into the dominant position, producing a new tyranny that occludes truth; and that psychoanalytic experience operates by introducing the Hysteric's discourse as a structural condition ("hystericisation") that exposes the non-self-knowing character of unconscious knowledge and the impossibility of sexual rapport.

what is rejected in the symbolic re-appears in the real!
#145

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.187

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that all language functions through metaphor and metonymy with the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches, and uses Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction to reframe the paternal metaphor: the Name of the Father is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone, but as a name that summons someone to speak — revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.

From the angle of what happened in the psychotic determination of Schreber, it is qua signifier, signifier capable of giving a sense to the desire of the mother, that I could in a correct manner situate the Name of the Father.
#146

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.28

**Seminar [l:\Vednesday](file://l:/Vednesday) 13 January 1971** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that there is no sexual relationship because sexuality at the level of discourse is constituted as semblance, with surplus-jouissance (not biology) as its operative term; the phallus functions as the signifier of sexual enjoyment precisely insofar as it is identical with the Name of the Father, and the Oedipus myth is the discourse's necessary fiction for designating the real of an impossible enjoyment.

Lacanian foreclosure never having reached his ears, which immediately and very easily explains the form of these cases.
#147

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.150

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that the logic of quantification (universal/particular, affirmative/negative) is not merely a formal apparatus but carries the mark of the sexual impasse: the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship without a third term (the phallus), and the asymmetry between the masculine "all" (grounded in a mythical exception) and the feminine "not-all" (sustained only as a discordant statement, as 'a-woman' rather than 'every woman'), with Hysteria named as the neurosis that articulates this truth of failure.

as someone who was a rather subtle grammarian formerly expressed it, it is forclusive. The function will not be written. I want to know nothing about it.
#148

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.162

J Lacan - Start that again.

Theoretical move: The passage turns on the structural homology between the logical form of double negation (as deployed in the fixed-point theorem and Lacan's own formulas), Peirce's distinction between the field of the potential (pure zero) and the field of the impossible (zero of repetition), and an empiricist prehistory of this distinction traced through Locke and Condillac — arguing that the "point that escapes" distortion in topology mirrors the logical and ontological status of the non-inscribed, which is the condition of possibility for any inscription at all.

the general possibility of impossibilities not effected, namely not inscribed
#149

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.18

Seminar 1: Wednesday 8 December 1971

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two forms of negation—foreclosure and discordance (not-all)—arguing that foreclosure operates at the level of the said (the unsayable), while the not-all is a form of discordance; the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship is the real ground that determines discourse as structurally broken.

what is foreclosure? Assuredly it is to be placed in a different register to that of discordance. It is to be placed at the point at which we have written the term described as Junction.
#150

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.41

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.

What distinguishes the discourse of capitalism is this: the Verwerfung, the rejection, the rejection outside of all the fields of the symbolic with what I already said this has as a consequence: the rejection of what? Of castration.
#151

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.128

The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst > **1 Jane 1972**

Theoretical move: Lacan situates the psychoanalyst's complex, horror-laden relationship to knowledge as the central theoretical problem, arguing that the discourse of the analyst places its practitioner in a structurally difficult position where knowledge about truth—mapped onto the four-discourse schema—is simultaneously perceived and repudiated, with foreclosure (Verwerfung) operating not only in psychosis but as a rationally legitimated social force.

It is from this question that Freud took on, in short, the Verwerfung, he calls it 'a judgement when faced with the choice that rejects'... it does not reign over the world as a rationally justified power
#152

Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.60

**Introduction** > **Seminar 4: Tuesday 21 January 1975**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that "a woman is a symptom" for a man, grounding this in the structure of phallic jouissance, the non-existence of The woman (not-all), and the logic of belief — distinguishing believing-in (the symptom/neurosis) from believing-her (love/psychosis) — while also reformulating the paternal function as père-version and redefining the symptom as an untamed form of writing from the unconscious.

Anyone at all who reaches the function of exception that the father has, we know with what result, that of his Verwerfung, or of his rejection, in most cases, through the filiation that the father generates with the psychotic results that I have exposed.
#153

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.147

Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Real as fundamentally unbound and orientating-without-meaning, distinguishes a more radical foreclosure than that of the Name-of-the-Father, and ties the Death Drive to the Real itself, while the matheme (and the Borromean knot as topological device) are offered as instruments for reaching "bits of Real" that resist symbolic embroidery.

I am saying that because last evening I was asked the question of whether there were other foreclosures than the one that results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. It is quite certain that there is something more radical about foreclosure.
#154

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.113

**Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Joyce's artistic ambition functions as a topological compensation for a de facto Verwerfung (foreclosure) by the father, and uses this to stage the broader claim that the Borromean knot articulates the entanglement of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real — with the sinthome as the supplementary loop that prevents their dissolution, while also developing the logic of per-version (père-version) as the son-to-father relation structuring the drive.

Is there not here something like what I would call a compensation for this paternal resignation? For this de facto Verwerfung, in the fact that Joyce felt himself imperiously summoned
#155

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.47

So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Knowledge (as unconscious signifier-effects) and Truth have no relation to one another, that the unconscious is structured as signifier-effects rather than philosophy, and that psychoanalysis is a 'scientific delusion' awaiting a science it may never produce — pivoting through the Four Discourses, the Borromean Knot, and the parlêtre to situate the irreducibility of the Real to matter.

It was in this connection that I spoke about the foreclosure of the name of the father.
#156

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.98

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the relation between the Real, the universal, and sense: Lacan argues that the Real is defined by the exclusion of all sense and by impossibility (what does not cease not to be written), yet psychoanalysis as a practice depends on words having import — a tension he navigates by revisiting the Four Discourses, specifically the Discourse of the Analyst, to show how the barred subject holds the place of Truth through Knowledge, while the gap between S1 and S2 marks an irreducible incompletion.

however excluded the universal may be, the foreclosure of this universal implies the maintenance of particularity.
#157

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.68

So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

Theoretical move: Through a game-theoretic allegory (Bozef/king chess positions), the passage argues that the subject's total dispossession before an omniscient Other (Absolute Knowing at R3) forces the emergence of the repressed signifier S2 into the Real—constituting aphanisis/fading—and that the only exit from this petrified position is a single word ("it is you," S(Ø)) which, rather than merely keeping one's word, *sustains* speech as an act anchored in the subject's desire, making the pass (passe) the topological test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating.

one could compare his position to that of these peoples invaded by foreigners who carry out a politics of scorched earth, who burn everything, who burn everything in order to keep something, namely, that the invasion is not total.
#158

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.213

**XV** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic practice must advance beyond cataloguing instinctual meanings to recognize the autonomous action of the signifier, proposing that psychosis is not merely a disturbance at the level of meaning but stems from a structural deficiency at the level of the signifier itself — what will become the concept of Foreclosure.

can't one conceive of considering the consequences of the essential lack of a signifier in these immediately accessible subjects called psychotics?
#159

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.157

**X** > **XI** > **On the rejection of a primordial signifier**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis must be approached through structural-explanatory analysis rather than phenomenological understanding, with the unconscious "present but not functioning" in psychosis, and that language phenomena in psychosis are the most theoretically productive site of investigation — grounding the entire analytic enterprise in the irreducibility of language.

A TWIN THAT IS BIG WITH DELUSION DAY AND NIGHT *VERWERFUNG* LETTER 52
#160

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

**I**

Theoretical move: This introductory passage announces the year's seminar topic—the question of the psychoses—positioning it as distinct from mere treatment, and frames the inquiry as moving from Freudian theory (including Verneinung and Verwerfung) toward clinical, nosographic, and therapeutic problems, while acknowledging a constitutive 'lapsus' in the seminar's announced title.

FROM VERNEINUNG TO VERWERFUNG
#161

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.318

**XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structurally precipitated when a primordial signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—is foreclosed (verworfen) and thus cannot be received from the field of the Other, reducing the subject to a purely imaginary, dual relation of mutual destruction; this is contrasted with the authentic symbolic invocation that addresses "all the signifiers" constituting the subject, including symptoms.

This is how it is whenever, in the appeal proffered to the other, the signifier falls into the field which for the other is excluded, verworfen, unattainable.
#162

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.54

**II** > **Ill** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan reworks Freud's grammatical analysis of paranoia by mapping each mode of negation of "I love him" onto a distinct structure of alienation (inverted, diverted, converted), while grounding the whole in the distinction between the big Other (symbolic, unknown) and the little other (imaginary, rival ego), arguing that psychosis must be understood through the structure of the subject's relation to an Other that speaks to him.

What part in the subject talks? Analysis says it's the unconscious... for the whole question is how it speaks and what the structure of paranoid discourse is.
#163

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.267

**XX**

Theoretical move: By distinguishing the little other (imaginary) from the absolute Other (symbolic/linguistic), and drawing an analogy between medieval ecstatic love theory and psychotic structure, Lacan argues that psychosis is constituted by an inability to respond to the interpellation of the Other, producing a love relation that abolishes the subject and reduces the Other to a pure signifier emptied of meaning.

