Psychosis

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (347)

1. #01

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dream's "navel" (its irreducible, unrepresentable core) is homologous to the Lacanian Real, and that aesthetic/creative production (sublimation) is the closest a subject can come to encountering this impossible kernel—while terror, theorized via Lyotard, names the affective-political structure of that encounter with the Real in both psychic and cultural life.

   Since unknotting the navel in actual life risks psychosis, a more common way to penetrate it is to pierce via aesthetic production

2. #02

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: Freud surveys the clinical and analogical relations between dream life and mental disturbances, positioning wish-fulfilment as the shared key to a psychological theory of both, and arguing that elucidating the dream is simultaneously an elucidation of the psychosis.

   Schopenhauer terms the dream a short insanity, and insanity a long dream... 'As a matter of fact we may in the dream ourselves live through almost all symptoms which we meet in the insane asylums.'

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud uses the analysis of "typical dreams" (especially nakedness/exhibition dreams) to argue that such dreams are universal because they draw on shared infantile sources—specifically childhood exhibitionism preceding the acquisition of shame—and that the dream-work's distortion through wish-fulfilment and repression explains their characteristic structure, including the contradictory indifference of spectators.

   paranoia alone puts the spectators back into their places, and is fanatically convinced of their presence, although they remain invisible

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparently aimless free association is never truly without an end-presentation; when conscious end-presentations are relinquished, unconscious ones take over and determine the train of thought, while the psychic censor—rather than the absence of goals—accounts for the predominance of superficial, displaced associations over deep ones, a principle that forms the twin pillars of psychoanalytic technique.

   The deliria are the work of a censor which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which, instead of lending its support to a revision no longer obnoxious to it, cancels regardlessly that which it raises objections against

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(B) REGRESSION**

   Theoretical move: Freud introduces "regression" as the defining structural feature of dream formation: the dream process runs retrogradely through the psychic apparatus from the motor end back to the perceptual end, reactivating memory traces as hallucinatory images, and this same mechanism underlies hysterical visions and paranoid hallucinations, with infantile reminiscences acting as the attracting force that draws preconscious thoughts back into perceptual representation.

   I may also add here the interpretation of a vision related to me by an hysteric forty years of age... I may therefore refer to my analysis of an hallucinatory paranoia

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(B) REGRESSION**

   Theoretical move: Freud consolidates the concept of regression in dream-work as a structural phenomenon produced by the double pressure of resistance (blocking normal progress toward consciousness) and the attractive pull of vivid visual memories, while acknowledging that pathological regression involves a different energy-transfer process that enables hallucinatory occupation of perceptual systems.

   in pathological cases of regression, as in the dream, the process of transference of energy must be different from that of the regressions of normal psychic life

7. #07

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that the unconscious wish supplies the indispensable motive power for dream-formation, while day-remnants function as the vehicle of transference that allows repressed ideas to enter the preconscious; culminating in the claim that dreaming follows a regressive 'primary process' of hallucinatory wish-fulfilment that recapitulates an archaic mode of psychic functioning, with 'thinking' as merely the detoured, secondary-process equivalent of that same hallucinatory wish.

   In the psychoses these modes of operation of the psychic apparatus, which are normally suppressed in the waking state, reassert themselves, and then betray their inability to satisfy our wants in the outer world.

8. #08

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

   Theoretical move: Freud advances the argument that the dream is the paradigmatic case of unconscious wish-fulfilment, but that hysterical symptoms reveal a more complex double determination—requiring the convergence of an unconscious wish and a preconscious counter-wish (often self-punishment)—thereby positioning the dream as merely the first member of a broader class of abnormal wish-fulfilments that includes all psychoneurotic symptoms.

   The guardian is then overpowered, the unconscious excitations subdue the Prec.; through it they dominate our speech and actions, or they enforce the hallucinatory regression... We call this condition a psychosis.

9. #09

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

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

   Theoretical move: The passage contextualizes "The Freudian Thing" as a polemical intervention in which Lacan frames his "return to Freud" against the distortions of Ego Psychology and the IPA, positioning the unconscious as the true addressee and theoretical stake of his work.

   Nine days later, Lacan gives the opening of his third seminar on The Psychoses (1955–1956).

10. #10

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.20

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a critique of ego psychology and object-relations theory by showing how both camps misidentify the speaking "I" of the unconscious—either by privileging non-verbal phenomena or by misconstruing them as Saussurian signs—and that only a return to Freud grounded in Saussurian structural linguistics can restore the unconscious as the proper object of psychoanalysis.

    Lacan also diagnoses the second camp as being guilty of indulging in psychotic-style magical thinking involving telepathy, mind-melding, and the like

11. #11

    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.

    Lacan goes so far as to compare Americanized ego psychology with a collective psychosis.

12. #12

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.59

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.

    if the father qua really existing person falls far too short of the role… neurosis (such as the Rat Man's obsessional one) or even psychosis can result

13. #13

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.132

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Context

    Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.

    his third seminar ('The Psychoses') where the concepts of metonymy and metaphor in Lacanian usage are explored at length… 'The Psychoses' relies heavily on Freud's reading of the Schreber case

14. #14

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.158

    [The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Conclusion

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that in Lacan's thought, metaphor and metonymy operate on two registers simultaneously—as a grammar of the unconscious (structural/linguistic) and as genuinely rhetorical figures in the concrete discourse of analysands—and that attentiveness to rhetoric as an art is therefore indispensable for clinical psychoanalytic practice.

    Lacan's seminar on psychosis where he writes that what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls metaphor

15. #15

    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.

    a crucial idea coming to the fore in the later parts of Seminar III and in 'On a Question' is that across all types of psychosis a single structural point can be found: the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father

16. #16

    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) > 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.

    50 years after Freud (1911) articulated his insights on the topic of psychosis, his followers had lost touch with the innovative quality of this theory.

17. #17

    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.

    A psychotic symptom is not indicative of an underlying illness process, or an underlying pathological structure (449, 9). On the contrary, the symptom is the structure itself

18. #18

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.175

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques post-Freudian (especially Katan's and Macalpine's) reductions of psychosis to ego-level defence mechanisms and affective projection, arguing that the decisive theoretical failure is the neglect of symbolic structure—specifically the logic of the signifier, the Oedipus complex, and the concept of the big Other—in favour of imaginary, ego-centred frameworks.

    A crucial problem that Lacan points to is the issue of how the sun, which frequently returns in Schreber's delusions, is interpreted.

19. #19

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.179

    [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.

    In the L-schema the symbol S refers to the subject, irrespective of whether the structure is psychosis or neurosis

20. #20

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.186

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

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

    In psychosis, by contrast, the object a manifests as a chaotic element in the Real, and thus the subject cannot rely on it

21. #21

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.188

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

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternity is constituted not by imaginary or biological reality but by the signifier — the paternal metaphor — and that this symbolic dimension grounds both paternity and the concept of death, a connection that becomes especially legible in obsessional neurosis (as in Freud's Rat Man).

    With reference to his own commentaries on Macalpine's interpretation of the sun in Schreber's delusion

22. #22

    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.

    The structure of psychosis is marked by the absence of a crucial signifier: the Name-of-the-Father... Foreclosure, a concept Lacan took from legal discourse, points to non-Bejahung.

23. #23

    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 suggests that this ambiguity is an effect of the psychotic structure.

24. #24

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.198

    [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.

    The schema illustrates that the final state of Schreber's psychosis is not inert. It is an efficient and elegant solution for the problem of foreclosure that he was confronted with.

25. #25

    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.

    any treatment should start from a clear idea on the status of the lack-of-being in psychosis... psychosis should not be treated as if it was a disease, but in terms of how the signifier is operating.

26. #26

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

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

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

    psychosis [26], [59], [158], [163]–[205], [223], [248], [274]

27. #27

    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.

    Such a refused signifier is one that returns in the real – this is why Lacan refers to the difficulties about the status, or construction, of reality in psychosis

28. #28

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.18

    Acknowledgments > Introduction > Th e Politics of a Nonpolitical Th eory

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the death drive—understood as the source of self-sabotaging enjoyment rather than merely an obstacle to social betterment—grounds a genuinely emancipatory psychoanalytic politics that supersedes Marxism precisely because it can theorize sacrifice as an end in itself, while psychoanalysis's universal claims about the irreducible antagonism between subject and social order simultaneously undermine any political program aimed at the good society.

    we will not surmount the fundamental antagonism between the social order and the individual subject that produces these specific disorders.

29. #29

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.59

    I > 1 > Enemies Within and Without

    Theoretical move: Paranoia is theorized as a political-libidinal structure that closes the gap in social authority by positing a hidden "Other of the Other," thereby rendering constitutive loss merely contingent and depriving subjects of the agency that emerges precisely from social inconsistency; this makes paranoia—left or right—a fundamentally self-undermining political strategy.

    Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority.

30. #30

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.139

    I > Changing the World > Th e Modern Critique of Normality

    Theoretical move: Against the modern critical tradition that treats normality as the hegemonic suppressor of difference and subversion as the path to resistance, the passage argues that psychoanalysis inverts this logic: the norm dominates *through* transgression, not despite it, and genuine ethical subjectivity requires recognising that abnormality—not normality—perpetuates capitalist ideology.

    Psychoanalysis, as Sheila Kunkle points out, 'realizes that normality is really just a special form of psychosis.'

31. #31

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.142

    I > Changing the World > Th e Questionable Task of Analysis

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that neurosis, psychosis, and perversion are forms of private rebellion that leave the social order intact, and that psychoanalytic "normalization" should be understood not as adaptation to the status quo but as the production of a subject capable of genuinely transformative public action.

    The psychotic subject tacitly acknowledges and accepts the existing public world by ignoring that world... By ignoring it, the psychotic leaves it intact.

32. #32

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.149

    I > Changing the World > Psychoanalytic Success

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic success consists in the subject publicly avowing its fantasy and acting from the "nonsense" of its own enjoyment rather than sacrificing that enjoyment to social authority — thereby exposing the groundlessness of all symbolic authority and opening a path for collective transformation. Hamlet's trajectory from perverse fool to authentic fool is used as the paradigmatic illustration of this move.

    The psychotic specifi cally refuses the sacrifi ce that the neurotic undergoes and suff ers from... the psychotic tacitly acknowledges it, which is why no psychotic derives enjoyment from activities that the symbolic law does *not* in some sense prohibit.

33. #33

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.160

    I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > Shared Sacrifi ce of Nothing

    Theoretical move: The shared sacrifice that founds social bonds repeats the originary loss that constitutes the subject; this repetition converts impossibility into prohibition, installs a constitutive lie at the heart of socialization, and explains the persistence of sacrifice (in religion, war, ritual) as enjoyment of loss itself rather than for any external end.

    Th e subject who would refuse to make this sacrifi ce for the sake of society would not participate in the social bond and would exist as an outsider within the social order. Th is is the position that the psychotic occupies.

34. #34

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.258

    I > 10 > Fighting against Faith

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that religious belief is not a contingent delusion but a structurally necessary effect of the gap within signification, and that the psychoanalytic counter-move is not Enlightenment atheism but insistence on the absolute necessity of faith — revealing belief's structural foundation in order to strip it of its political-delusional power and restore the subject to genuine political responsibility.

    like all forms of psychosis, it removes the subject from the fundamental problems of subjectivity and thereby depoliticizes it.

35. #35

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.316

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 3. Class Status and Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: These endnotes develop the theoretical argument that enjoyment, class status, subjectivity, and emancipation are structurally interlinked: the master's power is constituted through the renunciation of jouissance, anarchism fails by positing a subject outside social restriction, and the capitalist infinite of enjoyment corresponds to Hegel's true infinity (circular) rather than the bad infinite (linear).

    What Fincher's film indicates through this splitting is the necessarily psychotic dimension of the rupture with social class. Though the subject who abandons an investment in class status does not need to become a psychotic, the break does require a quasi-psychotic moment

36. #36

    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

37. #37

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_119"></span>***méconnaissance***

    Theoretical move: Méconnaissance is theorized not as mere ignorance but as an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge the subject already possesses, structurally homologous between neurotic ego-formation and paranoiac delusion, making all connaissance 'paranoiac knowledge'.

    méconnaissance is also the structure of paranoiac DELUSIONS, which are described in terms of a méconnaissance systématique de la réalité

38. #38

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_190"></span>**slip**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of "slippage" (glissement) theorizes signification as an inherently unstable, fluid relationship between signifier and signified—contra Saussure's stable bond—with the bar in the algorithm marking this instability, and points de capiton serving as the only temporary arrests of endless sliding; their absence defines psychosis.

    When there are not enough points de capiton, as is the case in PSYCHOSIS, the slippery movement of signification is endless, and stable meanings dissolve altogether.

39. #39

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_194"></span>**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

40. #40

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_143"></span>**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.

    Paranoia is a form of PSYCHOSIS characterised principally by DELUSIONS.

41. #41

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***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.

    Hallucinations are a typical phenomenon of PSYCHOSIS, and are usually auditory (hearing voices), but may also be visual, somatic, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory.

42. #42

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_34"></span>**Cause**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of causality across his oeuvre: from the cause of psychosis to causality as situated on the border of the symbolic and the real, to objet petit a as the cause of desire rather than its object, establishing that the cause of the unconscious is structurally a 'lost cause'.

    It first appears in the context of the question of the cause of psychosis, which is a central concern of Lacan's doctoral thesis

43. #43

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_153"></span>***point de capiton***

    Theoretical move: The point de capiton is theorized as the minimal quilting operation that arrests the endless sliding of the signified under the signifier, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning; it operates on two axes—diachronically as the retroactive effect of punctuation, and synchronically as metaphor—and its absence or dissolution is the structural condition of psychosis.

    'when they are not established, or when they give way' the result is PSYCHOSIS (S3, 268–9)

44. #44

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_189"></span>***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.

    Joyce managed to avoid psychosis by deploying his art as suppléance, as a supplementary cord in the subjective knot.

45. #45

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_71"></span>**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.

    Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis, in which an element is rejected outside the symbolic order just as if it had never existed

46. #46

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_147"></span>**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. #47

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_47"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0059"></span>**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 delusion is not the 'illness' of paranoia itself; it is, on the contrary, the paranoiac's attempt to heal himself, to pull himself out of the breakdown of the symbolic universe by means of a substitute formation

48. #48

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_146"></span>**passage to the act**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural distinction between acting out and passage to the act: while both are defenses against anxiety, acting out remains within the symbolic (a message to the big Other), whereas the passage to the act is a flight into the real that dissolves the social bond and collapses the subject into the position of pure object (objet petit a).

    Although the passage to the act does not, according to Lacan, necessarily imply an underlying psychosis, it does entail a dissolution of the subject.

49. #49

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_69"></span>**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.

    Psychosis and perversion both involve, in different ways, a reduction of the symbolic father to the imaginary father.

50. #50

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radicalises Freud's 'splitting of the ego' from a pathological phenomenon specific to fetishism/psychosis into a universal and irreducible structure of subjectivity itself: the subject is constitutively divided as an effect of the signifier and of speech, making any ideal of full self-presence impossible.

    a process, observable in fetishism and psychosis, whereby two contradictory attitudes to reality come to exist side by side in the ego

51. #51

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_160"></span>**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.

    Psychosis is defined as one of the three clinical STRUCTURES, one of which is defined by the operation of FORECLOSURE.

52. #52

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_ncx_127"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_page_0146"></span>***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.

53. #53

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**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.

    whereas Freud had also linked disavowal with psychosis, Lacan limits disavowal exclusively to the structure of perversion.

54. #54

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_62"></span>**enunciation**

    Theoretical move: The enunciation/statement distinction is deployed to locate the subject of the unconscious: the enunciation, as the unconscious dimension of speech, reveals that the source of language is the Other rather than the ego, and that the subject is split between the level of the statement (the 'I' as signifier) and the level of enunciation (the 'I' as index of the speaking subject).

    when Lacan does come to use the term 'enunciation' in 1946, it is first of all to describe strange characteristics of psychotic language, with its 'duplicity of the enunciation'

55. #55

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_165"></span>**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 (S3, 321).

56. #56

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_169"></span>**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

57. #57

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_138"></span>**Oedipus complex**

    Theoretical move: The passage expounds Lacan's distinctive reworking of the Oedipus complex as a three-timed logical passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order, mediated by the paternal function and the phallus, arguing that the prohibition of jouissance operative in the Oedipal myth masks the more fundamental Lacanian insight (drawn from Totem and Taboo) that maternal jouissance is not merely forbidden but structurally impossible.

    In psychosis, there is a fundamental blockage even before the first time of the Oedipus complex.

58. #58

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_157"></span>**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.

    distinguishes it clearly from the apparently similar phenomenon that occurs in psychosis (which Lacan calls FORECLOSURE)

59. #59

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_114"></span>**madness**

    Theoretical move: Lacan equates 'madness' (folie) precisely with psychosis, reclaiming the term from its pejorative connotations and valorising it for its poetic resonances, on the condition that it is used with clinical precision.

    The psychoses… correspond to what has always been called and legitimately continues to be called madness

60. #60

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_17"></span>**alienation**

    Theoretical move: Lacanian alienation is reframed as a constitutive, inescapable structural feature of the subject — rooted in imaginary identification with the counterpart — rather than a contingent accident susceptible to Hegelian/Marxist transcendence or synthesis.

    Although alienation is an essential characteristic of all subjectivity, psychosis represents a more extreme form of alienation.

61. #61

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_171"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0192"></span>**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.

62. #62

    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.

    Anyone who sees his quest for happiness frustrated in later years can still find consolation in the pleasure gained from chronic intoxication, or make a desperate attempt at rebellion and become psychotic.

63. #63

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

    <span id="Chapter23.htm_page214"></span>Postmodern Antiques: *Patience (After Sebald)*

    Theoretical move: Fisher uses Christopher Nolan's *Inception* as a cultural-critical lens to argue that the film's real achievement is the diagnosis of a postmodern condition in which identity, memory, and selfhood are irreducible from fiction and self-deception, while simultaneously exposing how the film itself capitulates to the logic of spectacular capitalism and the 'creative industries', replacing the uncanny unconscious with CGI spectacle.

    a psychotic who has mistaken dreams for reality… Priest's novels are also 'puzzles that can't be solved', in which writing, biography and psychosis slide into one another

64. #64

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    **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.

    The last evaluation, at Denfert, when Robert was three and a half, suggested that he be confined, which could only have been definitive, on account of an unclearly defined para-psychotic state.

65. #65

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.64

    **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.

    He just has a hallucination... but it really is a psychotic phenomenon we are dealing with.

66. #66

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.121

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's article on narcissism to argue that the distinction between egoistical and sexual libido—and the corresponding distinction between neurosis and psychosis—requires the tripartite framework of Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, with the Mirror Stage grounding the imaginary constitution of the ego, and the neurosis/psychosis structural difference hinging on whether the subject retains access to imaginary substitution when withdrawing from reality.

    Freud emphasises that nothing comparable is to be found in psychosis. When it comes to the psychotic subject, if he loses the realisation of the real, he doesn't find any imaginary substitute.

67. #67

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.92

    **vn**

    Theoretical move: Using Melanie Klein's case of Dick, Lacan argues that the subject's entry into the human world is not a matter of ego development but of symbolic integration: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, and it is the analyst's grafting of the Oedipal symbolisation onto the child's imaginary inertia that constitutes the therapeutic act—demonstrating that genuine speech, not language as such, is what coordinates the symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

    Starting from Dick's case and by employing the categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, I showed you how it can happen that a subject who has all the elements of language at his disposition... might not be in the real.

68. #68

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

    **IX**

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the theoretical distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary as separate registers, arguing that the structure of psychosis must be located within a specific disturbance of the symbolic rather than a confusion of the two orders—a distinction Freud grasps but Jung fails to make.

    the specific structure of the psychotic should be located in a symbolic unreal, or in a symbolic unmarked by the unreal.

69. #69

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.158

    **xn**

    Theoretical move: The ego is constituted as a capacity for méconnaissance (misrecognition) through the mirror-dynamic by which the other's body reflects back to the subject, obscuring self-knowledge; this founds the technique of analysis. Simultaneously, the dream-state suspends this libidinal obscuring, enabling the subject to perceive their own corporeality more adequately, while the concept of 'projection' in analysis must be rigorously distinguished from its classical sense as externalization of internal process.

    If we manage to get to the Schreber case and the question of the psychoses next term, we will have to spell out in its fine detail the meaning to be given to projection.

70. #70

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.73

    **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.

    Melanie Klein differentiates Dick from a neurotic, by his profound indifference, his apathy, his absence. In fact, it is clear that, for him, what isn't symbolised is reality.

71. #71

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.110

    **vin** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Universal*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is fundamentally an imaginary function, and that disturbances in imaginary development (rather than organic lesion) explain the wild child's motor, sleep, and relational failures—thereby grounding a structural account of psychosis in the failure of imaginary mastery rather than in nosological categories.

    That it is a question of phenomena of a psychotic nature, more exactly of phenomena which may terminate in psychosis, seems indisputable to me.

72. #72

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.104

    **vin** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case (Robert), the passage argues that psychotic/autistic construction of the subject proceeds through the dialectic of container/contained, requiring the analyst to embody and then be separated from the persecutory object (Wolfl), so that the child can build a body-ego, work through castration anxiety, and finally distinguish fantasy from reality — demonstrating that the therapeutic relationship literalizes and re-enacts the stages of primordial subject-constitution.

    This child had always remained at the stage in which fantasies are realities. That is what explains why his fantasies of intra-uterine form had been reality in the treatment

73. #73

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.107

    **vin** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of Robert and his single word "Wolf!" to distinguish the superego (as senseless, ferocious law located in the symbolic) from the ego-ideal (as exalting), and to articulate how even the most reduced form of language ties a subject to the human community, while also returning to the optical schema of container/contained to theorize the nascent imaginary in psychotic structure.

    An essential element is lacking here, needed in order to talk of schizophrenia, namely dissociation. There is no dissociation, because there is scarcely any construction.

74. #74

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    **Xffl**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes méconnaissance (misrecognition) from simple ignorance by arguing that misrecognition presupposes a correlative knowledge behind it, and uses this distinction to pivot from ego-psychology's conception of the ego as a synthesising function toward a Lacanian account of the ego as fundamentally imaginary and constituted through the specular/linguistic relation to the other.

    Reading Schreber is entrancing. In it one finds everything one needs in order to write a complete treatise on paranoia and to supply a rich commentary on the mechanism of the psychoses.

75. #75

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.86

    **vn**

    Theoretical move: Using the optical schema of the inverted bouquet, Lacan argues that the constitution of the ego and of reality depends on the position of the subject within the symbolic order: only from within the symbolic cone does the imaginary/real articulation cohere, while Dick's psychosis exemplifies the failure of this conjunction. Lacan simultaneously critiques Klein for lacking theories of the imaginary and the ego, and distinguishes projection (imaginary) from introjection (symbolic).

    Dick plays with the container and the contained... the number of objects of significance is, surprisingly, for him very limited... What doesn't happen is the free play, the conjunction between the different forms, imaginary and real, of objects.

76. #76

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    **XXI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language/speech introduces a "hole in the real" that opens the dimension of being, and it is only within this dimension—not the real itself—that the three orders (symbolic, imaginary, real) and the three fundamental passions of transference (love, hate, ignorance) can be inscribed; analysis is therefore the realisation of being through speech, not the reconstitution of a narcissistic image.

    next year I will have to divide this seminar into two if I want, on the one hand, to explain President Schreber and the symbolic world of psychosis to you

77. #77

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.292

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

    Theoretical move: Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's *Verneinung* argues that negation (*Verneinung/dénégation*) is not simply the negation internal to judgement but the very genesis of thought: by presenting one's being in the mode of not being it, the subject achieves a *Aufhebung* of repression that separates the intellectual from the affective, and the analysand's intellectual acceptance of what was denied constitutes a "negation of the negation" that still leaves the repressive process intact.

    the negativism characteristic of certain psychotics… what differentiates this point from negativity, all the while speaking mythically.

78. #78

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.124

    **X**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses ethological evidence (Lorenz/Tinbergen's releasing mechanisms) to argue that the libidinal drive is structurally centred on the imaginary—on image rather than real partner—thereby grounding the distinction between ego-drives and sexual drives in the Imaginary register, and reframing Freud's two narcissisms as two distinct relations to the image.

    The problem which Freud faced at this point in time was that of the structure of the psychoses. How to map out the structure of the psychoses within the framework of the general theory of the libido?

79. #79

    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.

    psychosis 59. 90-1.103-4.106.115, 116-17.119.134.163.272 ... negativism in 292 ... projection in 154 ... regression in 151

80. #80

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.139

    **XI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the animal ethology of Gestalt-governed sexual behaviour (stickleback dance) as a contrast case to argue that in the human animal, the imaginary function is radically disordered — no image adequately releases sexual behaviour — which is precisely why the mirror apparatus (real image/spherical mirror schema) is needed to theorise how the ego-ideal operates at the joint of the imaginary and the symbolic, and how this bears on the question of the end of analysis.

    Freud supports his argument with an example drawn from the psychoses in which, he says, this agency is clearly visible in delusions of being watched.

81. #81

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.312

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

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.

    and psychosis 117

82. #82

    Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.95

    **vin** > *The wolf! The wolf!*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic function (speech) is the unacknowledged core of all Freudian experience, and uses Freud's distinction between neurosis and psychosis to introduce the imaginary function as the next essential theoretical register — establishing transference as equivalent to love and anchoring the neurosis/psychosis distinction in the subject's relation to imaginary objects.

    It is otherwise with the paraphrenic. He seems really to have withdrawn his libido from people and things in the external world, without replacing them by others in phantasy.

83. #83

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.205

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Lucia Tower's clinical case report, Lacan argues that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated in the transference relation; and that sadism, properly understood, aims at the missing partial object rather than at masochistic self-punishment in the analyst.

    she had feared that the woman was drifting off a bit towards psychosis, but now her anxiety is well bound

84. #84

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.151

    **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.

    In the first group, psychosis. There, she has to agree to delegate a part of her responsibilities to other supports, if only, every now and then, for necessary hospitalizations.

85. #85

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.263

    **x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.

    on the pretext that we are acquainted with its waste scraps, its dead leaves, in the form of the straying voices of psychosis

86. #86

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    BookX Anxiety > *PASSAGE* **A** *L'ACTE* **AND ACTING-OUT** > Second table of division

    Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the *passage à l'acte* from acting-out by locating the former on the side of the maximally barred subject who falls off the stage of the Other into the world, while developing the pre-specular logic of objects *a* as remainder and their relation to anxiety, ideal ego constitution, and depersonalization in psychosis.

    What should be said is not that the objects are invasive in psychosis. What is it that constitutes their danger as far as the ego is concerned? Well, the very structure of these objects makes them unsuitable for egoization.

87. #87

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's certainty about the unconscious rests on the Wiederkehr (return) as its constitutive principle, grounded in Freud's self-analysis as a mapping of desire suspended in the Name-of-the-Father, and pivots from this to announce that repetition—tied to the subject's subversion by the signifier system—requires its own elaboration.

    it is not certain that one can speak of the delusion of hallucinatory psychosis of a confusional origin, as Freud does

88. #88

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that constitutes alienation; Lacan uses the phenomenon of verbal hallucination—where the subject is immanent in the hallucinatory voice—to reframe the analytic goal not as purification of the percipiens but as the subject's grounding encounter with the object-voice as support.