The psychotic's Eros is located where speech is absent. It is there that he finds his supreme love.
#164

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.45

**II** > **Ill** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the standard psychoanalytic account of Schreber's paranoia (homosexual tendency/castration) as ambiguous and unfalsifiable, then pivots to a properly linguistic analysis of psychotic discourse: the mark of delusion is not its content but a structural feature of the signifier—neologism at the level of the signifier, and irreducible self-referential meaning at the level of the signified—producing two poles of "delusional intuition" and "formula/refrain."

the very system of the delusional is supposed to provide us with the elements of its own understanding.
#165

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.296

**XXII** > **4**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that when the organizing signifier (specifically the Name-of-the-Father in Schreber's case) is evoked but fails to appear, the signifying chain cannot be anchored, producing a decomposition of the subject's relation to language and to the Other — the structural explanation for Schreber's interrupted sentences and his radical experience of absolute otherness.

if this signifier is heard, but nothing in the subject is able to respond to it? The function of the sentence is then reduced solely to the significance of the thou, a free signifier that is nowhere pinned down.
#166

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.33

**II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of paranoia cannot be grasped through the "pattern" of understandable behaviour, because the elementary phenomenon of a delusion is not a nucleus around which deduction builds but is itself an irreducible structure — the same structuring force operative at every level of the delusion — and that psychiatry's persistent failure to theorise this is evidenced by Kraepelin's definition, which point-for-point contradicts clinical observation.

The source of this structure has been so profoundly misrecognized that the whole discourse on paranoia I was talking about before bears the mark of that misrecognition.
#167

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.221

**XVI**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychotic subject's testimony about their relationship to language must be taken literally rather than filtered through academic clinical categories, because the psychotic's "turning" in relation to language reveals a dimension constitutive of all human subjectivity — namely, the half-external position every subject occupies with respect to the signifier. The Schreberian case is thus elevated from pathological curiosity to methodological key for understanding the signifier/signified relation and the ego's grounding in the Other.

it's insofar as he hasn't acquired or has lost this Other that he encounters the purely imaginary other.
#168

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.264

**XX**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is fundamentally structured by the subject's exteriority to the signifier — where the neurotic 'inhabits language,' the psychotic is 'inhabited by language' — and that the onset of psychosis is triggered at the moment of being called upon to 'speak out' one's own speech, a failing rooted in the prior foreclosure of the primordial signifier (Verwerfung).

The notion of Verwerfung indicates that there must already have been something in the relation to the signifier previously lacking here in the initial introduction to fundamental signifiers.
#169

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.100

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structural difference between neurosis and psychosis by mapping the three Freudian mechanisms (Verdichtung, Verdrängung, Verneinung) onto symbolization, repression, and reality, and then contrasts these with Verwerfung—the foreclosure of primitive symbolization—which, when the non-symbolized returns in the real, triggers not neurotic compromise but an imaginary chain reaction, illustrated through Schreber's delusion as the mirror stage run to its limit.

Verwerfung is not at the same level as Verneinung. When, at the beginning of a psychosis, the nonsymbolized reappears in the real, there are responses made from the side of the mechanism of Verneinung, but they prove inadequate.
#170

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.203

**XIV** > **1**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinctiveness of the signifier — that it signifies nothing in itself — is the key to understanding both the structure of human subjectivity and the differential mechanism of neurosis versus psychosis: in neurosis the signifier remains enigmatic but operative, while in psychosis what has been foreclosed from the symbolic (Verwerfung) reappears in the real, with delusion marking the moment the initiative is attributed to the big Other as such.

something there that had not materialized, at a certain moment, in the field of the signifier, that had been verworfen, thereby making the object of a Verwerfung reappear in the real.
#171

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.95

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Verwerfung (foreclosure) as a logical-prior failure of primitive symbolization—distinct from repression—whereby what is not symbolized reappears in the Real, establishing the foundational distinction between psychosis and neurosis and grounding a critique of the "defense" concept and premature interpretation in analytic technique.

In the subject's relationship to the symbol there is the possibility of a primitive Verwerfung, that is, that something is not symbolized and is going to appear in the real.
#172

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.163

**X** > **XI** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan theorises Verwerfung (Foreclosure) as the rejection of a primordial signifier into outer shadows—distinct from both Verdrängung (repression) and Verleugnung—positing it as the foundational mechanism of psychosis/paranoia, while simultaneously developing, via Freud's Letter 52 and the mystic writing-pad, a multi-register account of memory as the circulating chain of signifiers that underpins the repetition compulsion.

What is at issue when I speak of Verwerfung? At issue is the rejection of a primordial signifier into the outer shadows, a signifier that will henceforth be missing at this level. Here you have the fundamental mechanism that I posit as being at the basis of paranoia.
#173

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.134

**VIII** > **IX**

Theoretical move: By insisting that the unconscious is fundamentally structured by language and that the signifier plays the primary role, Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is fully legible through psychoanalytic method—the terminal state of the delusion preserves the same signifying elements as the originary experience of psychosis, making the symbolic relationship analyzable throughout.

Perhaps we shall be able to understand how over the course of the evolution of the psychosis... the subject is situated in relation to the whole symbolic, original order
#174

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.162

**X** > **XI** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis cannot be adequately explained at the level of the imaginary (projection, narcissism, ideal ego) because alienation is constitutive of the imaginary as such; what distinguishes psychosis is a breakdown at the level of the symbolic order, specifically through Verwerfung (foreclosure), which operates in the field of symbolic articulation that subtends the reality principle — a field Lacan grounds in the primordial symbolic nihilation of reality itself.

It's exactly this field of symbolic articulation that I'm currently aiming at in my discourse, and it's here that Verwerfung occurs.
#175

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.215

**XV** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is constituted not by conflict or defense in the neurotic sense, but by a foundational hole at the level of the signifier — specifically the foreclosure of the paternal signifier — which collapses the entire signifying chain and forces the subject into imaginary compensation, with decompensation occurring when imaginary crutches can no longer substitute for the absent symbolic function.

To designate it we've made do until now with the term Verwerfung.
#176

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.206

**XIV** > **1**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychosis is structured around a failure at the level of the signifier — the exclusion of the big Other — which forces the subject into an imaginary compensation through the "between-I" (inmixing of subjects), explaining the characteristic delusion, mental automatism, and enigmatic assertion of the other's initiative as restitutive responses to the signifier's absence.

The Other with a big O, qua bearer of the signifier, is excluded. The Other is thereby all the more powerfully affirmed between it and the subject, at the level of the little other.
#177

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.347

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.

name-of-the-father and foreclosure, 193, 306
#178

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.353

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This is an index from Seminar III, non-substantive in itself, but it maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar by clustering key Lacanian terms (Verwerfung/foreclosure, signifier, unconscious, symbolic, subject, Verneinung, etc.) with their page references, making visible the theoretical relations Lacan constructs across the seminar.

Verwerfung [foreclosure, rejection], 12-13, 142, 282, 305 and Bejahung, 81-82 … as lack in signifier, 203, 252 and paranoia, 149—50 and primordial signifier, 156
#179

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.152

**X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychosis to develop a theory of the signifier in the real: the verbal hallucination is not a false perception but the limit-phenomenon where discourse opens onto a signifier that precedes and exceeds the subject's intentional grasp, reframing the ego and the Other in terms of this foreign discourse at the heart of subjectivity.

the issue for us... is to look for what there is at the center of President Schreber's experience, what he senses without knowing it at the edge of the field of his experience... this signifier he fails to perceive as one but which, at its limit, organizes all these phenomena.
#180

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.41

**II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is not merely symptomatic content but a structural double of psychoanalytic theory itself — the delusion explicitly theorizes the very structures (of the unconscious, of intersubjective exchange, of libidinal economy) that analysis laboriously extracts from neurotic cases, thereby granting psychosis an exemplary status for structural investigation.

a classification of paranoia to be recast on completely new foundations
#181

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.114

**VII** > **1**

Theoretical move: By analysing Schreber's psychotic language, Lacan argues that the foreclosure of the third-person 'he' (the big Other as irreducible other subject) is the structural catastrophe of psychosis: without this guaranteeing 'he', the subject's being collapses, leaving only a hallucinatory, enigmatic speech produced by an imaginary-degraded God who absorbs all otherness.

What characterizes Schreber's world is that this he is lost, and only it/you remains.
#182

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.156

**X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

Theoretical move: By tracking the gradations between the bellowing-miracle (pure signifier without meaning) and the call for help (meaning without genuine subjecthood), Lacan argues that in psychosis the unconscious signifier is situated as externally real rather than internally repressed — pointing toward the structural difference between Verwerfung (Foreclosure) and Verdrängung (Repression) as two distinct modes of subjective localization of the signifier.

This topographical notion tends in the same direction as the question already raised about the difference between Verwerfung and Verdrängung as to their subjective localization.
#183

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.232

**XVII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

The relations of contiguity dominate, following the absence or failure of the function of meaningful equivalence by means of similarity.
#184

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.123

**VIII**

Theoretical move: Against phenomenological and psychiatric approaches to verbal hallucination, Lacan argues that the decisive analytic distinction is between certainty and reality, grounding psychosis analysis in the structural priority of the symbolic order—speech is always already present as symbolic articulation, covering lived experience "like a web," so that the unconscious is simply thought articulated in language.

Even if we don't resolve the problem of the economic function of what I called just now the phenomena of verbal alienation - let's provisionally call them verbal hallucinations - we are interested in what is distinctive about the analytic viewpoint in the analysis of a psychosis.
#185

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.35

**II** > **The meaning of delusion** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the defining feature of psychotic delusion is not its content or degree of understandability but its closure to dialectical movement — its "dialectical inertia" — and that the question "Who speaks?" must govern the analysis of paranoia, as demonstrated by the centrality of verbal hallucination and the Schreber case.