    I have shown at one time or another that it is impossible to conceive of the phenomenology of verbal hallucination if we do not understand what the very term that we use to designate it means—that is to say, voices.

89. #89

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (the ego ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject is seen) and the deeper, alienated level at which the objet petit a is encountered in transference — love as deception is contrasted with the paradoxical 'something more than you' that the analysand addresses to the analyst, culminating in the logic of the gift-turned-into-excrement as the swerve that marks analytic conclusion.

    that vertigo, for example, of the white page, which, for a particular character, who is gifted but stuck at the limits of the psychotic, is like the centre of the symptomatic barrage which blocks off for him every access to the Other.

90. #90

    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.

    It is certainly something of the same order that is involved in psychosis. This solidity, this mass seizure of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief.

91. #91

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes repetition (tuché) from the automaton (return of signs governed by the pleasure principle) by locating repetition in the encounter with the real that lies behind fantasy and transference — a distinction obscured in analytic conceptualization by the conflation of repetition with transference.

    we can today ask ourselves whether this fever, this presence, this desire of Freud is not that which, in his patient, might have conditioned the belated accident of his psychosis

92. #92

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.63

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's certainty about the unconscious is grounded not merely in the return of the repressed (Wiederkehr) but in his self-analysis, which maps the law of desire suspended in the Name-of-the-Father; furthermore, Freud's concept of hallucinatory regression implies a radical subversion of the subject by the signifier, setting up the pivot toward a new elaboration of repetition.

    it is not certain that one can speak of the delusion of hallucinatory psychosis of a confusional origin, as Freud does, rather too rapidly

93. #93

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Repetition (as tuché) must be rigorously distinguished from the Automaton (return of signs) and from Transference, because what is repeated is always something that occurs 'as if by chance'—the encounter with the Real—which lies behind the pleasure-principle governance of signs and behind the phantasy screen, and which Freud's own desire in the Wolf Man case reveals as the irreducible pressure of the Real on analytic research.

    we can today ask ourselves whether this fever, this presence, this desire of Freud is not that which, in his patient, might have conditioned the belated accident of his psychosis.

94. #94

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.252

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

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Pavlovian conditioned reflex experiment articulates not a sign-thing association but a signifier-cut-of-desire structure, and uses the concept of "holophrase" (solidification of the first dyad S1-S2) to model psychosomatic effects and cases where the subject is foreclosed from the interval between signifiers.

    we have the model for a whole series of cases—even though, in each case, the subject does not occupy the same place

95. #95

    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.

    It is certainly something of the same order that is involved in psychosis. This solidity, this mass seizure of the primitive signifying chain, is what forbids the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief.

96. #96

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.273

    FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

    Theoretical move: Through the function of objet petit a, the subject achieves separation from the vacillation of being that characterizes alienation; and the paradigm case of verbal hallucination — where the voice is the operative object — reveals that psychoanalysis inverts the classical epistemic ideal of a purified percipiens by grounding subjective assurance in an encounter with the 'filth' of the partial object.

    it is impossible to conceive of the phenomenology of verbal hallucination if we do not understand what the very term that we use to designate it means—that is to say, voices.

97. #97

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

    IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (grounded in the Ego Ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject sees itself) and the objet petit a as the paradoxical object that disrupts the deceptive mirroring of love in the transference, introducing mutilation and the gift-of-shit as the truth of analytic alienation.

    that vertigo, for example, of the white page, which, for a particular character, who is gifted but stuck at the limits of the psychotic, is like the centre of the symptomatic barrage which blocks off for him every access to the Other

98. #98

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.233

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

    as regards psychoses, who knows that there is a signified, I would even say dwells there, it is a lekton, but which is not for all that sure of anything.

99. #99

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.257

    **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

    Theoretical move: The analyst's desire is theorized not as a counterforce to the patient's defensiveness but as a ruse that inhabits the patient's own defensive structure—occupying the pole of sexual reality's impossibility—so that what constitutes the analysand's original fantasy can be separated out and the objet petit a revealed as the substitute for the missing sexual relationship; this operation is articulated through the Möbius strip topology of the unexpected.

    These people are the psychotics. And that is why it is perfectly possible...to have a perfectly consistent discourse of madness, it is distinguished by the fact that it is sure of the thing

100. #100

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.226

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the signifier from the sign by locating its function on the side of the emitter rather than the receiver, arguing that the signifier's representation of a subject for another signifier necessarily bars and divides that subject — and uses this structure to differentiate the clinical positions of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion with respect to a message's gap and the desire of the Other.

     If you are psychotic, that means that you are interested in the message essentially in the measure that she knows that you are reading it

101. #101

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the o-object (objet petit a) is the hiding place of the Other's desire, not merely a register of demand or transference identification, and that failing to distinguish desire from demand leads to a clinical impasse — illustrated through a case where the analyst remains captive to a decade-long identificatory grip because she reduces the symptom to oral demand rather than grasping the dimension of desire.

     it is necessary in what is going to follow, that I should tell you what an o-object is in psychosis, in perversion, in neurosis, and there is every chance that it is not the same.

102. #102

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a clinical vignette of a borderline patient treated for ten years to argue that the analyst's error was reducing the patient's symptomatology to demand (and its oral regression) rather than locating the properly structural dimension of desire—specifically, that desire is constituted by its torsion toward the Other's desire, and that the objet petit a is the site where the desire of the Other dwells, not a relation between two egos.

     he suffers, like these subjects that we put on the edge of the psychotic field, from this kind of falseness experienced about his self, from this putting into suspense, indeed from this vacillation of all his identifications

103. #103

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.261

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Leclaire argues that the analyst's position is irreducible and even inconceivable within logical discourse because, unlike the logician, the analyst does not suture — does not close the gap in discourse by assigning zero to the concept of non-identity-to-itself — but instead remains open to radical (sexual) difference, castration, and death, occupying no fixed place in the topology of discourse.

     his delusional preoccupation - in fact the delusion is not one that would frighten us - is going to be what is going to happen to this hole, this little scar, this little scratch, which cannot be seen, but he, at his mirror where he constantly looks at his nose sees this hole.

104. #104

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.233

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

     as regards psychoses, who knows that there is a signified, I would even say dwells there, it is a lekton, but which is not for all that sure of anything.

105. #105

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the example of the "alone at five o'clock" love-sign to demonstrate that the signifier (unlike the sign) represents a subject for another signifier — not from the side of the receiver but from the side of the emitter — and deploys this to differentiate the clinical structures (psychosis, neurosis, perversion) by how each relates to the gap structured in a signifying message.

     If you are psychotic, that means that you are interested in the message essentially in the measure that she knows that you are reading it

106. #106

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.257

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965** > (18) In other words let us deceive ourselves together.

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire operates not as the imposition of knowledge onto the analysand but as a structural ruse that separates the analysand's defensiveness—directed not against the analyst but against the reality of sexual difference—into an ever-purer form of fantasy, with the objet petit a standing in for the impossible real of the sexual relation; the unexpected (figured topologically via the Möbius strip) is proposed as the operative mode of analytic desire against the field of anxious expectation.

     These people are the psychotics. And that is why it is perfectly possible... there is a perfectly consistent discourse of madness, it is distinguished by the fact that it is sure that the thing

107. #107

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

     when I think that in the phenomenology of psychosis, we are still at the stage of questioning ourselves about the sensorial texture of the voice

108. #108

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* to distinguish the picture from the mirror and to argue that the scopic field reveals the subject's constitutive division: the picture is not representation but the *Vorstellungsrepresentanz* (representative of the representation), and the Objet petit a occupies the interval between the plane of fantasy and the picture-plane, which is the only genuine *Dasein* of the divided subject.

     the presence of the irreducible percipiens from the mark that it carries there of the signifier, when it shows itself to be minted in the never conceived phenomenon of the psychotic voice.

109. #109

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     Mademoiselle Grazien

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and Klein bottle to theorize jouissance as structurally analogous to the symptom, arguing that orgasm is merely one privileged surface-point of jouissance rather than its essence; this allows him to critique "psychoanalytic mysticism" around female orgasm, reframe aphanisis as the fading of the subject (not desire), and follow Jones's account of the father-daughter couple to argue that feminine sexuality resolves into the woman taking the place of the objet petit a.

     it can go so far as to have psychotic consequences; it is infinitely less dangerous, it is even dangerous to a zero degree as compared to mother-son incest, which always has devastating consequences

110. #110

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Cartesian-Aristotelian reduction of body to homogeneous three-dimensional extension is a fundamental epistemological deception, and proposes that the topological structure of two-dimensional surfaces (sphere, cylinder, torus) with holes—rather than metric spherical space—can provide a non-punctual, non-specular account of the divided subject and its relation to the real.

     In my seminar on President Schreber I oscillated for a long time in connection with what I called the perforating power of the consecrating affirmation

111. #111

     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.

     if one wishes to maintain the framework of narcissistic neurosis...madness, in the measure that the patient is mad...this possibility does not exist because of the foreclosure that we have just been dealing with.

112. #112

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.230

     **Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the picture from the mirror by theorising the picture as the "representative of the representation" (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz): the scopic field of the picture inscribes both the Objet petit a and the division of the subject through projective topology, where the subject's "there" (Dasein) is not a presence but the gap/interval between two parallel planes — the picture-plane and the fantasy-window — in which the object a falls.

     the presence of the irreducible percipiens from the mark that it carries there of the signifier, when it shows itself to be minted in the never conceived phenomenon of the psychotic voice.

113. #113

     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.

     madness, in the measure that the patient is mad… this possibility does not exist because of the foreclosure that we have just been dealing with.

114. #114

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject must be rigorously understood as a "cut" (not a subjectivist position), and uses this to articulate the analyst's impossible-but-necessary position; he connects the Möbius strip and cross-cap as topological figures that make the constituting cut of the subject graspable, while distinguishing Wirklichkeit (realizable analytic relation) from Realität (the impossible Real that determines failure).

     a square piece of cloth, a field where those... were able to pick it out at the beginning of an article that is called: A question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis.

115. #115

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.160

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

     in the phenomenology of psychosis, we are still at the stage of questioning ourselves about the sensorial texture of the voice

116. #116

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical reduction of the body and the real to three-dimensional homogeneous (spherical) extension is a fundamental deception about the subject and knowledge; by drawing on topology (the sphere, the cut, the hole, the cylinder, the torus), he proposes that a two-dimensional, edge-based topological structure—rather than metric space—is the proper framework for articulating the divided subject and its inscription in the real.

     In my seminar on President Schreber I oscillated for a long time in connection with what I called the perforating power of the consecrating affirmation

117. #117

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

     The experienced impossibility of a pulverulent discourse is the Trojan Horse through which there enters into the city of discourse its master who is the psychotic.

118. #118

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.113

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

     Theoretical move: By re-reading the founding scene of transference (the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis), Lacan argues that the subject supposed to know is the indispensable structural hinge of transference, and that the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question — thereby distinguishing transference from mere love and revealing the objet petit a as the object at the heart of love's apparatus.

     under the terms of the as regards which precisely it is not in a very tenable position, except in the categories of psychosis.

119. #119

     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.

     Verwerfung, which is an extremely precise term, and which situates perfectly what is involved in psychosis

120. #120

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's concepts of true/false self and therapeutic regression as a symptomatic case study to argue that any miscognition of the analytic act inevitably leads—however gifted the analyst—to a negation of the analytic position, thereby confirming the necessity of a theoretical critique of the psychoanalytic act.

     with respect to these psychotic consequences, something that Winnicott saw very clearly

121. #121

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

     The experienced impossibility of a pulverulent discourse is the Trojan Horse through which there enters into the city of discourse its master who is the psychotic.

122. #122

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Winnicott's true/false self distinction as a symptomatic case of misrecognition of the analytic act: the analyst who posits a "true self" waiting behind a "false self" covertly installs himself as the locus of Truth, thereby negating the properly analytic position—an error all the more consequential in a capable analyst.

     with respect to these psychotic consequences, something that Winnicott saw very clearly. But behind this freezing, there is, Winnicott tells us this self which is waiting.

123. #123

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.113

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the proper concept of transference is only fully illuminated once the 'subject supposed to know' is introduced and its fracture in the analytic act is understood; the originary scene of Freud's patient embracing him out of hypnosis reveals that what the hysteric seizes is the objet petit a—not love as sentiment—thereby grounding the entire structure of the analytic operation in the subject's relation to this object rather than in narcissistic identification.

     as regards which precisely it is not in a very tenable position, except in the categories of psychosis

124. #124

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.362

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively structured around failure: the objet petit a emerges as a substitute for the gap left by castration (the impasse of the sexual relationship), the analyst incarnates the 'subject supposed to know' only to evacuate the o-object at analysis's end, and transference is properly defined not through repetition alone but through its structural relation to the subject supposed to know as the illusory One of the Other—while the analyst occupies the paradoxical position of a scapegoat who bears the o-object so the subject can be reprieved from it.

     the error and properly speaking the ineptitude of what is put forward on the subject of what is involved in psychoanalytic treatment of psychosis, and the radical failure marked in it to situate precisely psychosis in a psychopathology that is of an analytic order

125. #125

     Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     J Lacan - Pierce as astronomer > Seminar 12: Wednesday 21 Jane 1972

     Theoretical move: In this closing session of Seminar XIX, Lacan condenses the year's argument: the *Yadl'un* (the One makes Being) is not ontology but the structural ground of analytic discourse, and Freud's essential contribution—overdetermination—is precisely the irreducible relation of the signifying chain to the body as the site of jouissance, a jouissance that is always "hand to hand" and never attributable to a single body.

     I found something, a seminar that I gave at the beginning of a trimester...on the case of President Schreber...I posited the fact that it was...the structure.

126. #126

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.6

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalyst's knowledge is constitutively bound to ignorance (not as deficit but as passion), and polemically distinguishes his own claim — that the unconscious is structured like a language (grammar and repetition, hence logic) — from misreadings that conflate this with lalangue-as-dictionary or that opportunistically promote "non-knowledge" as a flag, thereby obscuring that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a matter of knowledge.

     The question of the mentally ill or of what are called, to put it better, psychoses, is a question that is not at all resolved by anti-psychiatry.

127. #127

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.251

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the schema of the "wall of language" separating the subject (S) from the true big Other (A), distinguishing the imaginary plane of ego/specular other (a/a') from the symbolic plane, and arguing that the Other's capacity to lie—not merely to answer—constitutes the decisive proof of authentic intersubjectivity; this schema also serves as a critique of ego-psychology's imaginary reduction of analytic aims.

     the obsessional neurotic is in fact a madman... a paranoid madman. To say that madness is the greatest imaginary perturbation there can be.

128. #128

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

     One of the secret mainsprings for the failure of the treatments of obsessionals is the idea that there's a latent psychosis behind the obsessional neurosis.

129. #129

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.256

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques ego-psychology-style analytic technique—which aims at imaginary reconstitution of the ego through identification with the analyst's ego—and counter-proposes an analysis oriented toward the big Other, where the analyst functions as an empty mirror so that true speech can traverse the wall of language and the subject can assume its relations of transference with its real Others; "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" is re-read as the subject (S) being called to speak and enter into relation with the real Other.

     That the subject ends up believing in the ego is in itself madness… Paranoia, as compared with schizophrenia, always has a relation to the imaginary alienation of the ego.

130. #130

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the fundamental distinction between the big Other (the radical alterity of speech and the symbolic) and the small other (the ego as imaginary counterpart), arguing that the subject's relation to satisfaction is always mediated by the Other — and uses the contrast between planets (pure reality, silenced by language) and speaking beings (constituted by the gap of desire) to demonstrate that language does not emerge from the real but retroactively forecloses it.

     these old ladies, victims of the so-called Cotard syndrome, or negation delirium... I don't have a mouth. They inform us that they don't have a stomach either, and what is more that they will never die.

131. #131

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.113

     THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > IX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's four schemata of the psychic apparatus as a scaffold to argue that the analytic field is irreducible to psychology or individual ontology, insisting that the Imaginary and Symbolic are two distinct but intertwined dimensions of the inter-human relation, and that confusing them produces theoretical and clinical error.

     Psychosis isn't structured at all in the same way in the child and in the adult. If we legitimately speak of psychosis in children, it is because, as analysts, we can advance a step further than the others in our conception of psychosis.

132. #132

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **¹⁰⁷x** > Rings of string

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Borromean knots and rings of string to ground a theory of desire, the subject, and the Other: object a is the void presupposed by demand, the subject's division is structurally equivalent to the 'bending' of a ring, and the Other is not additive to the One but is the 'One-missing' — a difference internal to the One rather than supplementary to it.

     It's not very difficult to find such an example in psychosis, and that's no accident. Recall what hallucinatorily fills up Schreber's solitude: 'Nun will Ich mich…' These interrupted sentences…leave some sort of substance in abeyance.

133. #133

     Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.255

     (3) Naturally since I made a small mistake

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a topological demonstration that the One (ring of string enclosing nothing but a hole) grounds both the structure of desire—where the objet petit a is not a being but a void supposed by demand, sustained only by metonymy—and the logic of mathematical language, where removing a single element disperses all the rest simultaneously.

     Contrary to what you see in language, namely, what is very simply materialised for you, and it is not very difficult either to find an example of it, and not for nothing in psychosis.

134. #134

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 9: Tuesday 8 April 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Borromean knot's topology — particularly the distinction between ek-sistence (the track/cycle) and the hole — as the operative figure for primordial repression (Urverdrängt), arguing that the difficulty of mentally grasping the knot is itself the trace of an irreducible, foundational repression, and that the inexistence of the sexual relationship is not a failure but the very structure knotted into being.

     paranoia is being stuck in the Imaginary. It is the voice that sounds, the look that becomes all-prevailing it is a matter of the congealing of a desire.

135. #135

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.64

     **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.

     In psychosis, the voices, it's all there, they believe in them. Not only do they believe in them, but they believe them. Now it is all there, in this limit.

136. #136

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.119

     Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976

     Theoretical move: The sinthome is theorized topologically as a fourth ring that repairs an error in the Borromean knot—where the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real come undone—and is deployed to explain both Joyce's artistic practice (as compensation for paternal lack) and the clinical phenomenon of imposed words in psychosis, thereby linking the topology of knotting to the structure of symptom formation and paternal function.

     A case of madness which, which had begun with the sinthome: imposed words (paroles imposées).

137. #137

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.100

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Joyce's relationship to madness, faith, and writing as a clinical-theoretical probe to distinguish the true from the Real, locating jouissance (including masochism) in the Real rather than the true; he simultaneously advances a topological argument about the Borromean knot and the torus as the best available "physics" for measuring belief and subjective structure.

     from what point on is one mad? And the question that I am asking myself, and that I am asking Jacques Aubert, is the following, which I will not resolve today: was Joyce mad?

138. #138

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.48

     **Seminar 3: Wednesday! 6 December 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that the Borromean knot of three (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) constitutes the minimal support of the subject — and is itself the structure of paranoid psychosis — while the Sinthome emerges as a necessary fourth term that knots the three rings when they would otherwise come apart, with phallic jouissance located at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Real, and meaning at the conjunction of the Symbolic and the Imaginary.

     paranoid psychosis and personality, as such, have no relationship; simply because of the fact that it is the same thing. In so far as a subject knots together in three, the Imaginary the Symbolic and the Real, it is supported only by their continuity. The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are one and the same consistency. And it is in this that paranoid psychosis consists.

139. #139

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **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.

     the question that I will put at the end of this chat, is the following... the question of whether yes or no Joyce was mad

140. #140

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.49

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan voices ambivalence about having made the unconscious teachable, lamenting the degenerate offspring of his teachings (e.g. Derrida's preface to *Le verbier*), while also articulating that the Real—figured as *l'âme à tiers*—is precisely that to which we have no relation, and that S(Ø) names its non-response, leaving the subject talking alone until a potentially delirious Ego emerges.

     nothing guarantees that it might not properly speaking be speaking deliriously. This indeed is the reason I highlight, like Freud moreover, that you do not have to look too closely at what is called psychoanalysis and that, between madness and mental debility, we can only choose

141. #141

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

     There is someone called Clérambault who noticed one day... that there was somewhere mental automatism. There is nothing more natural than mental automatism.

142. #142

     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.

     it would also be necessary to articulate the return of this S2 into the Real with what is involved in terms of delusion, to seriously articulate the aphanisis and the delusional position in the measure that in the two cases the signifier returns to the Real

143. #143

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     **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.

     essentially it stems from something that is situated at the level of the subject's relations with the signifier.

144. #144

     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.

     Our starting point is this - the unconscious is present but not functioning.

145. #145

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.285

     **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Other must be understood as a *locus* — the site in which speech and the speaking subject are constituted — rather than as a symmetrical alter-ego or existentialist "thou," and uses grammatical evidence (personization across relative clauses) alongside the Schreber case to demonstrate that the asymmetry between I and you, and the structural priority of the big Other, precede and condition any imaginary intersubjectivity.

     the burning question, which has been made topical in a confused way by the function of the object relation and made present as much by the structure as by the phenomenology of psychosis, of the other.

146. #146

     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.

     This year the question of the psychoses begins. I say the question because one can't speak straightaway of their treatment

147. #147

     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.

     Observe this crucial moment carefully and you will be able to pick out this passage in the onset of every psychosis - it's the moment at which from the Other as such, from the field of the Other, there comes the interpellation of an essential signifier that is unable to be received.

148. #148

     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.

     You must already be able to tell the difference in level between alienation as the general form of the imaginary and alienation in psychosis... From the moment the subject speaks, the Other, with a big O, is there. Without this there would be no problem of psychosis. Psychotics would be speaking machines.

149. #149

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     **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.

     Where does the difference between someone who is psychotic and someone who isn't come from? It comes from the fact that for the psychotic a love relation that abolishes him as subject is possible insofar as it allows a radical heterogeneity of the Other.

150. #150

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.312

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the second-person pronoun 'you/thou' is not a univocal marker of the other but a punctuating signifier that 'hooks' the other into discourse; the theoretical question is what mechanism elevates this indeterminate signifier to subjectivity—answered through the copulatory ('to be') and ostensive functions, which bear directly on the structural problem of why 'it speaks' in psychosis.

     It isn't so astonishing to hear people speaking their internal discourse out loud in the manner of psychotics, a little bit more than we do ourselves.

151. #151

     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."

     we were indeed dealing with a delusional and not simply with a person of difficult character who quarrels with those around her.

152. #152

     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.

     This decomposition of the signifier occurs around a point of interpellation constituted by the lack, the disappearance, the absence of a certain signifier to the extent that at a given moment it is interpellated as such.

153. #153

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     **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.

     paranoid psychoses and passional psychoses, a difference that has been admirably emphasized by the work of my master, de Clerambault

154. #154

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVIII** > **Metaphor and metonymy (II): Signifying articulation and transference of the signified**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the aphasia distinction (similarity vs. contiguity disorders) to positively ground the metaphor/metonymy opposition, while insisting that the signifier/signified split cannot be collapsed into the traditional "words for thought" dualism.

     In introducing the opposition between similarity and contiguity here, I'm not saying that I consider that psychosis is in any way comparable to aphasia.

155. #155

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     **XVIII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy (contiguous, signifier-to-signifier coordination) is the foundational operation of language acquisition and psychic organization, upon which metaphor (transference of the signified) can only subsequently operate—and that psychotic phenomena like Schreber's delusional assonances expose this hidden signifying substructure by promoting the signifier as such.

     Promoting the signifier as such, the emergence of this always hidden substructure that is metonymy, is the condition of any possible investigation of the functional disorders of language in neurosis and psychosis.

156. #156

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.234

     **XVII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement in the rhetorical distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing that the signifier's structural priority over the signified is the very starting-point of the Freudian discovery, and that psychosis results from a specific pathological relationship between the subject and the signifier/Other rather than from a merely aphasic mechanism.

     in psychosis these workings of the signifier end up totally preoccupying the subject… this invasion by the signifier, called psychosis.

157. #157

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious is nothing other than the continuous circulation of the symbolic sentence (the "discourse of the Other"), from which the ego functions precisely to shield consciousness; psychosis makes this structure visible by exposing the internal monologue as an articulated, interrupted, and grammatically structured discourse — as Schreber's voices demonstrate — thereby grounding both the theory of the unconscious and the theory of psychosis in the same structural account of language.

     in cases of psychosis we see this sentence, this monologue, this internal discourse I was speaking to you about, reveal itself in the most highly articulated manner

158. #158

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.49

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

     Theoretical move: By shifting the analysis of psychosis from organogenetic/psychogenetic frameworks (both of which covertly presuppose a unifying subject-point) to the register of speech, Lacan establishes the structural distinction between the big Other (the absolute, unknown addressee of speech) and the little other (the object of discourse), and grounds the ego's constitutive alienation in the primacy of the other's desire as the origin of human objects.

     it's the register of speech that creates all the richness of the phenomenology of psychosis, it's here that we see all its aspects, decompositions, refractions.

159. #159

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **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.

     the delusion of the chronic hallucinatory psychoses reveals that the subject has a very specific relationship with respect to the entire system of language in its various orders.

160. #160

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     **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).

     If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language.

161. #161

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **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.

     What is the psychotic phenomenon? It is the emergence in reality of an enormous meaning that has the appearance of being nothing at all—in so far as it cannot be tied to anything, since it has never entered into the system of symbolization.

162. #162

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.103

     **VII** > **The imaginary dissolution**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of Schreber's paranoia to argue that narcissism, as conventionally understood (self-as-object), is insufficient to explain psychosis; the real question is the structural modification of the other — its emptying of subjectivity — which points toward a distinctly Lacanian register of alienation in madness.

     What are the levels, the registers, by which we can define these modifications to the character of the other that are always, we very much get the impression, central to the alienation of madness?

163. #163

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **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.

     There is an obstacle here, a resistance, which will yield its meaning only to the extent that we have gone into things deeply enough to explain why things are like this.

164. #164

     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.

     President Schreber reveals to observation certain microscopic things in a dilated form. This is going to enable me to clarify for you what Freud clearly formulated on psychosis... something that has been rejected from within reappears without.

165. #165

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.164

     **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.

     Here you have the fundamental mechanism that I posit as being at the basis of paranoia.

166. #166

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     **XXII** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a linguistic analysis of the second person pronoun ('you') to demonstrate that the superego operates as a foreign-body signifier rather than a dialectical law, and that the foundational function of speech—mission or mandate—is what generates the subject's latent question about its own being, with the 'you' as quilting point between address and subjectivity.

     this you that always makes itself more or less discreetly heard, this you that speaks alone, and says You see! to us... As in Schreber's experience, this you doesn't need to say you in order to be the you that speaks to us.

167. #167

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XVI** > *Reading from the* Memoirs, *308-10*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is structurally indivisible—its meaning-effect overruns any mechanical interruption—and uses this property to reframe the question of libidinal investment in psychosis: what is at stake is not energy per se but the subject's fundamental relationship to the signifier as such.