The phenomenon is closed to all dialectical composition.
#186

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.271

**XXI** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience and Saussure's two-flow schema to argue that the signifier is never isolable but always retroactively determines meaning through the completion of a signifying chain — a structural property illustrated through Racine's Athalie — and that this structuring priority of the signifier over the signified is the necessary foundation for understanding psychoanalytic (especially psychotic) experience.

phenomena are produced that are above all ones the subject regards as neutralized, as signifying less and less... residue, refuse, empty bodies.
#187

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.175

**XII** > **The hysteric's question**

Theoretical move: By analyzing Schreber's delusion through the schema of analytic communication, Lacan argues that in psychosis the big Other—where being is realized through speech—is foreclosed, reducing discourse to an internal echo (automatism) that cannot resolve the subject's constitution; this structural difference from neurosis must be clarified before any technique for working with psychotics can be formulated.

we have been able to recognize that in psychosis the Other, where being is realized through the avowal of speech, is excluded.
#188

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.60

**IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's neurosis/psychosis distinction to sharpen the concept of Verwerfung (foreclosure): whereas in neurosis a repressed element returns symbolically within the subject's psychical reality, in psychosis what has been excluded from the symbolic order entirely returns from without in the Real — a structural difference that cannot be reduced to projection. A clinical vignette (the butcher's remark) then demonstrates that the signifier can carry meaning erotically/allusively without being identical to the message received in inverted form.

what has got caught up in the Verwerfung - that is, what has been placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject - return from without.
#189

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.295

**XXII** > **2**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the grammatical agreement (or non-agreement) of the verb in a relative clause with the *thou* of the main clause is not a matter of syntax alone but indexes the degree to which the subject is "caught up" in a signifying quilting point — the subject is constituted as such precisely through its implication in the signifier, as evidenced by the linguistic category of the middle voice.

the signifying part has been conquered and assumed or on the contrary *verworfen,* rejected by him.
#190

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.25

**I** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) by showing how the same phenomenon (the red car, psychotic experience) is interpretable at each level, and then pivots to the theoretical crux: unlike repression—where the repressed returns through symptoms—Verwerfung (Foreclosure) causes what is refused in the Symbolic to reappear in the Real, as demonstrated by the Wolf Man's hallucination and Schreber's fundamental language.

behind the process of verbalization there must be admitted a primordial Bejahung, an admission in the sense of the symbolic, which can itself be wanting... a phenomenon of exclusion for which the term Verwerfung appears valid.
#191

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.112

**VII** > **1**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the purely imaginary relation — illustrated via Schreber's psychosis — is structurally doomed to collapse (collision/fragmentation) unless stabilized by the symbolic order, specifically the Name of the Father; Schreber's delusion is then read as a clinical demonstration of what happens when that symbolic anchoring fails, leaving the subject exposed to an unchecked imaginary invasion legible through the disintegration of identity, voice phenomena, and the decomposition of language itself.

It is suggestive to see how this network, which is symbolic by nature and maintains the image in a degree of stability in interhuman relationships, is necessary so that everything doesn't suddenly reduce to nothing, so that the entire veil of the imaginary relation does not suddenly draw back and disappear in the yawning blackness.
#192

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.87

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the psychotic's relation to reality from that of the normal subject by showing that what is at stake in psychosis is not belief in the reality of hallucinations but an unshakeable *certainty* that phenomena concern the subject — a certainty that is structurally prior to and independent of reality-testing, and which must be understood through the symbolic frame (L Schema) rather than reduced to normal mechanisms like projection.

VERDICHTUNG, VERDRANGVNG, VERNEINUNG, AND VERWERFUNG
#193

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.306

**XXIII** > **The highway and the signifier "being a father"**

Theoretical move: The highway-as-signifier analogy is deployed to show that the signifier does not merely connect points but *creates* and polarizes a field of meanings; this is then applied to Schreber's psychosis by arguing that the foreclosed signifier 'being a father' leaves only a network of minor paths (imaginary/partial routes), generating hallucinatory substitute signifiers in place of the absent structuring highway.

To all appearances President Schreber lacks this fundamental signifier called *being a father.* This is why he had to make a mistake, become confused, to the point of thinking of acting like a woman.
#194

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.136

**VIII** > **IX**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's delusion to elaborate the structure of psychotic discourse: the *Unsinn* (nonsense) of the voices is not simple privation of sense but a positively organized, contradiction-laden discourse from which the subject is alienated, while the threat of being 'forsaken' (*liegen lassen*) functions as the persistent thread tying together the entire delusional structure — with the implication that what is at stake is the subject's relation to language as a whole, not a providential/superego mechanism.

the Other is lacking in delusion - but on this side, in a sort of internal beyond.
#195

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.83

**V** > *The reading continues.*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Schreber's psychotic experience to argue that the fundamental structure of psychosis involves a lived contradiction between two incompatible figures of God (the cosmic guarantor of the Real and the erotic living partner), played out entirely within the imaginary dimension rather than through formal logic or intersubjective speech—a 'transversal' axis of deception that subverts the subject-to-subject axis of authentic symbolic exchange.

This means that the world - as you will see emerge in the subject's discourse - is transformed into what we call a fantasmagoria, but which for him has the utmost certainty in his lived experience. This is the game of deception that he maintains, not with another like himself, but with this primary being, the very guarantor of the real.
#196

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.141

**VIII** > **IX**

Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Schreber's delusion, Lacan argues that psychotic experience is structured around a fundamental disturbance in the symbolic order: God's radical incomprehension of the human, the 'writing-down system', and the self-contradictory nature of the delusional universe all index a breakdown in the total functioning of language, with the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary as the analytic framework for understanding delusional interlocution.

one gets the impression that it was discovered through an extraordinarily innocent development, through the working out of significant consequences, in a harmonious and continuous unfolding through its various phases, whose motor is the subject's disturbed relationship to something that affects the total functioning of language
#197

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.223

**XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *300-01*

Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Schreber's Memoirs, Lacan demonstrates that in psychosis the structure of reality itself is reorganized around verbal/signifying presences — the "fundamental language" — such that the Real is replaced by a linguistically constituted divine Other, which functions as the sole guarantor of the subject's existence.

the incidental presences in his surroundings are afflicted with unreality and become fleeting-improvised-men.
#198

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.17

**I** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues against psychogenesis—understood as the reintroduction of Jaspers's "relation of understanding" into psychiatry—by insisting that psychoanalysis operates beyond immediate experience and psychological causation, and that the field of psychosis must be understood structurally rather than through characterological or empathic intelligibility.

at the end of the observation on the Schreber case, which is his major text concerning the psychoses, Freud traces out a watershed, as it were, between paranoia on the one hand and on the other everything he would like, he says, to be called paraphrenia
#199

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.319

**XXIII** > **XXIV** > **1**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father forces the subject to substitute a constant, hollow 'mental automatism' (language speaking itself without a subject) for the missing paternal signifier, and uses the Schreber case to adjudicate between Freud's latent-homosexuality thesis and Macalpine's pregnancy-fantasy thesis — showing both to be partial accounts of how the psychotic subject attempts to reconstitute what the paternal signifier cannot anchor.

precisely what the subject is literally unable to conceive… what isn't receivable for the psychotic subject
#200

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

**XXI** > **The quilting point**

Theoretical move: By asking why a hallucinated voice — something as architecturally complex as speech — should appear in the hole produced by a refusal to perceive, Lacan argues that psychosis restores the theoretically neglected proper relationship between signifier and signified, which standard analytic accounts of hallucination (rooted in a crude realism) fail to explain.

a so-called refusal to perceive produces a hole and there then appears in reality a drive that has been rejected by the subject
#201

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.345

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index for Seminar III (The Psychoses), listing key terms, proper names, and their page references across the seminar volume.

foreclosure [Verwerfung, rejection], 321
#202

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.66

**IV** > **"I've just been to the butcher's"**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the hallucinatory utterance "Sow!" to demonstrate that in paranoia the big Other is structurally excluded, so the subject's own message circulates between two small others (ego and mirror-counterpart) without ever reaching the dimension of true speech; this is contrasted with the diachronic/synchronic structure of language (Saussure) mapped onto the tripartite symbolic/imaginary/real.

The Other being truly excluded, what concerns the subject is actually said by the little other, by shadows of others, or, as Schreber will express himself to designate all human beings he encounters, by fabricated, or improvised men.
#203

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.333

**XXV** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan consolidates his theory of psychosis around the foreclosure of the paternal signifier, arguing that the psychotic's structural "askewness" in relation to the signifier — exemplified by Schreber — is not a deficiency of object-relating but an impossibility of access to the Name-of-the-Father as signifier, and uses this to polemicize against object-relations theory's reduction of analytic experience to imaginary absorption.

I shan't go back over the notion of Verwerfung I began with, and for which, having thought it through, I propose to you definitively to adopt this translation which I believe is the best - foreclosure.
#204

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.169

**X** > **XI** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primordial signifier (Wahrnehmungszeichen) is the condition of possibility for memory, historicization, and neurosis, while its foreclosure (Verwerfung) constitutes the distinctive mechanism of psychosis—a "hole in the symbolic" rather than a reworking of reality—thereby reframing Freud's Verneinung and the neurosis/psychosis distinction in strictly signifier-based terms.

He expressly acknowledges in his Letter 52 that the primordial Verneinung comprises an initial putting into signs, Wahrnehmungszeichen...which is the chosen locus of what for you I am calling Verwerfung.
#205

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.102

**VI**

Theoretical move: Delusion is theorized as the consequence of a failed symbolization: when a demand of the symbolic order cannot be integrated into the subject's existing dialectical movement, it triggers a serial disintegration (the 'removal of the woof from the tapestry'), and Lacan positions this at the intersection of Verwerfung, Verdrängung, and Verneinung.