     The fact that within a delusion voices play upon this property can't be taken to be a matter of indifference, and we can't exclude the hypothesis that it is fundamentally motivated by a precisely more radical, more global, relationship to the phenomenon of the signifier.

168. #168

     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.

     we shall be able to understand how over the course of the evolution of the psychosis, from the time of its origin to its final stage, assuming that there is a final stage in psychosis, the subject is situated in relation to the whole symbolic, original order

169. #169

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.159

     **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.

     the mechanisms at work in psychosis are not limited to the imaginary register.

170. #170

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.27

     **I** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the distinction between neurotic repression and psychotic repression is a matter of their different positions within the symbolic order, and that misrecognizing the autonomy of the symbolic—substituting imaginary recognition for symbolic exchange—is the structural cause of analytic-triggered psychosis; verbal hallucination is theorized as the moment the subject collapses into identification with the ego, speaking to itself in the real.

     the origin of the neurotic repressed is not situated at the same level of history in the symbolic as that of the repressed involved in psychosis, even if there exists the closest of relations between their contents.

171. #171

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.69

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes synchronic from diachronic dimensions of the signifier, using Schreber's psychosis to show how isolated signifiers become "erotized" (charged with unassimilable meaning), and frames the structural analysis of delusion around the differentiation of the big Other (symbolic), the imaginary ego, and the real person—arguing that this tripartite structure is what the unconscious means.

     before we start wondering how he entered psychosis and giving the history of the prepsychotic phase, before we take things up in the sense of their genesis, as everyone always does, which is the source of inexplicable confusions

172. #172

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.216

     **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.

     In psychosis it's the signifier that is in question, and as the signifier is never solitary, as it invariably forms something coherent...the lack of one signifier necessarily brings the subject to the point of calling the set of signifiers into question.

173. #173

     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.

     At the heart of the psychoses there is a dead end, perplexity concerning the signifier... The Other with a big O, qua bearer of the signifier, is excluded.

174. #174

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **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.

     psychosis and lack of signifier, 201, 322 and language, 11-12, 32-33, 250 and neurosis, 11-12, 44-47, 60-61, 63, 85, 86-88

175. #175

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.352

     **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.

     speech in psychosis, 36, 101 … subject and signifier in psychosis, 190, 250 … unconscious in psychosis, 11-12, 143-44

176. #176

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.199

     **XIV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure and signifier are inseparable concepts, and uses this identity to draw the epistemological boundary between the natural sciences (where no one uses the signifier to signify) and psychoanalysis (where subjectivity—the use of the signifier to deceive—is encountered in the real), thereby grounding clinical structures like neurosis and psychosis in a field irreducible to natural explanation.

     these series of apparently natural phenomena that we call neuroses or psychoses. Do the psychoses form a series of natural phenomena?

177. #177

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     **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.

     Schreber's discourse has a different structure, to be sure. Schreber notes at the beginning of one of his chapters, very amusingly - They say I'm paranoid.

178. #178

     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.

     owing to this exemplary case and to the intervention of such a penetrating mind as Freud's, we find ourselves for the first time in a position to grasp structural notions which it's possible to extrapolate to all cases

179. #179

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **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.

     we are going to shed light on a new dimension in the phenomenology of the psychoses.

180. #180

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.281

     **XXI** > **1** > **4**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the quilting point (point de capiton) between signifier and signified is the minimal structural condition for normality, and that psychosis is characterised precisely by its absence or failure — a thesis developed through the Oedipus complex as the paradigmatic quilting point and through Schreber's case as exemplary psychotic disintegration of signifier/signified unity.

     One can think that in a psychosis everything is there in the signifier... it isn't impossible that one should manage to determine the minimal number of fundamental points of insertion between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be called normal

181. #181

     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.

     We need to know how this unconscious signifier is situated in psychosis. It appears to be external to the subject

182. #182

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hysteria (in both men and women) revolves around the question of procreation—a question generated by the fact that the Symbolic cannot account for individual existence, birth, or death—and grounds this in a reading of Freud's early letters showing that repression originates in the failure of signifying inscriptions to carry over across developmental stages.

     If I'm particularly interested in the question raised in hysteria, it's because at issue is the way in which it's distinct from the mechanism of psychosis, especially that of President Schreber, where the question of procreation, of feminine procreation in particular, is also sketched out.

183. #183

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By moving from the clinical case of Dora's hysteria through a theory of narcissism to ethological examples (the stickleback), Lacan argues that the Mirror Stage constitutes the ego as an alienating, foreign image that structurally inscribes an aggressive tension ("either me or the other") into all imaginary relations—and that this same logic differentiates hysteria from psychosis via the criterion of language disturbance rather than persecution-like content.

     for us to have a psychosis, there must be disturbances of language - this at least is the rule of thumb I suggest you adopt provisionally.

184. #184

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.228

     **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.

     when he comes to psychosis it's as if Freud has been struck by a more profound enigma. He says - As for those suffering from paranoia, delusions, psychosis, they love their delusion as they love themselves.

185. #185

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.79

     **V**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the condition of possibility for modern science is a historically specific "act of faith" — inherited from the Judaeo-Christian tradition — that posits an absolutely non-deceiving guarantor of the real; this epistemological foundation distinguishes modern science from other cultural formations (including Aristotle's) and is used to frame the entry into Schreber's psychotic system, where the celestial sphere functions as an alternative guarantee of reality.

     here we are, all of a sudden, in the thick of the first chapter of President Schreber's Memoirs, which treats the system of the stars as the essential, rather unexpected, item in his struggle against masturbation.

186. #186

     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.

     What is distinctive about the analytic viewpoint in the analysis of a psychosis.

187. #187

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.332

     **XXV** > **1**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is irreducibly symbolic—not imaginary—because the phallus operates as a signifier rather than an imaginary element; and that the signifier as such (illustrated through the example of naming/the rainbow) introduces an ordering structure that cannot be derived from imaginary or naturalistic dynamics, with this distinction being decisive for differentiating neurosis from psychosis.

     But where the psychoses are concerned, things are different. It's not a question of the subject's relation to a link signified within existing signifying structures, but of his encounter under elective conditions with the signifier

188. #188

     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.

     it's precisely because it's situated at the level of understanding as an incomprehensible phenomenon, as it were, that paranoia is so difficult for us to grasp and, also, of such great interest.

189. #189

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

     **XIV** > **The signifier, as such, signifies nothing**

     Theoretical move: This introductory passage frames the seminar's return to Freudian psychosis structures through the lens of language, using a Cicero epigraph to assert that language conceals marvels requiring diligent structural attention — positioning the study of psychosis as inseparable from the function of Language.

     it's a question of what Freud left behind concerning the structures of the psychoses, this being why we call them Freudian.

190. #190

     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.

     this guides us towards something that is really deep-seated in psychotic structure

191. #191

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **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.

     the analysis of Schreber's text has led us to emphasize the importance of language phenomena in the economy of psychosis.

192. #192

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.58

     **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.

     In psychosis, on the contrary, reality itself initially contains a hole that the world of fantasy will subsequently fill.

193. #193

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.300

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a grammatical analysis of the French construction "Tu es celui qui..." to demonstrate that the subject of enunciation (the I/ego) is essentially fleeting and can never fully sustain the address to the Other (thou), and then extends this insight to argue that the Judaeo-Christian tradition's founding figure of "I am the one who am" installs an always-elusive, unsustainable Other at the heart of Western subjectivity and science, distinguishing it from the Aristotelian relation to a graded world of entities.

     It's a question of this in President Schreber - of a mode of constructing the Other-God.

194. #194

     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.

     It's classically said that in psychosis the unconscious is at the surface, conscious. This is even why articulating it doesn't seem to have much effect.

195. #195

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.111

     **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.

     There is an altogether striking predominance of the mirror relationship, a notable dissolution of the other qua identity... This fragmentation of identity brands all Schreber's relations with his counterparts on the imaginary level.

196. #196

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.88

     **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.

     Today this is Schreber the madman... the madman doesn't believe in the reality of his hallucinations.

197. #197

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.305

     **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.

     Several things can be deduced from this, which explain Schreber's delusion to us. Which signifier is it that is in abeyance in his inaugural crisis? It's the signifier *procreation* in its most problematic form... *being a father.*

198. #198

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     **V**

     Theoretical move: By contrasting the neurotic's symptomatic language (where repression and the return of the repressed are two sides of one linguistic process) with the psychotic's open discourse, Lacan argues that psychosis cannot be reduced to the same mechanisms as neurosis; the analysis of Schreber's discourse must proceed through the three registers (symbolic/signifier, imaginary/meaning, real/discourse) toward an account of a specifically psychotic mechanism distinct from repression.

     We are not saying that psychosis has the same etiology as neurosis. We are not even saying that it is, like neurosis, a pure and simple fact of language - far from it.

199. #199

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.137

     **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.

     Bracketing it at the outset as psychiatric is the source of the state of incomprehension in which people have always remained until now.

200. #200

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.81

     **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.

     Our job is to situate structurally the discourse that testifies to the subject's erotic relations with the living God who, through these divine rays and through an entire procession of forms and emanations, also speaks to him

201. #201

     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, the symbolic order, and discourse.

202. #202

     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 presences that count have become essentially verbal, and the sum of these verbal presences is for him identical with the divine presence, this sole and unique presence that is his correlative and his guarantor.

203. #203

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.227

     **XVII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dimension of truth enters human life through the paternal symbol, and that this symbol—understood as pure signifier—coincides with the death drive at the origin of the human symbolic order; this convergence grounds the return to the study of psychosis.

     This question takes us back to our study of the psychoses.

204. #204

     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.

     Psychosis is not dementia. The psychoses, if you like - there is no reason to deny oneself the luxury of this word - correspond to what has always been called and legitimately continues to be called madness.

205. #205

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     **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.

     What we have just been emphasizing will enable us next time to see what is lacking in each of the two points of view developed by Freud and Mrs. Ida Macalpine

206. #206

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.145

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is distinguished from neurosis not by degree of ego pathology but by the structure of testimony to the unconscious (open vs. closed), and that psychoanalysis — unlike ego psychology or the discourse of freedom — operates at the level of discourse's effect on the subject rather than at the level of rational leverage, making psychotics "martyrs of the unconscious" and rendering their condition therapeutically irreducible.

     the psychotic is a martyr of the unconscious, giving this term martyr its meaning, which is to be a witness. It's an open testimony.

207. #207

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.224

     **XVI** > *Reading of the* Memoirs, *46-47*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the paternal function operates across three registers—symbolic, imaginary, and real—and that Schreber's psychosis is distinguished by the emergence of the father's *real* generative function in imaginary form (the "little men" as spermatozoa), representing a regressive retreat through all three registers rather than normal symbolic integration via imaginary conflict.

     President Schreber's delusion would therefore depend more on the giddiness of success than on a sense of failure. This is what the understanding generated by authors of the mechanism determining the psychosis revolves around.

208. #208

     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.

     we can expect that the phenomenon of psychosis will enable us to restore the proper relationship, increasingly misunderstood in analytic work, between the signifier and the signified.

209. #209

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     **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.

     in psychosis, 14, 144, 312 ... hole in symbolic ... in psychosis, 45, 156-57, 201, 202-03

210. #210

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.63

     **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.

     She would always come and knock at their door while they were at their toilet or just as they were dining or reading... Things only started to become problematic when this expulsion, this refusal, this rejection, took full effect

211. #211

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.178

     **XII** > **The hysteric's question** > **2**

     Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp distinction between the preconscious/imaginary domain and the unconscious proper, arguing that the analytic field is defined not by preverbal or imaginary communication but by the structural fact that unconscious phenomena are "structured like a language" — meaning they exhibit the signifier/signified duality where the signifier refers to another signifier, not to any object.

     The fundamental image that currently seems to regulate analytic practice is that there must be something connecting neurosis and psychosis, the preconscious and the unconscious.

212. #212

     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.

     What is perceptible in the phenomenon of everything that takes place in psychosis is that it is a question of the subject's access to a signifier as such and of the impossibility of that access.

213. #213

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.170

     **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.

     How does one enter psychosis? How is the subject led, not into alienating himself in the little other, but into becoming this something which, from within the field in which nothing can be said, appeals to all the rest

214. #214

     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.

     brings about a serial disintegration, a removal of the woof from the tapestry, which is known as a delusion

215. #215

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.323

     **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.

     all its phenomena, and I even think I can say its dynamics, would be clarified in reference to the functions and structure of speech

216. #216

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **"Thou art"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the existentialist notion of "openness of being" as philosophically inadequate for analytic work, proposing instead that being's openness must be re-situated within determinate "gaps of being" that psychoanalytic experience reveals—while also previewing the following year's seminar theme on object relations, phobia objects, and fetishes.

     THE ONSET OF PSYCHOSIS

217. #217

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.118

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental distinction between neurosis and psychosis lies in the register where the repressed returns: in neurosis it returns *in loco* within the symbolic order (under a mask), while in psychosis it returns *in altero* in the imaginary (without a mask) — and that post-Freudian ego-psychology's reduction of psychosis to ego-defense mechanisms systematically obscures this economic and topographical distinction.

     In neurosis, one always remains inside the symbolic order, with this duality of signifier and signified that Freud translates as the neurotic compromise. Delusions occur in a completely different register.

218. #218

     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.

     it is very precisely at this point that the origin of paranoia branches off... delivered up entirely to the eye and the gaze of the Other

219. #219

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **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.

     The question that arises concerning the psychoses is what the nature of this process of communication is, precisely, when it fails to be constitutive for the subject.

220. #220

     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.

     In the third year of my Seminar, I spoke about psychosis insofar as it's founded on a primordial deficiency of a signifier.