Next time we shall continue our examination at the point where Verwerfung and Verdrängung intersect with Verneinung.
#206

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.325

**XXV** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan defends Freud's account of Schreber's psychosis—centered on castration, the Phallus, and the paternal function—against Macalpine's pre-oedipal/imaginary fantasy alternative, arguing that only a framework grounded in speech and the function of the father can account for the "verbal auditivation" and structural features that distinguish psychosis from neurosis.

it's not castration at all... Freud's analysis makes the entire dynamics of the subject Schreber revolve around the theme of castration, of the loss of the phallic object
#207

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.407

FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.

what we have taught here at the level of Verwerfung, namely what has been rejected from the symbolic and reappears in the real.
#208

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.221

ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

the term of the symbolic father does not intervene, having been left on the outside due to Verwerfung
#209

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.139

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bateson's double bind as a foil to argue that the genesis of psychosis cannot be reduced to double-meaning communication but requires identifying the missing signifier — the Name-of-the-Father — as the grounding element of the law in the Other; its Verwerfung (foreclosure) is what distinguishes psychotic from neurotic structure, while the accompanying schema of the witticism illustrates how desire is essentially transformed (betrayed) by its passage through the signifying chain.

What has been the nub of everything that I have taught you about psychosis these last two years? It's what I have called Verwerfung.
#210

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.15

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.

a primordial deficiency of a signifier... which we were speaking about last night in terms of Verwerfung
#211

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.288

**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

what I am alluding to here can be brought into relation with this German term that in our vocabulary I have linked to rejection, namely *Verwerfung.*
#212

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.501

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > Chapter vn *Une Femme de Non-Recevoir,* or: A Flat Refusal

Theoretical move: This passage is a translator's/editor's footnote and reference apparatus for Seminar V, providing bibliographic citations, terminological clarifications, and cross-references to other seminars and texts. It is non-substantive in terms of theoretical argument.

Chapter VIn Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father
#213

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.166

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.

if you don't look for the paternal deficiencies at this level, you won't find them anywhere else.
#214

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.521

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar V, listing concepts, proper names, and page references in alphabetical order (L–N). No original theoretical argument is advanced here.

Name-of-the-Father 174, 454, 455 ... foreclosure of 129-44
#215

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.195

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural failure of the Name-of-the-Father (foreclosure in psychosis, or its effective overruling by the mother in homosexuality) determines the subject's inability to complete the Oedipus complex's third moment; the key theoretical move is to show that homosexuality is not simply an "inverted Oedipus" but results from a precise structural inversion of authority within the parental couple, where the mother lays down the law to the father instead of the reverse.

the Name-of-the-Father, the father as symbolic function ... is verworfen.
#216

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.335

**SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

What we see appear here is the root of what, in the subject's completion on the path to the Other's desire, can be called her profound Verwerfung, her profound rejection, qua being, of how she appears as a woman.
#217

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.148

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis (specifically Schreber's) results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: because the Other lacks the signifier that would ground its own authority, messages cannot be authenticated through the 'you' circuit and arrive as broken, enigmatic utterances—a failure that is structural (the paternal metaphor) rather than empirical (whether the real father is present or adequate).

What is essential is that, in one way or another, the subject has acquired the dimension of the Name-of-the-Father.
#218

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.502

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > Chapter X The Three Moments of the Oedipus Complex (I)

Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly apparatus (editorial footnotes and bibliographic references) for Seminar V, providing source citations, translations, and cross-references for chapters X–XVI. It is non-substantive theoretical content.

This article is his 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis', Ecrits, pp. 447-88.
#219

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.523

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.

foreclosure of the Name-of-the Father 129-44
#220

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.194

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the three logical moments of the Oedipus complex as a structural sequence centred on the metonymic circulation of the phallus as the object of the mother's desire, showing how the paternal prohibition interrupts the child's identification as the mother's metonymic object and thereby opens the path to the third, identificatory moment — grounding castration in the paternal metaphor rather than in any social teleology.

Let's pause here for a moment to make place for what is almost a parenthesis, important nevertheless, concerning psychosis. It is extremely important to consider the manner in which the father intervenes at this moment in the dialectic.
#221

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.459

**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

the Name-of-the-Father is rejected, is the object of an original Verwerfung and does not enter into the cycle of signifiers, and this is also why the Other's desire, namely the mother's desire, is not symbolized there.
#222

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.147

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father destroys the message/code circuit at point A (the locus of the Other), thereby collapsing the signifying conditions for desire's satisfaction and precipitating psychosis—illustrated through Schreber's voice hallucinations as substitutes for the absent paternal signifier.

if you imagine the Verwerfung of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, that the signifier is absent, you will see that the two links in dotted lines here … are thereby destroyed and rendered impossible.
#223

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.471

THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

We are putting our finger here... on one of the most eminent forms of the function of Verwerfung [foreclosure]. Assuming that the cut is both constitutive of discourse and irremediably external to it, one can say that the subject is verworfen [foreclosed] insofar as he identifies with the cut.
#224

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.94

THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "AS HE WISHED"

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject is constituted through the structural split between the I of enunciation and the I of the statement, and that negation (Verneinung) — especially the "discordant" ne — is the earliest linguistic trace of this split, linking the signifier's capacity for self-effacement to the inaugural moment of the unconscious subject.

He dwelled especially on the use of negation in French, and in this realm he could not avoid making a discovery that he formulated with the distinction between the 'foreclusive' and the 'discordant.'
#225

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.89

LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates repression (Verdrängung) as an operation *on the signifier* — specifically, the subject's self-effacement through the elision of signifying clausulae — and distinguishes it from foreclosure (Verwerfung) and negation (Verneinung) as three distinct modes by which the subject "hides itself qua subject," grounding the unconscious in the structure of the Other as locus of speech.

There are three ways in which the subject can perform this trick: through Verwerfung [foreclosure], Verneinung [negation], and Verdriingung [repression].
#226

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.351

MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that mourning creates a hole in the real (not the symbolic) analogous to the Verwerfung of psychosis, and that funeral rites function as the total mobilization of the symbolic order to fill this hole — thereby linking the structural logic of mourning to fantasy ($ ◇ a) and the economy of the real, imaginary, and symbolic as dramatized in Hamlet.

Such a loss constitutes a Verwerfung, a hole, [not in the symbolic] but in reality. Owing to the same correspondence as the one I articulate regarding Verwerfung, this hole turns out to provide a place onto which the missing signifier is projected.
#227

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.88

LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

Theoretical move: The passage develops the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement as the structural foundation of the Graph of Desire's two lines, arguing that repression is essentially the effacement of the subject at the level of the enunciation process, and that all speech is primordially the Other's discourse — with Foreclosure (Verwerfung) marking the pathological limit of this structure.

The fact remains that if a Verwerfung [foreclosure] has not occurred, the child perceives at a certain moment that the adult who supposedly knows all his thoughts doesn't in the slightest.
#228

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.480

THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion inverts the neurotic's proof-structure: where the neurotic must ceaselessly prove desire's existence, the pervert takes it as given, and organises his entire construction around identifying with the phallus-as-object inside the mother, using the fetish or idol to symbolise the split between symbolic identification (I) and imaginary identification (i(a)) — a structure illustrated paradigmatically through male and female homosexuality and confirmed clinically via the anecdote of Gide's marble.

his first Verwerfungen [foreclosures]. This is connected to the subject's second identification, his imaginary identification with his specular form, i( a).
#229

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.350

MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

The relationship in question is the converse of the one that I proposed with the term Verwerfung [foreclosure] when I told you that what is rejected in the symbolic reappears in reality.
#230

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.108

INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE

Theoretical move: By testing the algorithm (S◇a) against the phenomenology of desire—through dream interpretation, clinical vignette, and Jones's concept of aphanisis—Lacan argues that desire is structurally alienated in a sign and thereby constitutively linked to lack, such that castration functions as the "final temperament" of the metonymic vanishing of desire's object.

This 'big enough phallus,' or more exactly this phallus that is essential to the subject, thus turns out to be foreclosed at a certain moment of his experience.
#231

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.436

THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

at the beginning of this year I pointed out the difference between foreclosure and discordance. For the time being, it is in this closed - but for that reason decisive - symbolic form that I am pointing out another form of negation
#232

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.535

449. "Your daughter is mute" > 462. The article I devoted to the case of Andre Gide > 483. "Neurosis and Psychosis" > 486. A mark of fancy

Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of a brief editorial note identifying the source of a spoonerism cited by Lacan (Desire Viardot's *Ripopée*, 1956), followed by index pages (pp. 533–536) listing concepts and proper names from Seminar VI with page references.

foreclosure and discordance 8 1-3, 95, 421, 457 and negation 58, 76-7, 8 1-3, 95
#233

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.71

THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

Theoretical move: The dream about the dead father is analyzed as a metaphor produced by the elision (subtraction) of signifiers, where repression operates at the level of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rather than content; this analysis hinges on the distinction between signifying elision and repression, and opens toward the graph of desire, fantasy, and the differential clinical significance of similar structures across neurosis and psychosis.

unless we immediately distinguish the clinical contexts, as Verwerfung [foreclosure] is distinguished from Verneinung [negation]
#234

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.209

SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

Theoretical move: Lacan uses close reading of a clinical dream-text to argue that the phallus functions as a perpetually absent signifier whose structural elusiveness—not aggressive retaliation or castration anxiety in the ordinary sense—organises the neurotic subject's symptomatology, thereby critiquing hasty analytic interpretations that reduce the material to castration as cause rather than context.

an insufficient articulation or partial foreclosure of the castration complex on their part.
#235

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

**V**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes das Ding from Vorstellungen/Sachvorstellungen by positioning it as the primordial, absent, and unsymbolizable Thing that governs the gravitational field of unconscious representations, while using Freud's Verneinung/Verdrängung/Verwerfung triad to map different levels of negation onto the structure of discourse, ultimately grounding the Reality Principle and superego in the relation to das Ding and the Other of the Other.