221. #221

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.494

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **EDITOR'S NOTE**

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive editorial note by Jacques-Alain Miller situating Seminar V's key schemas and lessons in relation to contemporaneous Écrits texts, and acknowledging manuscript sources and collaborators.

     Lacan wrote 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Question of Psychosis' (Bcrits, pp. 445-88).

222. #222

     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.

     Gisela Pankow...her work on psychosis dating back to 1956

223. #223

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.373

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.

     the idea that one runs the risk in analysis of not curing the subject but of seeing him lapse into psychosis is a risk that seems extraordinarily fantasmatic, for it's really the thing that one runs the least risk of.

224. #224

     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.

     what I have represented by the dotted lines, namely, that by means of which the father intervenes as law, is not there.

225. #225

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the "nodal point" of the Oedipus complex as the moment when the subject must decide whether to accept the father's castration/privation of the mother, distinguishing two structural alternatives—"being or not being the phallus" (imaginary) versus "having or not having the phallus" (symbolic)—and shows how the father must intervene not merely as the bearer of the law de jure but as a real, graduated symbolic agent whose effective presence or deficit determines clinical structure.

     this relationship is not the same in neurosis, psychosis and perversion. But the configuration is nodal in every case.

226. #226

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.155

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

     Theoretical move: Lacan maps the historical evolution of debates around the Oedipus complex onto three structural poles—superego, reality, and ego-ideal—arguing that the function of the father and the Oedipus complex are co-extensive, and uses Melanie Klein's own findings to demonstrate that the paternal third term (the phallus) is irreducible even in supposedly pre-Oedipal imaginary relations, thus preparing the ground for his formal account of the paternal metaphor.

     Certain parts of our field of experience refer especially to this field of pre-Oedipal stages in the subject's development - namely, perversion on the one hand, and psychosis on the other.

227. #227

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.207

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Winnicott paradox—that optimal maternal satisfaction makes hallucination indistinguishable from reality—to expose the theoretical dead-end of grounding psychoanalytic development in a purely imaginary, hallucinatory primary process, and argues instead that desire, not need, is the originary term, requiring a structural (symbolic) account of the pleasure/reality principle opposition.

     Here, we have what one can truly call a psychotic construction of the subject. From this perspective, a normal subject is, in short, a psychosis that has turned out well.

228. #228

     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).

     messages come... they are not in any way authenticated by the Other's return... They come from the Other... 'Reflection is missing'.

229. #229

     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.

     psychosis and 368 ... psychosis and [Other's desire] 455-8

230. #230

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that hallucinatory satisfaction is not a primitive imaginary phenomenon but is constituted at the level of signifiers and presupposes the locus of the Other; consequently, both the pleasure principle and the reality principle must be rethought as effects of the signifying chain rather than of need-satisfaction or experiential adaptation.

     if you are tempted, for want of anything better, to endeavour to make it too correspond to a kind of desire on the part of the subject... the most striking, the most massive and the most invasive of all the phenomena of delusions isn't at all the phenomenon that refers to a reverie of satisfaction of desire, but something as frozen as verbal hallucinations

231. #231

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.519

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     psychosis and 147

232. #232

     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.

     It is extremely important to consider the manner in which the father intervenes at this moment in the dialectic of the Oedipus complex. You will see this more clearly in the article... presenting an overview of what I said the year in which we spoke about the Freudian structures of psychosis.

233. #233

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.475

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     psychosis places the autonomy of this function of command on the horizon of the subject's relationship to speech, an experience that we can only take as fundamental.

234. #234

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.451

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.

     There is absolutely nothing to fear with respect to psychosis. This signifier suffices to preserve the dimension of the Other in him

235. #235

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.468

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipal structure is grounded in the castration complex as the effect of the signifier on the Other, which introduces a constitutive lack-in-being into the subject; this foundational lack then distributes into distinct clinical structures—symptom, hysteria, and obsession—each defined by a specific relationship to desire and its object.

     it's common experience that there isn't the slightest danger of psychosis for the typical obsessional, wherever you lead him - and I will tell you, when the moment comes, to what extent an obsessional differs in structure from a psychotic.

236. #236

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     The invasion of the world of objects by the image of the body is manifest in delusions of a Schreberian type, whereas, inversely, signifier phenomena are gathered around the ego to the point where the only thing supporting the subject is a continuous thread of verbal hallucinations

237. #237

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.460

     **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.

     what psychosis articulates into is designed precisely to supplete this absence at its organized point... The forms of psychosis from the most benign to the extreme state of dissolution present us with a pure and simple discourse of the Other.

238. #238

     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.

     That's where the tipping point is, the turning point that tips the subject into psychosis … what has been appealed to at the level of the 'you' at a given moment is precisely the Name-of-the-Father.

239. #239

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.513

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     psychosis and 455-8 communication and 130-3 children 207

240. #240

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.229

     THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation by showing that the specular couple [a-a'] is always already regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One, and that the birth of metaphor (substitution) is the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges — yielding the formula of fantasy ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

     all psychoanalytic authors situate the locus of psychotic or parapsychotic anomalies which have an impact on the integration, at the borders of the bodily image, of one or another term of the subject's autoerotic relations with himself - in the central relationship between mother and child

241. #241

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.428

     THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "Freudian thing" is desire, and that desire is constitutively incompatible with any harmonistic or adaptive account of human development; against ego-psychological attempts (Glover, Hartmann) to reduce desire to a preparatory stage of reality-adaptation, Lacan proposes to re-situate desire within the synchronic structure of the signifier rather than the diachronic unfolding of the unconscious.

     a developmental chronology, establishing a timeline on which psychotic disturbances are the earliest occurrences and neurotic disturbances come later

242. #242

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.454

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

     he highlights the extremely early nature of psychotic disturbances - paranoid disturbances in particular - and situates after them the different forms of neurosis in order from the earliest to the latest.

243. #243

     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.

     This machine is precisely what we rediscover in a detached and isolated form at the core of schizophrenia. In schizophrenia, the subject identifies with the very discordance between this machine and his life-sustaining current.

244. #244

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.397

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject encounters itself only as gap or cut in the unconscious chain, and that objet petit a is constituted structurally as a cut: the pregenital objects (oral, anal), the phallus (castration complex), and delusion are three forms of a that share the formal property of coupure, functioning as signifying props that screen the hole in the unconscious chain for a barred subject who fundamentally misrecognises itself there.

     those of you who have taken a close look at what I have written about the-psychoses will not be terribly puzzled here. The third type of object [d] ... is neither more nor less than what is commonly called a 'delusion.'

245. #245

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.456

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: By critically rereading Glover's adaptive theory of perversion and Klein's object-relations theory through the lens of the signifier, Lacan argues that the subject's primary structuring occurs at the level of signifying opposition (good/bad objects), not reality-testing; and that the bad internal object marks the precise point where the être/avoir (to be/to have) split institutes the subject's relation to an undemandable object — from which desire, irreducible to demand or need, emerges.

     perversion is unambiguously conceptualized by Glover as a form of salvation when compared with the supposed threat of psychosis.

246. #246

     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.

     as in psychosis, all the images that have to do with the phenomena of mourning proliferate in its place. Mourning is akin to psychosis in this regard.

247. #247

     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.

     This involves appealing to notions of development... the so-called mental form of hallucination. In the latter, we see the primitive structure of what I will call the backdrop of the enunciation process — parallel to the ongoing statement of existence — which is known as the echo of actions, the echo of explicit thoughts.

248. #248

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.479

     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.

     all sorts of peripheral, intermediary forms between perversion and psychosis, let us say, such as drug addiction

249. #249

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.65

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of the representation) is strictly equivalent to the signifier, establishing that what is properly unconscious is a signifying element — not affect, sensation, or feeling — and uses Freud's dream of the dead father to demonstrate that dream-interpretation proceeds via the insertion of missing signifiers into the dream-text, not via wishful thinking or affective content.

     in what form do hallucinations usually present themselves in the lion's share of clinical experience? They are those of verbal hallucinations, or verbally structured hallucinations... it involves signifiers, not images

250. #250

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.401

     IN THE FORM OF A CUT > A few tangential remarks are in order here.

     Theoretical move: Lacan develops the voice as the third form of objet petit a — specifically as a pure cut or gap — by contrasting it with ordinary vocal function and analysing the hallucinatory voice in psychotic delusion, where the interrupted sentence (Schreber's Sie sollen werden…) produces a call to signification that swallows the subject; he then frames this alongside the mirror-stage, narcissism, and the phallus to insist that fantasy's "dimension of being" cannot be collapsed into any reality-adaptation model of analytic technique.

     what I think is most likely to show you what is at stake and how I mean it is to try here to spell out the voice's function in delusions.

251. #251

     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.

     we sometimes observe a misrecognition of death, misrecognition by the subject of his own death... In psychosis this articulation can lead to feelings of being invaded or penetrated

252. #252

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.74

     **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.

     the whole psychology of the psychotic develops insofar as a term may be refused, a term that maintains the basic system of words at a certain distance or relational dimension.

253. #253

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.310

     **XIV** > **XXII**

     Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must not collapse the distance between analyst and analysand into imaginary fusion; such a collapse (figured as the "joiner" fantasy) leads to psychosis or perversion, and points toward the ethics of analysis being grounded in sublimation and the sublime rather than imaginary incorporation.

     the subject can achieve nothing but some form of psychosis or perversion, however mild its character

254. #254

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     **VIII**

     Theoretical move: Lacan establishes *das Ding* as the excluded interior of the psychic organization — an operational but irreducibly opaque field that lies beyond the signifying chain and the pleasure principle, and whose ethical significance distinguishes Freudian metapsychology from both Hegelian philosophy of the state and affect-based psychology.

     Freud addresses the sick individual as such, the neurotic, the psychotic; he addresses directly the powers of life insofar as they open onto the powers of death.

255. #255

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **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.

     At another point he relates paranoia to scientific discourse.

256. #256

     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 paranoid doesn't believe in that first stranger in relation to whom the subject is obliged to take his bearings.

257. #257

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.83

     **VI**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

     I pointed it out when I was discussing the case of President Schreber. The function of the stars in the delirious system of that exemplary subject shows us, just like a compass, the polar star of the relation of man to the real.

258. #258

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.320

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

     those who do, those who in fact hear themselves being heard, are madmen who are hallucinating. This is the very structure of hallucination.

259. #259

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.115

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' desire as an atopia — an unclassifiable, unsituable place of pure desire for discourse — which he locates topologically in the space between-two-deaths, and uses this to frame the question of the analyst's desire as something that must be articulated beyond the vague notion of training catharsis.

     Don't we almost find ourselves faced here with an apparition that is foreign to us, with a manifestation that I would qualify... as akin to the psychotic core?

260. #260

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the cross-cap/projective plane—specifically the hole structure of the Möbius strip and the double cut that yields a central piece plus a Möbius surface—to formalise the structure of fantasy ($ ◇ a), showing how the Objet petit a is situated at the point of lack in the Other and how narcissistic/specular identification serves as a lure that covers the true relationship to the object of desire.

     For the psychotic his own body, which is to be distinguished in its place, in this structuring of desire, his own body is all-important.

261. #261

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan positions the logic of desire—articulated through the fantasy matheme ($◇a) and the topology of the subject's relation to the object—as the necessary supplement to Lévi-Straussian structuralism, while simultaneously arguing that the three clinical structures (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are each 'normal' expressions of the three constitutive terms of desire, and that misreading drive as biological agency is the foundational error of ego-psychology/American psychoanalysis.

     The psychotic is normal in his psychosis, and moreover because the psychotic in desire has to deal with the body

262. #262

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > M Audouard

     Theoretical move: The passage raises the theoretical problem of how anxiety, precisely as that which resists symbolisation (marking the failure of symbolisation), can itself come to be symbolised — and what happens at the 'central hole' from which the signifier is born.

     I am not used to schizophrenics, but as regards neurotics and perverts

263. #263

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.209

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology—specifically the theory of knots and surface dimensions—is necessary to account for the subject's relation to desire and the constitution of the imaginary mediating function (i(o)), and that anxiety arises precisely when this imaginary mediation is lacking; topology is proposed as the proper formalism to replace naive spatial intuition derived from the specular image.

     what we need to distinguish what happens for example at the steps that Mme Aulagnier has divided in going from the normal to the psychotic

264. #264

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     in psychosis for example, we have seen that unless the relation between affect and verbalisation is more clearly defined a kind of paradox appears, whereby on the one hand the psychotic is seen as someone particularly subject to anxiety

265. #265

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.252

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's sadistic fantasy misses its true target: it aims at the specular image i(o) rather than at the object of desire o itself, because a fundamental asymmetry between the specular image and the object (which has no specular image) leads the neurotic astray—and it is this structural confusion, not narcissism per se, that accounts for neurosis and radically distinguishes it from perversion and psychosis.

     it is also the only reference which allows us radically to differentiate the structure of the neurotic from neighbouring structures... from those which are psychotic.

266. #266

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.

     if the subject does not include in its definition, in its primary articulation, the possibility of psychotic structure, we will never be anything but alienists.

267. #267

     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.

     For the psychotic the Other is introjected at the level of his own body, at the level of everything which surrounds the primordial absence which is the only thing which designates him as subject.

268. #268

     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.

     The psychotic is a subject whose demand has never been symbolised by the Other, for whom the real and the symbolic, phantasy and reality have never been demarcated because he has never acceded to the imaginary, the third dimension which alone allows a differentiation between these two different levels.

269. #269

     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. Hence the end of the role of psychoanalysis.

270. #270

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.94

     Translator's Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a translator's notes section providing bibliographic references, terminological clarifications, and contextual annotations for Lacan's "Triumph of Religion" text; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Cf. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III. The Psychoses, trans. R. Grigg, New York: Norton, 1993, p. 214.