Laplanche... asked himself and asked me, what Verwerfung might be. He wanted to know if it was the paternal No / Name (Nom-de-père), as is the case in paranoia, or the No/Name of the Father (Nom-du-père).
#236

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.140

**IX** > **X**

Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

it is strictly speaking Verwerfung that is involved in the discourse of science. The discourse of science repudiates the presence of the Thing insofar as from its point of view the ideal of absolute knowledge is glimpsed
#237

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

**IV**

Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

the rejection of a certain support in the symbolic order, of that specific support around which the division between the two sides of the relationship to das Ding operates
#238

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.107

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ARISTOPHANES*

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Aristophanes' myth of the spherical beings in Plato's Symposium as a mythical encoding of the castration complex, arguing that the attachment to round, seamless shapes is rooted in the imaginary foreclosure of castration, and that the repositioning of the genitalia in the myth functions as the linchpin connecting love-discourse to the phallus—the essential mainspring of comedy.

what is our attachment to such shapes due to, insofar as it is affective, if not to the Verwerfung [foreclosure] of castration?
#239

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.16

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*

Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Cartesian cogito as producing not a stable subject but a vanishing subject ("I think and I am not"), whose constitutive vacillation demands a structural guarantor—the Master Signifier as unique, absolutely depersonalised trait (einziger Zug)—which grounds the signifying chain and points toward the Subject Supposed to Know.

I do not think - and this is not new either, I indicated it to you at the same time - that Pichon's formulations about the forclosive or the discordant can resolve the question
#240

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.118

*Seminar 12*: *Wednesday 7 March 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the torus as the privileged topological surface for modelling the subject, arguing that the subject's structure is founded not on inclusion but on exclusion via the unary trait, such that class formation (and the universal/particular dialectic) originates in a "minus one" — the subject as constitutively lacking — which generates the logic of castration, foreclosure, and ultimately the loop-topology of the torus rather than the closed interiority of the sphere.

some people are upset because I am not providing a place for the Verwerfung: it is there beforehand, but it is impossible to start from it in a deducible fashion. To say that the subject is first of all established as minus one, is indeed something in which you can see that effectively, as one might expect, it is as Verworfen that we are going to rediscover him.
#241

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.200

*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety arises at the precise moment when the desire of the Other becomes unnameable, dissolving both ego and Other as supports of identification; this structural logic is then differentiated across neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, where for the psychotic the foreclosure of symbolisation means that the emergence of desire itself—rather than its loss—is the privileged source of anxiety, since it forces a confrontation with the constitutive lack (castration) that was never symbolised.

The interdiction regarding desire which he has experienced means that his response has caused him to register not a gap but a fundamental antimony between demand and desire.
#242

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.199

*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

what characterizes the mother of the psychotic is a total interdiction which blocks the child from becoming subject to any desire.
#243

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.83

VI. Getting Used to the Real

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that if the Real becomes sufficiently invasive and destructive, the only imaginable escape—a collective severing from reality—would render psychoanalysis obsolete; but rather than calling this 'collective schizophrenia,' he reframes it as the triumph of true religion, turning a psychiatric diagnosis into a theological-structural observation.

Completely push away reality [reel]? A collective schizophrenia, in some sense.
#244

Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive · Julie Reshe · p.138

Human Animal, Positive Psychology, and Trauma: A Conversation Between Alenka Zupancič and Julie Reshe ̌

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that psychoanalysis uniquely enables access to the structural causes of suffering by attending to the signifier rather than pre-established therapeutic schemas; suppression of the unconscious through positive-thinking regimes or pharmaceuticals does not eliminate its content but forecloses it, producing a return of the Real — a logic she homologizes to the climate crisis as a structural surplus-waste problem.

The unconscious truly closes off and becomes inaccessible in this way, it is foreclosed.
#245

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.210

Notes > Chapter 4 The Ethics of the Voice

Theoretical move: These notes to "The Ethics of the Voice" develop the structural homology between the superego's categorical imperative and the Kantian moral law, trace the voice's ethical function across Rousseau, Kant, Freud, and Lacan, and culminate in the claim that the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father returns in the Real precisely as the voice in psychosis.

Lacan scrutinized psychosis under the heading of 'the foreclosure of the name of the father'—and we could say that the foreclosed 'name of the father' returns in the Real precisely as the voice
#246

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.12

Read My Desire

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's reduction of society to immanent relations of power and knowledge constitutes a historicism that undermines his own best insights about a 'surplus existence' that escapes predication—an insight whose Lacanian inflection (the non-existence of 'The' woman, the 'il y a') Copjec identifies and defends against Foucault's own anti-linguistic turn.

any discourse that 'originated' with the pleb was thought to have a political value and correctness that was automatically foreclosed to discourses 'originating' with those in positions of power.
#247

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.220

LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale

Theoretical move: Copjec argues for a "total incompatibility" between Butler's constructivist account of sex and the psychoanalytic position: sex, defined by the law of the drives, cannot be deconstructed or culturally re-signified because the drives are the irreducible Other of culture, and the impossibility they introduce into language is precisely what necessitates repetition and forecloses voluntarism.

To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space.
#248

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.246

LetbalJouissance and the FemlDe Fatale > Sexual Diference and the Superego

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamical sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share the same logic of the limit/exception (foreclosure of existential judgment), and uses this alignment to call for a new, alternative ethics proper to women—an "ethics of inclusion or of the unlimited"—beyond the superego's logic of exception.

This possibility of a realm beyond, unlimited by our phenomenal conditions, is precisely dependent on the foreclosure of the judgment of existence.
#249

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.137

Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the modern subject is not an external cause of social failure but is structurally constituted by and as that failure—exemplified by Frankenstein's monster as the embodiment of a failed invention—and that the proper psychoanalytic response to the Real is to circumscribe its unbridgeability (via symbolic negation/repudiation), not to foreclose it through historicist chains of signification.

She forecloses rather than repudiates it. No anxiety disquiets her, nothing signals the danger that faces Irma and Freud.
#250

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.16

POWERS OF HORROR > BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Theoretical move: Kristeva deploys Lacanian categories (repression, foreclosure, jouissance, objet petit a, the Other) to argue that abjection constitutes a logic of exclusion that precedes and exceeds the Freudian unconscious, operating through a "border" structure rather than through negation, thereby challenging the conscious/unconscious dialectic and positing a pre-objectal, affect-laden mode of subjectivation anchored in the Symbolic Other.

Freud put forward that of denial as a means of figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a means of situating psychosis. The asymmetry of the two repressions becomes more marked owing to denial's bearing on the object whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud's thought, interprets that as 'repudiation of the Name of the Father')
#251

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.32

POWERS OF HORROR > AS ABJECTION—SO THE SACRED > OUTSIDE OF THE SACRED, THE ABJECT IS WRITTEN

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that great modern literature (Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Céline) constitutes the privileged site where abjection is symbolized and traversed, and that the aesthetic act of speaking/writing the abject—at the boundary of the symbolic construct and primal repression—performs a catharsis that simultaneously discloses and partially redeems what escapes signification.

the absolute because primeval seat of the impossible—of the excluded, the outside-of-meaning, the abject. Atopia.
#252

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.59

POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE > AIMING AT THE APOCALYPSE: SIGHT

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that abjection marks the threshold moment in subject constitution for borderline patients—neither full object-relation nor psychotic non-relation—and that the failure of paternal function produces a 'fortified castle' structure where language desemantizes into pure signifier, with affect making its only imprint in the gaps of that disintegrated discourse; religious codes of defilement/taboo are then read as cultural solutions to the same subject/object instability that abjection names clinically.

It is worth noting what repercussions such a foreclosure of the Name of the Father have on language.
#253

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.60

POWERS OF HORROR > WHY DOES LANGUAGE APPEAR TO BE "ALIEN"?

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the collapse of the paternal/condensation function in borderline patients dissolves the sign's constitutive unity of word-presentation and thing-presentation, producing a desperate erotization of abjection as the only remaining anchor to the Other—a position that demands psychoanalysis attend to the heterogeneity of signifiance rather than reducing language to a purely philosophical or Saussurian model.

foreclosure of paternal function affects what, in the sign, stems from condensation (or metaphor), that is, the ability of the sound-trace to maintain and go beyond (in the sense of an Aujhebung) the signified
#254

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.81

POWERS OF HORROR > MATERNAL AUTHORITY AS TRUSTEE OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that both excrement and menstrual blood as defilements share a common root in maternal/feminine authority, which operates as a pre-symbolic "semiotic" mapping of the body—a binary primal charting of clean/unclean, orifices and surfaces—that language and culture must repress in order to constitute the symbolic order; this repression of maternal corporeality is the structural precondition of the paternal/phallic/linguistic register.

what happens to such a repressed item when the legal, phallic, linguistic symbolic establishment does not carry out the separation in radical fashion
#255

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.103

POWERS OF HORROR > SEMIOTICS OF BIBLICAL ABOMINATION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical impurity (tahor/tame) is not simply a demonic force or a divine ordinance, but a "logicizing" of what departs from the symbolic order—rooted in the cathexis of maternal function—which monotheism subordinates to the Law, thereby instituting a "strategy of identity" constitutive of the speaking subject and social community alike.

the pure/impure mechanism testifies to the harsh combat Judaism, in order to constitute itself, must wage against paganism and its maternal cults.
#256

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.110

POWERS OF HORROR > THE MAN/GOD DISTINCTION: A DIETARY DISTINCTION

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the biblical system of dietary abomination is not merely a code of food taboos but a structural logic of separation whose deepest function is to differentiate the speaking subject (the son) from the archaic, abject maternal body — thereby establishing that symbolic identity, signifiability, and law itself are founded on the violent exclusion of the feminine/maternal.

Might it be that dietary prohibitions are a screen in a still more radical separating process? ... separating oneself from the phantasmatic power of the mother, that archaic Mother Goddess
#257

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.118

POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY > INCEST TABOO

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the incest taboo functions as the originating "mytheme" underlying the entire system of biblical dietary and purity prohibitions, such that abjection — oral, excremental, and corporeal — is structurally inseparable from the symbolic contract, not merely one semantic value among others but its unconscious foundation.

A body without soul, a non-body, disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God's territory as it is from his speech.
#258

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.142

POWERS OF HORROR > AN OVERFLOWING OF DESIRE > FELIX CULPA: SPOKEN SIN. DUNS SCOTUS

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Duns Scotus's sacramental theology enacts a shift from judicial-punitive abjection to a verbal-covenantal logic, whereby the act of enunciation (confession, spoken sin) becomes the locus of absolution — making *felix culpa* a phenomenon of enunciation rather than moral action, and grounding art as a lateral extension of this same speech-power over abjection.

power no longer belongs to the judge-God who preserves humanity from abjection while setting aside for himself alone the prerogative of violence—the violence of separation as well as of punishment
#259

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.83

POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT?

Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that defilement rites function as a "scription without signs"—a translinguistic inscription of the archaic border between the semiotic (maternal authority) and the symbolic (paternal law), and that the ambivalent remainder in Brahmanism exposes a non-totalizing logic that challenges mono-logical symbolics by perpetually positing a non-object at once polluting and generative.

It is blunt foreclosure that voids those acts and objects from conscious representation.
#260

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.91

3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegemonic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.

what is foreclosed in the symbolic 'returns in the real'
#261

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.269

8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Index*

Theoretical move: This passage is an index from a book chapter, listing topics, concepts, and proper names with page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical passage—no argument is advanced—but it maps the conceptual terrain of the book, including Lacanian concepts such as jouissance, sinthome, objet a, the real, sublimation, and singularity.

rebellious real, 105, 122 / rebellious signifi ers, 122
#262

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

the subject is able to view the world from an angle that is foreclosed by its customary mode of being
#263

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.126

**Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a occupies a paradoxical double position—it is both the real itself and the symbolic's positivized failure to reach the real—and uses this logic to distinguish psychoanalysis (which registers its own limits as the condition of truth) from historicism/skepticism (which forecloses the real by filling every gap with causal-cultural chains), while reading Frankenstein's monster as the paradigmatic modern subject: structurally constituted by the failure/lack of knowledge rather than by any positive invention.

She forecloses rather than repudiates it. No anxiety disquiets her, nothing signals the danger that faces Irma and Freud.
#264

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.210

**Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason**

Theoretical move: Copjec argues that sex must be understood as the structural impossibility of completing meaning—the Real failure of language with itself—rather than as an incomplete or unstable signification (Butler), and that only this Kantian/psychoanalytic definition of sex as radically unknowable preserves the subject's sovereignty and protects against the voluntarism and calculability that underwrite racism and homogenization.

To speak of the deconstruction of sex makes about as much sense as speaking about foreclosing a door; action and object do not belong to the same discursive space.
#265

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

**Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason** > **Sexual Difference and the Superego**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kantian dynamically sublime, the Lacanian male antinomies, and the psychoanalytic superego all share a common logic of the limit/exception—wherein a terrifying force is posited as possible but not existent, converting the father into an impossible Real—and concludes by calling for a new ethics grounded in the "not-all" logic proper to feminine sexuation, rather than the superegoic logic of exception.

This possibility of a realm beyond, unlimited by our phenomenal conditions, is precisely dependent on the foreclosure of the judgment of existence.
#266

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.280

Chapter 5 Figurations of the *Objet a* > How the Real World Became a Phantasy

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet a is the structural condition of both love and reality-testing: it is the paradoxical lost object that simultaneously grounds erotic desire (as what the beloved signifies but does not possess) and the sense of reality (as the constitutive lack that prevents absolute certainty), thereby recasting the Freudian reality principle in genuinely radical terms against ego-psychological adaptation models.

The Lacanian formula for psychosis as a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father implies that the psychotic suffers an impairment of the relation to the objet a due to a deficiency of the symbolic function.
#267

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

Index

Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage (letters F–G) from Boothby's *Freud as Philosopher*, listing terms and page references with no argumentative or theoretical content.

Foreclosure 160, 280
#268

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.161

Chapter 3 The Freudian Dialectic > The Agency of Death in the Signifier

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the death drive is double-sided: operating as imaginary unbinding (violence, hallucination, fragmentation) and as symbolic unbinding (signification), where the symbolic constitutes a "second-order binding" whose very bound structure enables ongoing dissolution of imaginary unities — thereby translating Freud's instinct-fusion into a dialectic of binding/unbinding immanent to the speech chain itself.

This point illuminates Lacan's understanding of the symbolic foreclosure that issues in psychosis. When foreclosure impairs access to the symbolic function, the essential work of castration collapses onto the level of the imaginary.
#269

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.35

THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > CONTENTS > The serpent versus God

Theoretical move: The passage argues that biblical narrative is constitutively structured around unresolvable moral ambiguity and contradiction — most visible in the Eden story — and proposes a third position beyond apologetic harmonization or secular rejection: fidelity to the text means embracing its conflicts as the very mark of its divine character rather than as defects to be explained away.

God banishes them from Eden and places both cherubim and a flaming sword at the entrance to prevent them from re-entering.
#270

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins

THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > CONTENTS > What would Jesus do?

Theoretical move: The passage argues that an act which appears outwardly as betrayal can, when viewed from the perspective of foreknowledge and divine complicity, constitute the highest act of fidelity — destabilising the binary of betrayal/faithfulness and reframing Judas's act as a structurally necessary, willed sacrifice rather than a simple transgression.

the polymorphous nature of the text itself ensures that a single interpretation of Judas and his motives lies beyond the realm of biblical theology and finds its true home in the wide expanse of the artistic imagination.
#271

The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.96

The Orthodox Heretic > INTRODUCTION > COMMENTARY

Theoretical move: The passage deploys a parable to argue that authentic faith requires active defiance of divine command when that command contradicts the ethical demand already inscribed in the Other's face — staging the paradox that fidelity to God is achieved through disobedience to God, and that lukewarm compliance is the real heresy.

They beseeched God to speak to them, not as a still, small voice in their conscience, but rather in the way that he had spoken to Abraham and Moses.
#272

Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.204

12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

Theoretical move: The passage argues that neuroscientific findings about the brain's non-unified, kludge-like, evolutionarily stratified architecture provide empirical support for the psychoanalytic emphasis on intrapsychical conflict and the split subject, while simultaneously insisting on a crucial gap between the neuroscientific (cognitive/preconscious) unconscious and the properly Freudian dynamic unconscious.

defensively occluded by such intrapsychical mechanisms as repression, disavowal, negation, rejection or foreclosure, and so on
#273

Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.286

13. > Inde x > affects (*continued*)

Theoretical move: This index passage maps the book's theoretical terrain by cross-referencing key psychoanalytic, philosophical, and neuroscientific concepts around affect, unconscious affect, autoaffection, and the body-mind connection, revealing how the text triangulates Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology with neuroscience and Continental philosophy.

Lacan's denial of, 76, 84, 111, 119, 122, 129, 134, 149, 212–13
#274

Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.294

13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

Theoretical move: This index chunk maps the theoretical terrain of a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affects, tracking key debates around unconscious affects, the priority of signifiers over affects, the translation problems around Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and Lacan's neologisms (lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment) as attempts to articulate the affective-linguistic interface — while situating these debates in relation to neuroscience, neurobiology, and continental philosophy.

formations of the unconscious, 108, 111
#275

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.439

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Language, *Lalangue*

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that in every parallax gap (production/representation, drive/desire, lalangue/language) true materialism requires asserting the primacy of the *second* term—the gap, representation, desire, language—because the supposedly "more basic" first term only functions against the background of the lack opened by the second; and he maps four modes of relating to language (praxis, lalangue, science, and the radical cut of philosophy/poetry/mysticism), concluding that the Klein bottle, not the cross-cap or quilting point, is the appropriate topological model for subjectivization.

the scientific stance, the one of pure meta-language which, as Lacan put it, forecloses the subject: the scientific discourse is enunciated from an abstract position which erases all specificity of enunciation
#276

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.301

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Retarded God of Quantum Ontology > [The Two Vacuums: From Less than Nothing to Nothing](#contents.xhtml_ahd20)

Theoretical move: Žižek maps a triadic ontological structure—Nothing/Void ($), the One (objet a), and the Two (sinthome)—onto unorientable topological surfaces (Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle), arguing that at every level there is a constitutive antagonism: nothing is never fully nothing, the One is never one, the Two never forms a relation, and the barred subject ($) is the operator that transforms pre-ontological void into ontological nothingness.