271. #271

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.88

     The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

     This is also where the mechanism of psychosis, 'hearing voices,' uses, takes on, only the hallucinatory trait which pertains to the voice itself.

272. #272

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.138

     The voice and the drive > The voice and the letter

     Theoretical move: Dolar uses Freud's well-known ambivalence toward music as a pivot to argue that the voice operates across three registers in Freud's texts (fantasy, desire, drive), and that the key fault-line in the Freudian corpus is between an unconscious that "speaks" (structured like a language) and drives that are constitutively mute — with the death drive as the silent, invisible shadow subtending the "clamor" of Eros.

     Here I will leave aside the two most obvious and frequently discussed instances: hearing voices in psychosis, and the voice of the superego

273. #273

     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.

     if the voice supplants the Other and immediately 'makes the law,' then it entails the dramatic consequences we can witness in psychosis

274. #274

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.140

     The voice and the drive > The click

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the voice functions as a traumatic kernel at the origin of fantasy, specifically the primal scene fantasy: a contingent, inexplicable sound (the 'click') short-circuits inner and outer, revealing an excess of jouissance in the Other that simultaneously constitutes the subject's own enigma, so that subjectivation is grounded not in language structure but in a pre-linguistic sonorous object.

     a curious case that Freud called 'A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease'

275. #275

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.50

     chapter 2 > Voice and presence

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that the object voice, far from grounding a "metaphysics of presence" (as Derrida's deconstruction of phonocentrism might imply), introduces an irreducible rupture at the core of narcissistic self-presence: the voice is not the transparent medium of auto-affection but harbors an alien, Real kernel—the object voice—that makes the subject possible only through an impossible relation to what cannot be present.

     there is the widespread experience of psychosis based on 'hearing voices,' the vast field of auditory hallucinations which impose themselves as more real than any other voices

276. #276

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.75

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause and the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of cause—tied to failure, the materiality of language, and the equivocations of the signifier—surpasses both the covering-law model and Hart/Honoré's norm/deviation framework, while simultaneously critiquing "historicist" and "psychological" constructions of the subject (illustrated through the Clerambault case) as unable to account for how subjects are overdetermined by meanings they never consciously experience.

     G. G. de Clerambault... through his concept of mental automatism, completely revised our notion of psychosis and disassembled the category of effort or will upon which the study of the psyche had been based

277. #277

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.142

     Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety > The Drying Up of the Breast

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that vampirism figures the collapse of fantasy's support of desire—the "drying up of the breast" as objet petit a—when the extimate object loses its proper distance and returns as an uncanny double endowed with surplus jouissance, threatening the subject's constitutive lack; this structure is traced across breast-feeding advocacy, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and La Jetée.

     The negativism of psychotics is proof of this; libidinal cathexis is withdrawn from the world, producing the psychotic experience of the 'end of the world.'

278. #278

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.

     we are better able to understand the so-called object-of-attention delusion or, more correctly, object-of-scrutiny delusion, that crops up so conspicuously in the symptomatology of paranoid illnesses

279. #279

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).

     Also, in the case of the paraphrenic illnesses, we can better understand the concomitance within the ego-ideal of ideal-formation and sublimation, the retrogression of sublimations, and the re-formation of ideals.

280. #280

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     In the case of paraphrenia, megalomania permits a similar inner processing of the libido once it has retreated into the ego; it is perhaps only when the megalomania has failed that the build-up of libido within the ego becomes pathogenic

281. #281

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's explanatory validity against Jung's claim that it fails with dementia praecox, arguing that the ego-drive/sexual-drive antagonism remains the most productive hypothesis for psychoanalytic work, even while acknowledging its biological rather than purely psychological grounding.

     Jung's claim that the libido theory has been proved a 'failure' by its inability to solve the problem of dementia praecox, and is therefore finished in respect of other neuroses too

282. #282

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," critiquing Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian technical terms; it is primarily philological/bibliographic apparatus with limited direct theoretical work.

     Regarding these propositions, cf. the discussion of the 'end of the world' in the analysis of Senate President Schreber (1911)

283. #283

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     The question then arises as to the subsequent fate of the libido in schizophrenia once it has been withdrawn from objects. The megalomania characteristic of this condition points the way.

284. #284

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.134

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Singularity as a Social Phenomenon*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that singularity is not an asocial eruption of the real but a social phenomenon produced by creatively linking the sinthome (the inexorable real in the subject) with the signifier, such that the rebellious energies of the real become the very engine of symbolic innovation—and this reconciles the apparent opposition between Lacanian, Foucauldian, and Derridean accounts of symbolic subversion.

     he was able to flirt with psychosis in a manner that many of us are not.

285. #285

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.21

     *Introduction* > *What Sublimation Can Do*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian singularity should be located not only in acts of symbolic rupture (subjective destitution) but also in the creative reformulation of symbolic systems from within, positioning the interface between the Symbolic and the Real — exemplified by sublimation and Joyce's sinthome — as the proper site of both singularity and resistance.

     a self-annihilating plunge into the (arguably psychotic) wilderness of the real

286. #286

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.248

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *6. The Dignity of the Thing*

     Theoretical move: This passage, comprising endnotes to a chapter on sublimity and love, develops the theoretical relationship between Das Ding, sublimation, the drive, jouissance, and the Real, arguing that aesthetic and sublimatory processes mediate our proximity to the Thing while the drive's satisfaction lies in its perpetual circling rather than attainment.

     it isn't impossible that one should imagine to determine the minimal number of fundamental points of insertion between the signifier and the signified necessary for a human being to be called normal, and which, when they are not established, or when they give way, make a psychotic

287. #287

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.130

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Epiphanies That Transmit the Real*

     Theoretical move: Joyce's writing is theorized as a privileged site where the Real irrupts into the Symbolic not to destroy but to radicalize language: by remaining at the level of metonymic residue rather than metaphor, Joyce's epiphanies transmit scraps of the Real and enact an eroticization of language that brushes against the sinthome without collapsing into psychosis.

     Joyce's writing can approach psychosis without never fully falling into it.

288. #288

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.244

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > 8. Here is one example:

     Theoretical move: The passage, drawn from endnotes, argues that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real are each structurally necessary components of bearable human coexistence: the Symbolic Third mediates between subjects and the monstrous Real Thing, the Imaginary enables identification with the other, and the Real supplies the dynamism of singular passion—while also elaborating the sinthome as a meaning-producing enigma that is opaque, poetic, and irreducible to ultimate signification.

     the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber's God who directly controls me)

289. #289

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.155

     6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *Symbolic Ideals and Values*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that symbolic quilting points, when chosen critically, serve a constructive function by anchoring desire in collective meaning without arresting its movement—thus enabling sublimation rather than narcissistic closure—and that the ego ideal (symbolic) is theoretically superior to the ideal ego (imaginary) precisely because it opens onto collective structures rather than foreclosing personal limitation.

     Quilting points guarantee that no matter how ludic the sliding of the signifier gets, it does not slide quite to the point of psychosis (or complete nonmeaning).

290. #290

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.128

     5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Lacan's Reading of Joyce*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sinthome is not a site of pure destruction but of creative renewal: by identifying with his sinthome, Joyce links the symbolic and the real so as to generate innovative signification, making artistic creativity—rather than subjective destitution—a viable response to the death drive's impossibility.

     it would be easy to take this to imply that jouissance destroys meaning altogether, thereby ushering the subject to the heart of psychosis (or the ethical/divine act)

291. #291

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.254

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 5**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 5, providing bibliographic citations and brief clarifying glosses for claims made in the chapter body. It is largely non-substantive but contains several theoretically load-bearing footnotes connecting anxiety, extimacy, consciousness, negation, and desire to specific Lacanian sources.

     The distinction between negation and the negativism of psychotics is made by Jean Hyppolite in his commentary on Freud's Verneinung

292. #292

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.131

     **Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety** > <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_page127"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_c05_r1.htm_pg127" class="pagebreak" title="127"></span></span>**The Drying Up of the Breast**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that vampirism and the uncanny are structurally indexed to the collapse of the fantasy relation to the partial object (objet petit a): when the extimate object loses its status as object-cause of desire and is encountered at zero distance, anxiety replaces desire, the fantasy structure collapses, and jouissance floods in—a logic illustrated through breast-feeding discourse, vampire fiction, Hitchcock's Rebecca, and Marker's La Jetée.

     The negativism of psychotics is proof of this; libidinal cathexis is withdrawn from the world, producing the psychotic experience of the 'end of the world.'

293. #293

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the case of Clérambault to distinguish between three epistemological constructions of the subject—psychological, psychoanalytic, and historicist—arguing that psychoanalysis dissolves the fantasy of a subject with secret inner knowledge by replacing "lived experience" with the overdetermination of the subject by the signifier, thus also critiquing historicism's reduction of subjects to pathological experience.

     G. G. de Clérambault was a well-known and respected French psychiatrist who, through his concept of mental automatism, completely revised our notion of psychosis

294. #294

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.244

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 3**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 3, providing scholarly references and brief clarificatory asides on sources cited in the main argument, including Freud, Lacan, Bergson, Aristotle, Derrida, and others. It is primarily bibliographic and non-substantive, though a few notes carry minor theoretical glosses.

     An analysis of the refutation of Bergsonian/Janetist, that is, 'evolutionary,' psychiatry by the structural psychoanalysis of Clérambault/Lacan would reveal the problems inherent in Sass's definition.

295. #295

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.169

     **FRIDAY, MARCH 17**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a memoir excerpt depicting grief, trauma, and guilt following a son's suicide; it contains no substantive Lacanian or psychoanalytic theoretical argumentation, operating instead as personal narrative testimony.

     I hadn't taken seriously enough the possibility that he was descending into real madness... He thought people were after him all the time... he was convinced that somebody had put bugs in there for listening to him.

296. #296

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.191

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_182" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="182"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c13_r1.xhtml_page_183" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="183"></span>*13*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a first-person account of a psilocybin research session to enact, at the level of lived experience, a dissolution of the boundaries between self and other, reality and unreality, life and death—culminating in an identification with the dead son that functions as a form of grief-work running parallel to, and impatient with, the formal analytic process.

     I think at one point, for example, that I am going insane... convinced that they are standing over me, horrified at the psychosis into which I have sunk

297. #297

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.117

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Dream's Solution

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that dream-work enacts a "short circuit" between verbal (preconscious) and imagistic (unconscious) registers of the dispositional field, and that free association as analytic method constitutes a principled resistance to the fusional, totalizing power of the dream-image—reversing condensation by dissolving the image back into its conditioning field.

     Failure to make this discrimination threatens the subject with descent into psychosis. During sleep, however, this discriminating function is abrogated in some degree. For the dreaming subject, as for the psychotic, linguistic forms offer themselves as immediately transposable into the register of image perception.

298. #298

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.121

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > Circulation in the Psychical Apparatus

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's imaginary-symbolic distinction can be recast as a theory of "circulation" within the psychical apparatus, where clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis) represent specific breakdowns or arrests in this dialectical interplay, and where analytic work consists in repunctuating discourse to restore proper circulation between the two registers.

     the onset of psychosis becomes comparable to an uncontrolled slippage of the signifier, compensated for by delusional overgrowths of the imaginary. In psychosis, as Freud had already suggested, the relation between words and things breaks down with the result that words are mistaken for things.

299. #299

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.279

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>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.

     absolute certainty without reality could function as a shorthand definition of paranoia. The nonpsychotic orientation to the world, on the contrary, has a firm sense of reality precisely because it doesn't have absolute certainty.

300. #300

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.161

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 3 </span><span id="ch3.xhtml_p133" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 133. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>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.

     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.

301. #301

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.263

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

     Theoretical move: By mapping the *objet a* across Schema L, Schema R, the Gestalt figure/ground distinction, and the Greimasian semiotic square, Boothby argues that the *objet a* is not a positional object but an "objectality" function that emerges from the structural tension between das Ding (maternal) and the paternal Law (symbolic order), a tension whose topology is best captured by Schema R rather than Schema L.

     Its failure, as we see it in the Schreber case, triggers descent into psychosis. For Schreber, das Ding appears in the place of the imaginary other, but with all the power and uncanny monstrousness of the primordial object.

302. #302

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.173

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: By contrasting Deleuze's "realization of ontology through repetition" with Lacan's account of the symbolic cut as primary, Zupančič (drawing on Dolar) argues that tyche is the gap internal to automaton—i.e., the Real is not opposed to the Symbolic but is its constitutive impasse—and further that repetition and primary repression are co-extensive rather than causally related, so that alienation, the signifying dyad, and the forced choice together explain why repetition cannot be dissolved by successful interpretation.

     psychosis implies precisely that symbolic relations appear as real—like 'nerves' and 'cosmic rays' in the case of President Schreber

303. #303

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical necessity of a primary narcissism by tracing the concept from its clinical origins through schizophrenia, childhood, and "primitive" thought, thereby justifying the differentiation of ego-libido from object-libido and grounding psychoanalysis in empirical observation rather than speculative theory.

     Compelling grounds for entertaining the notion of a primary and normal form of narcissism arose when the attempt was made to apply the libido theory to our understanding of dementia praecox (Kraepelin) or schizophrenia (Bleuler).

304. #304

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     Refusal to eat as a result of fear is a characteristic of psychotic states (delusional fear of poisoning).

305. #305

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.

     We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal.

306. #306

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

     dementia praecox and paranoia will afford us insight into the psychology of the ego

307. #307

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," correcting Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian terms; it is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than theoretically substantive, though it touches on Narcissism, the Ego Ideal, libido cathexis, and the censorial agency (superego precursor).