Sinthome—the signifier of the barred Other—registers the antagonism of the two, their non-relationship
#277

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.235

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three Unorientables > [The “Inner Eight”](#contents.xhtml_ahd14)

Theoretical move: The Möbius-strip topology of the "inner eight" (self-reflecting hierarchical inversion) is deployed to argue that true materialist dialectics requires acknowledging that the Universal is *already* barred/voided from within—not sublated into the Idea—and that fantasy, repression, and the Form/content split all operate according to this same logic of a loop immanent to hierarchy.

Tannhauser's psychotic split between the Real and the Imaginary which takes place when the third term, the Symbolic, is foreclosed.
#278

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.52

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Parallax of Ontology > [Varieties of the Transcendental in Western Marxism](#contents.xhtml_ahd3)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Sadean dream of a "second death" as radical external annihilation misrecognises what Lacan (and Hegel) identify as already primordial: the subject IS the second death, the immanent negativity/inconsistency internal to Substance itself; and this same error—presupposing an ontologically consistent Whole—recurs in Western Marxism (Ilyenkov, Bloch), while Adorno's "negative dialectics" and "primacy of the objective" approximate but do not fully reach the Lacanian distinction between symbolically-mediated reality and the impossible Real.

this neglected dimension, foreclosed by the transcendental thought, then returns in the real as the phantasmagoria of a total world-destruction
#279

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.185

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Cracks in Circular Time](#contents.xhtml_ahd12)

Theoretical move: By reading the film *Arrival* through the opposition of circular (heptapod) and linear (human) temporality, Žižek argues that the circle of time is always-already an ellipse structured around a disavowed cut, and that the act of "willing the inevitable" is not empty but ontologically necessary—the finite, sexualized subject's capacity to intervene with a decision is what the holistic Other lacks and needs, making temporal finitude superior to atemporal plenitude.

what if they need our cuts, shifts, onesidedness …? It is a decision (like the one Louise faces) which breaks the circle of time
#280

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.393

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [The Protestant Freedom](#contents.xhtml_ahd26)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that freedom and universal truth are accessible only through the irreducible position of enunciation (the subject's horizon), not by abstracting from subjectivity toward an objective view; and that the Protestant subject, as barred/empty subject ($), embodies this by being sacrifice itself rather than offering sacrifice in exchange—collapsing the logic of exchange into an identity of giving and getting.

This reference to the subject of enunciation (foreclosed by science) is irreducible
#281

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.403

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Jumping Here and Jumping There](#contents.xhtml_ahd27)

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "objective riddle" structure—in which mystery belongs to the thing itself, not merely to the finite mind—reveals a God who is internally split (the "separation in the heart of god himself"), such that Christ's death on the cross is not the sublation of a real God into a symbolic one but the death of the big Other itself, leaving behind a community that accepts the non-existence of the big Other; this is deployed to distinguish a revolutionary theology of ontological opening from one of purification/instrumentalization.

god is alive again (in his most terrifying real, in fundamentalism), but we don't know it—and don't want to know it.
#282

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that both descriptivism and antidescriptivism miss the radical contingency of naming: descriptivism misses the big Other (the tautological, self-referential dimension of the master signifier), while antidescriptivism misses the small other (objet petit a as the objectification of a void opened by the signifier), with the identity of an object across all counterfactual situations being a retroactive effect of naming itself rather than a feature found in positive reality.

forecloses the function of the Name-of-the-Father - that is to say, prevents the transformation of the dead father into the rule of his Name.
#283

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek traces Lacan's theoretical development from symptom as symbolic/coded message to symptom as sinthome—the real kernel of enjoyment that is the subject's only ontological substance—arguing that this universalization of symptom (paired with a universalization of foreclosure) is Lacan's answer to the philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing.

Lacan gave universal range to this function of foreclosure: there is a certain foreclosure proper to the order of signifier as such; whenever we have a symbolic structure it is structured around a certain void, it implies the foreclosure of a certain key-signifier.
#284

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.233

Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze > Notes

Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for a chapter on ontological incompleteness, Virginia Woolf, Lacan, and Deleuze; it is non-substantive in itself but contains one theoretically notable annotation equating the Lacanian barred subject ($) with a subject that "emerges from its own loss," and another flagging Žižek's charge of Deleuze's "outright psychotic foreclosure" of Hegelian thought.

Despite his later assessment (in Absolute Recoil) of Deleuze's "outright psychotic foreclosure" of Hegelian thought, Žižek, in Organs without Bodies, resurrects a Deleuze who is uncannily Hegelian.
#285

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.130

There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > *The Formulas of Sexuation*

Theoretical move: Fink expounds Lacan's formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, arguing that masculine structure is constituted by universal phallic determination grounded in the exception of a foreclosed primal father, while feminine structure is constituted by the 'not-all' — an incompleteness with respect to the phallic function that opens onto an Other jouissance whose status is ex-sistence rather than existence within the symbolic order.

the phallic function is not simply negated in some mild sense in his case; it is foreclosed ... foreclosure implies the utter and complete exclusion of something from the symbolic register.
#286

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.75

**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Introduction of a Third Term*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the paternal metaphor/function, by introducing a third term (Name-of-the-Father) that disrupts the mother-child dyad, is structurally equivalent to the operation of Separation, and that the failure of this function is what produces psychosis; language itself is thereby theorized as the protective mechanism that transforms dangerous dyadic jouissance into structured desire.

A psychotic child may very well assimilate language, but cannot come to be in language in the same way as a neurotic child. Lacking that fundamental anchoring point, the remainder of the signifiers assimilated are condemned to drift.
#287

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.193

*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_

Theoretical move: This passage is a glossary of Lacanian mathemes and symbols (barred S, object a, S1, S2, the Other, barred A, S(/A), phallus, phallic function, logical quantifiers, lozenge, fantasy formula, drive formula), followed by non-substantive acknowledgements pages.

related to every other signifier (SJ, but foreclosed (as the Name-of-the-Father) in psychosis
#288

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.94

**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Signified*

Theoretical move: Fink redefines Lacanian castration as the subject's alienation-in and separation-from the Other (not biological threat), and articulates how the barred subject is constituted as a sedimentation of meanings via the retroactive relation between S2 and the master signifier S1 (equated with the Name-of-the-Father), with the traversal of fantasy marking the path beyond neurosis.

If it is not, we speak of foreclosure and thus of psychosis, there being no possibility for the existence of a subject as such.
#289

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.69

**The Lacanian Subject** > **Alienation and Separation**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation and separation are two complementary operations structuring subjectivity: alienation constitutes the subject through a forced submission to the Other-as-language, while separation arises from the alienated subject's confrontation with the Other-as-desire, specifically the irreducible gap between the child's desire to be the Other's sole object and the Other's always-elsewhere desire.

The latter decision forecloses the possibility of one's advent as a subject.
#290

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.236

**Index**

Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

Phallic function, 101-25; contingent, l92n.IO; defined, 173; foreclosure and, 112
#291

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.214

*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus consolidates and defends Fink's interpretive positions on Lacan's formulas of sexuation, the non-existence of the sexual relationship, the structure of the signifier, and the Other jouissance—correcting common misreadings while flagging key conceptual distinctions (existence vs. ex-sistence, the bar of negation, the role of the phallus, S1/S2, and object a).

The father of the primal horde should, in this sense, be considered psychotic.
#292

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.125

There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **"There's no Such Thing** as a **Sexual Relationship"**

Theoretical move: Lacan's formula "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" is grounded in the claim that masculinity and femininity are defined separately and differently with respect to the symbolic order—not in relation to each other—such that each sex has a distinct mode of alienation by language and a distinct form of jouissance, making any direct complementary relation between them structurally impossible.

psychosis suggests that the latter involves a part of the symbolic that is foreclosed and returns in the real whereas the former does not.
#293

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.233

**Index**

Theoretical move: This is the index of Bruce Fink's *The Lacanian Subject*, listing key concepts, proper names, and page references — a non-substantive navigational apparatus with no original theoretical argumentation.

Foreclosure, 74, 110, 112, 194n.29
#294

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.313

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

Theoretical move: The Matrix trilogy is read as a political allegory in which jouissance functions as the ultimate stake of both oppression and liberation: the Matrix's true need is not energy but human jouissance, making any genuine revolution a transformation in the regime of jouissance-appropriation rather than a mere exit from illusion into reality.

This utter passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active, self-positing subjects.
#295

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.296

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Biopolitical Parallax

Theoretical move: The passage argues that late capitalism's shift from desire to demand (and from Oedipal to post-Oedipal subjectivity) converges with biopolitical control as two faces of the University Discourse; the correct psychoanalytic response is not conservative re-Oedipalization but a full assumption of the Other's nonexistence, enabling a demand no longer addressed to the Other — a mode that coincides with the drive.

God did not die, he always-already was dead, and this death is the very foundation of religion
#296

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.347

The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > The Ignorance of the Chicken

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the opposition between liberal cynicism and fundamentalism is a false one masking a deeper shared pathology—both substitute direct knowledge for authentic belief—while the structural logic of the symbolic order (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, les non-dupes errent) requires a "third term" to reveal the true antagonism beneath ideological surface oppositions, and that "the truth has the structure of a fiction" applies to political, aesthetic, and theological domains alike.

This brings us to the formula of fundamentalism: what is foreclosed from the symbolic (belief) returns in the Real (of a direct knowledge).
#297

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.85

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Kierkegaard as a Hegelian > Die Versagung

Theoretical move: Žižek uses Lacan's reading of Claudel's *The Hostage* and James's *The Portrait of a Lady* to argue that the feminine "No" (Versagung) is not a signifying negation grounded in the paternal "No," but a bodily, excremental gesture of pure loss that enacts separation from the Symbolic—prefiguring the sinthome—and that this "No as such" (form without content) is the hidden materialist core linking Kierkegaard's infinite resignation to Hegelian speculative identity.

Sygne's 'No' names a more primordial negation, a feminine refusal/withdrawal which cannot be reduced to the paternal 'No' constitutive of the symbolic order.
#298

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.327

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that egalitarian political "terror" (from the Jacobins to Maoism) is a symptom of the *foreclosure* of the economic sphere rather than its over-extension, and that Badiou's anti-Statist politics reaches a deadlock precisely because it refuses to grant the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth/evental potential—the only exit being to restore the economic as a site of Event.

Is it not that all political 'terror,' from the Jacobins to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle?
#299

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.99

The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's *Ethics* seminar represents a deadlock—not a triumph—because it cannot clearly distinguish pure desire from immersion in primordial jouissance ("passion for the Real"); the resolution lies in the move from desire to drive, while the broader argument shows that Bataille's premodern dialectic of Law/transgression is superseded by the Kantian insight that the absolute excess is the Law itself, a move Lacan only partially executes.

A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant.
#300

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [Introduction](#contents.xhtml_ch01) > The Chapters

Theoretical move: This passage is a table-of-contents-style summary of contributed chapters in an edited volume responding to Žižek; it maps the theoretical terrain each contributor covers but makes no single theoretical argument of its own, functioning as an editorial overview rather than a substantive intervention.

Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure
#301

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>

Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary political crisis—exemplified by the war in Ukraine—is best understood not through Baudrillardian simulacra but through the psychoanalytic lens of "generalized foreclosure": a collapse of the big Other that produces an excess of certainty ("too much reality"), dissolves the social bond, and generates the very wars and communicative breakdowns that define our era.

we must be prepared to examine it as an exemplary case of war in a time of generalized foreclosure.
#302

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.227

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

Theoretical move: Žižek defends the Lacanian notion of sexual difference against Butler's historicist critique by arguing that "primordial repression" (Ur-Verdrängung) is not a trans-historical a priori but a retroactively posited presupposition of any social space, and that the gap between form and content must be reflected back into content itself — a move that grounds his concept of "inherent transgression" as the structural supplement that constitutes rather than merely polices the public sphere.

This 'primordial repression' is not preceding historical processes, it is their pre-supposition, their retroactively posited ground.
#303

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Bou Ali](#contents.xhtml_ch9a)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that sublimation, repression, and jouissance are structurally inseparable—desublimation is always already repressive, primordial repression constitutes rather than suppresses its content, and castration and the death drive are two faces of the same parallax structure rather than opposing forces—thereby refuting any emancipatory vision premised on overcoming repression or positing a new Master Signifier as sufficient.

only a psychotic is a king who thinks he is a king (or a father who is a father) by his nature, as he is, without the processes of symbolic investiture.
#304

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.313

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues against reducing the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Western cancel culture to psychotic foreclosure or clashing paranoiac singularities, instead mapping both phenomena onto Lacan's University Discourse and formulas of sexuation, while insisting that symbolic communication (the inverted message) and fetishistic disavowal—not psychosis—are the operative mechanisms.

None of the two forms of knowledge, the mobilizing fake and the factual truth, involves a psychotic foreclosure… the psychotic-paranoiac communication in which I only get back from the other my own foreclosed content projected onto the other is not sufficient
#305

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.302

Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the War in an Era of Generalized Foreclosure](#contents.xhtml_ch13)<a href="#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_en13-1" id="13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_nr13-1">1</a>

Theoretical move: Rousselle argues that the contemporary era is defined by "generalized foreclosure" — a structural condition in which the Lacanian foreclosure of castration/lack has become universal, rendering civil war and political uprising impossible, dissolving the symbolic space of truth, and producing a politics of "known knowns" driven by singular modes of jouissance rather than shared symbolic worlds.

My conviction is that we are now in an era of foreclosure, such that traditional notions of political uprisings, civil wars, and revolutions … seem increasingly impotent.
#306

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's thesis of "generalized foreclosure" by showing that symbolic castration and the Name-of-the-Father remain operative at local levels of social exchange, while tracking a contemporary structural shift from symbolic Law to superego at multiple levels (family, international relations, nation-state); he further argues that Rousselle's position is self-defeating because it forecloses the transformative role of knowledge itself.

the social structure of 'generalized foreclosure' does not preclude that in the domain of more special and localized socialized exchanges the Oedipual structure of the link grounded in symbolic castration is largely not still operative
#307

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.308

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

we are now in an era of foreclosure, such that traditional notions of political uprisings, civil wars, and revolutions… seem increasingly impotent.
#308

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

Theoretical move: The passage stages a critical engagement with Žižek's account of sexuation, arguing that while sexual difference names the incompleteness/trauma constitutive of the subject, Žižek's formalism fails to theorize the body as the extimate site where the signifier's cut produces a split—a gap Butler exploits via social constructivism and which Tomsič's account of the signifier as bodily cut helps to address. The central theoretical pivot is whether the antinomies of sexuation, as the Real of the subject's incompleteness, can ground emancipatory politics without presupposing a binary heterosexual structure.

Butler holds the view that the negativity in question, which she designates using the term 'foreclosure,' cannot be assumed to precede the space of the social
#309

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [INDEX](#contents.xhtml_end1)

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from the edited volume "Žižek Responds!" listing terms and proper names (D–H) with hyperlinked page references across chapters.

freedom [here]...13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_IDX-323
#310

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.69

**A NATURAL EXPERIMENT**

Theoretical move: The passage traces the historical construction of transsexualism as a clinical category from Cauldwell through Benjamin and Stoller, showing how the tension between biological and psychoanalytic etiologies structured the field's foundational concepts—particularly the somatic/psychic distinction, the sex/gender split, and the systematic exclusion of psychoanalytic treatment—while embedding pathologizing assumptions that later become the object of Lacanian critique.

Benjamin's choice of treatments affected and transformed the body (surgery, hormones) foreclosed a consideration of what may not be fully anatomical.
#311

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.126

**PLASTIC SEX, THE BEAUTY OF IT** > **Sex is a joke of nature**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that sexual difference is irreducible to either anatomy or social construction—sex must be symbolized and gender embodied—and that this irreducibility is tied to the death drive, castration, and the sinthome; a clinical case (Stanley) and aesthetic examples (Antigone, Trecartin) are deployed to show that trans subjectivity engages an ethical rather than merely imaginary relation to beauty, mortality, and singularity.

This feminist man is at ease in the world because he can pass in his masculine persona... He is obviously not psychotic.
#312

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.130

**THAT OBSCURE OBJECT**

Theoretical move: The passage uses Schreber's transsexual delusion—its simultaneous preoccupation with beauty, feminine jouissance, and excremental voluptuousness—to argue that Lacan's objet petit a (as object-cause of desire) is the theoretical instrument needed to account for the libidinal interchangeability of feces/baby/penis that Freud detected but could not fully theorize through drive objects alone.

The Father's gaze is both omnipresent and cancelled. The Father's hyper-male idealization has been inverted into a female mockery, in which however he finds a temporary reassurance.
#313

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.198

**INDEX** > **186** Index

Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Gherovici's book on transgender psychoanalysis; it is bibliographic/reference material with no standalone theoretical argument, though it surfaces the book's key conceptual vocabulary through index entries.

push-towards-Woman (pousse-à-la-femme) 90–3, 93n, 117–20
#314

Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.103

**THE SINGULAR UNIVERSALITY OF TRANS** > **Organon**

Theoretical move: By reading Lacan's clinical interview with Primeau alongside his theoretical elaboration of the Schreber case, Gherovici argues that Lacan carefully distinguishes a delusional feminization (a symptom of psychosis involving excessive jouissance and foreclosure) from a legitimate demand for gender reassignment, thereby dismantling the Millot-led pathologization tradition and showing that Lacan's intervention is a clinical maneuver deploying the phallus-as-signifier to limit jouissance rather than a moralistic rejection of transsexuality.

what looked like a return of a foreclosed idea in the Real
#315

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.46

Contradictions that Matter > Sex or Gender?

Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the psychoanalytic insistence on sex as an ontological inquiry (rather than a moral or identity question) is what gives sexual difference its political explosiveness, and that the replacement of "sexual difference" by "gender" performs a neutralization by removing sex's irreducible Real dimension — leaving psychoanalysis in a paradoxical position of being coextensive with the desexualization of reality while remaining absolutely uncompromising about the sexual as irreducible Real, not substance.

this exclusion is not simply the exclusion of the other side, or half, but above all the exclusion ('repression') of the split (social antagonism) as such; it is the erasing of a social antagonism.
#316

What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.148

Object-Disoriented Ontology > Being, Event, and Its Consequences: Lacan and Badiou

Theoretical move: The passage argues that a "new signifier" functions by naming the minimal contingent difference that sustains love (or social reality) without collapsing impossibility into necessity; it illustrates this through the amorous nickname and Marx's concept of class struggle, both treated as interventions that introduce new reality rather than describe existing reality, thereby maintaining the gap opened by an Event rather than foreclosing it.

this disappearance of impossibility is not its solution, but its repression or foreclosure; hence the closing up of the very gap that made its 'evental' solution possible in the first place