     Regarding these propositions, cf. the discussion of the 'end of the world' in the analysis of Senate President Schreber (1911)

308. #308

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud defends the libido theory's biological grounding and its methodological priority in psychoanalytic work against Jung's claim that its failure to explain dementia praecox (schizophrenia) invalidates it for the neuroses, insisting the antagonism between ego drives and sexual drives remains the productive working hypothesis derived from analysis of transference neuroses.

     let us not be deterred from rigorously following up the first hypothesis we mentioned, viz. that of an antagonism between ego drives and sexual drives thrust upon us by our analysis of the transference neuroses, and thereby discovering whether it can be developed in a fruitful and consistent way, and whether it can be applied to other disorders as well, e.g. schizophrenia.

309. #309

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.

     Patients then complain that all their thoughts are known, their actions watched and monitored. They are informed of the workings of this entity by voices… Object-of-scrutiny delusions reflect it in a regressive form

310. #310

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.425

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Ibi <span id="corollary_4_ibi_rhodus_ibi_saltus.xhtml_IDX-952"></span>Rhodus Ibi Saltus! > [Four Ethical Gestures](#contents.xhtml_ahd28)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that an "empty ritual" — one whose traditional content is lost and whose artificiality is fully acknowledged — can be more authentically operative than an immersive, "authentic" one, and uses this case to construct a four-term Greimasian matrix of ethical gestures organized around the axes of negative/positive and ritual/non-ritualized act, while also distinguishing hegemonic false universality from the authentic universality embodied by those excluded from the hegemonic order.

     some kind of ritual has to be found to avoid a psychotic breakdown—but since the hold of the big Other (symbolic substance) is broken, this can only be an empty ritual

311. #311

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.235

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>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.

     it just bears witness to Tannhauser's psychotic split between the Real and the Imaginary which takes place when the third term, the Symbolic, is foreclosed.

312. #312

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.444

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > <span id="scholium_42_prokofievs_travels.xhtml_IDX-1802"></span>Prokofiev’s Travels

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Philippe Petit's high-wire act and Prokofiev's return to the USSR as parallel figures of "the Act" — a gesture combining meticulous planning with abyssal purposelessness — to argue that simple beauty produced under conditions of terror is not mere escapism but ideology at its most efficient, precisely because it is "homogenizable" (not identical) with the dominant order while retaining its own coherent artistic greatness.

     he weathered the anti-formalist campaign of 1948 with an almost psychotic serenity, as if it didn't really concern him.

313. #313

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.345

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of <span id="theorem_iv_the_persistence_of_abstraction.xhtml_IDX-17"></span>Abstraction > [Madness, Sex, War](#contents.xhtml_ahd22)

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that "abstract negativity" (madness, sexuality, war) is not an accidental excess to be sublated but a constitutive, immanent remainder that persists at the heart of every ethical and ontological edifice; the Möbius-strip topology of this persistence means that the barbaric core sustaining civilization cannot be simply overcome by expanding rational order, and Hegel's own failure to follow through on this insight (in sexuality and in his conservative politics) reveals the limit of any synthesis from Substance to Subject.

     madness is not an accidental lapse, distortion, 'illness' of human spirit, but something which is inscribed into individual spirit's basic ontological constitution: to be a human means to be potentially mad

314. #314

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.169

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Sinuosities of Sexualized Time > [Days of the Living Dead](#contents.xhtml_ahd11)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that digitalization does not threaten humanist subjectivity but rather the decentered Freudian subject: it risks collapsing the symbolic big Other into a really-existing machine, thereby abolishing the constitutive gap (alienation/separation, counterfactuality, primordial repression) that makes subjectivity possible—while the "paranoid" structure of digital control is nonetheless pathological because the digital Other is immanently stupid and cannot register the purely virtual dimension of the Freudian unconscious.

     There is a clear psychotic-paranoiac potential in this shift: in paranoia, the big Other falls into reality and becomes an actual agent that persecutes the subject.

315. #315

     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.

     Searle's mythical tribe is thus a tribe of psychotics which - because of the taboo concerning names of dead persons - forecloses the function of the Name-of-the-Father

316. #316

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian Real is a paradoxical entity that does not exist yet produces structural effects (trauma, jouissance, the MacGuffin, class struggle, antagonism), and extends this logic to the 'forced choice of freedom'—the subject is always-already positioned in the symbolic order such that 'free choice' is itself real-impossible, structured retroactively, which Žižek traces from Kant through Schelling to Freud/Lacan.

     The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject, one who retains a kind of distance from the symbolic order - who is not really caught in the signifying network.

317. #317

     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.

     the way we 'choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)' through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation

318. #318

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.226

     Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf *avec* Lacan *contra* Deleuze

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Woolf's novels stage a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology in which subjectivity is constituted by irreducible negativity and the interruptive structure of memory, contra Deleuze's notion of Becoming as anti-memory; Clarissa's "flowers of darkness" and Septimus's dissolution together demonstrate that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

     Septimus is almost a parody of the 'schizophrenic' openness that Deleuze prescribes as the antidote to neurosis.

319. #319

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.28

     Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek

     Theoretical move: This introductory survey passage maps the theoretical terrain of a collection's second section on Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism, demonstrating how each chapter uses Lacanian concepts (objet petit a, death drive, extimacy, sublimation, the barred subject) to critique rival materialisms (Deleuzian, new materialist, object-oriented) and assert the irreducibility of the subject and the Real.

     Septimus Smith, a character whose schizophrenia and eventual suicide suggest that... libidinally charged visions of matter as emergent or 'becoming' not only veer dangerously toward the cheap plenitudes of freedom, but also sidestep the more challenging enigma of ontological incompleteness

320. #320

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.17

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > The Proximity of David Lynch

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Lynch's cinema achieves a theoretically impossible feat: by formally separating the realms of desire and fantasy—rather than blending them as most films and everyday experience do—Lynch's films expose the structural relationship between the two, revealing how fantasy retroactively constitutes desire rather than merely answering it, and thereby producing a "normality" more unsettling than any avant-garde subversion.

     The psychotic confuses reality and fantasy and experiences them as equivalent... for the psychotic every experience, even a fantasmatic one, seems real.

321. #321

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.140

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.

     psychosis, 16, 228n

322. #322

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.122

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > NOTES > Infroduction: The Bizarre Nafure of Normality

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for the introduction of a book on David Lynch, providing scholarly citations and brief elaborations on concepts including the gaze, fantasy, desire, normality, and the uncanny in relation to film theory and psychoanalysis. It is primarily apparatus rather than original theoretical argument.

     both in neurosis and psychosis there comes into consideration the question not only of a loss of reality but also of a substitute for reality.

323. #323

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.131

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>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.

     Were the phallic function to be totally inoperative for a subject, he or she would be psychotic, the bar over the phallic function designating foreclosure.

324. #324

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.75

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**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.

     Psychosis, according to Lacan, results from a child's failure to assimilate a 'primordial' signifier which would otherwise structure the child's symbolic universe, that failure leaving the child unanchored in language.

325. #325

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

     neurosis, psychosis, and perversion

326. #326

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.65

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > **Lacan's Split Subject**

     Theoretical move: The Lacanian subject is nothing but the split itself — a radical separation between ego (false being) and unconscious (the Other's discourse) produced by alienation in language; this split, which exceeds purely linguistic/structural explanation, serves as the foundational diagnostic divide between neurosis and psychosis.

     Lacan states that in psychosis this split cannot be assumed to have occurred at all, the 'unconscious' being 'a ciel ouvert,' exposed for all the world to see.

327. #327

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.12

     **THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

     Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.

     the conditions responsible for the failure to become a subject (leading to psychosis)

328. #328

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.207

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity

     Theoretical move: This passage is a footnotes/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief clarificatory remarks on Lacanian concepts including Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, primal repression, the drive-language relation, S1/S2, and the beyond of castration; it is largely non-substantive as a theoretical text but contains several load-bearing conceptual notes.

     for a far more complete discussion of psychosis (e.g., the failure of the paternal metaphor and its consequences)

329. #329

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.85

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**The Lacanian Subject** > *Subjectifying the Cause: A Temporal Conundrum*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that separation and the subjectification of the cause operate under a retroactive temporal logic (future anterior / Nachträglichkeit) that is irreducible to classical linear causality, and that this culminates in the traversal of fantasy as the moment when the Other's desire is fully "signifierized," liberating the subject from the fixity of the Name-of-the-Father and enabling genuine action.

     This is not the freedom of the psychotic Lacan mentions in his early paper 'Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis' (Ecrits); it is not a freedom 'before' the letter but 'after' it.

330. #330

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.94

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**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.

     jouissance invades the body in schizophrenia, and the locus of the Other as such in paranoia.

331. #331

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.69

     <span id="page-53-0"></span>**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.

     psychosis can be understood as a form of victory by the child over the Other, the child foregoing his or her advent as a divided subject so as not to submit to the Other as language.

332. #332

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

     the different clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, and perversion) and their subcategories

333. #333

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

     <span id="page-231-0"></span>**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.

     psychosis and, 55...Name-of-the-Father: ... psychosis and, 75

334. #334

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.193

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan > Return to Comedy

     Theoretical move: Comic repetition is theorized as the structural re-enactment of the schism between the subject's being and meaning—not a revelation of nonsense but a practice that repeats the erratic emergence of sense at the limit of subject/objet petit a incongruence, which is precisely why the most serious existential stakes can only be approached through comedy.

     not in order to force a psychotic falling of the subject into the object

335. #335

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.43

     part i

     Theoretical move: Župančič reads Hegel's account of comedy as the site where substance undergoes its own alienation and thereby becomes subject, such that comedy is not the undermining of the universal by the concrete but the universal's own self-movement — a theoretical move that reframes the comic as producing concrete universality rather than merely exposing its limits.

     a lunatic is not some poor chap who believes that he is a king; a lunatic is a king who believes that he really is a king.

336. #336

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.173

     Conceptual Stakes of Repetition: Deleuze and Lacan

     Theoretical move: By triangulating Deleuze and Lacan on repetition, Župančič argues that the three Lacanian registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) correspond to three modes of repetition, and that tyche is the gap internal to automaton rather than its opposite—a structure grounded in primary repression and alienation as co-constitutive rather than causally sequential moments of subjectivity.

     psychosis implies precisely that symbolic relations appear as real—like 'nerves' and 'cosmic rays' in the case of President Schreber

337. #337

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.354

     The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fundamentalism?

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that fundamentalism is defined by the immediate identification with fantasy (becoming the "dupe of one's fantasy") which forecloses the enigma of the Other's desire; this structural analysis is then extended to show that liberal multiculturalism's tolerant repression of passion produces the same segregationist logic it claims to oppose, leaving aggressive secularism and fundamentalist passion as mirror-image dead ends.

     Her psychosis and lack of fantasmatic coordinates are evident in her strange relationship with her mother

338. #338

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.228

     29 > **Preface** > **Introduction**

     Theoretical move: This endnotes passage consolidates the theoretical apparatus of the book by anchoring its key moves—the Lacanian gaze as object rather than look, the critique of empiricism in spectator theory, the real as the neglected register in film theory, and masochism as the primary form of cinematic enjoyment—through a dense network of citations and polemical asides.

     studies of cinema influenced by psychoanalysis remain more or less comfortably identified with the neurotic, and have been less willing to engage in the more difficult (in some sense, impossible) project of identifying with the psychotic

339. #339

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.60

     **Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.

     This collapse of 'fiction' (the contents of the hallucination) and 'reality' defines the psychotic universe

340. #340

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.62

     **Pleasure Principle**

     Theoretical move: This passage works as a keyword glossary, deploying several core Freudian and Lacanian concepts—Pleasure Principle, Preconscious, Psychoanalysis, Psychosis, and Point de capiton—each illustrated by a canonical quotation, with the quilting-point entry making the strongest theoretical move: the retroactive logic of narrative closure masks the radical contingency of any signifying chain.

     The psychotic confuses reality and fantasy and experiences them as equivalent...for the psychotic every experience, even a fantasmatic one, seems real.

341. #341

     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.

     the problem with the clinical structure that psychoanalysts name psychosis: it is not, as some psychologists maintain, that in psychosis one suffers from delusions 'detached from reality.' Rather, the problem with psychosis, obviously, is that there is 'too much' reality.

342. #342

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.311

     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.

     the reason I don't endorse such an interpretation is that, if we accept it, we should say that Stalinism was incomparably more 'psychotic'

343. #343

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.303

     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.

     In Lacan's third seminar on psychosis he claimed that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real.

344. #344

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.64

     Žižek Responds! > [Žižek and the Risks of Irony](#contents.xhtml_ch2) > In Need of Dogma?

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's "gappy" ontology, unlike Kant's Doctrine of Method or the Pittsburgh School's neo-Hegelian frameworks, lacks a reflective dogmatic foundation (an "article of faith" grounded in subjective certainty), and that this deficiency — while philosophically consistent — renders his dialectical thinking politically and existentially unstable, unable to serve as a ground for hope, action, or mastery.

     I do not want to claim that Žižek willingly accepted this and—similar to Nietzsche—lives out an ordinary psychosis triggered by the abysses of his theory.

345. #345

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.309

     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.

     All these (and other similar) phenomena cannot be accounted for in the terms of Lacan's first definition of psychosis ('what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real').

346. #346

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

     Žižek Responds! > [<span class="grey">INDEX</span>](#contents.xhtml_end1)

     Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage listing proper names and Lacanian sub-concepts with their page/anchor references across the volume; it is non-substantive and performs no theoretical argument.

     psychosis [here](#13_iek_and_the_war_in_an_era_of_generalized_foreclosure.xhtml_IDX-732), [here](#response_to_rousselle.xhtml_IDX-733)

347. #347

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     Reflexive impotence, immobilization and liberal communism

     Theoretical move: Fisher argues that British youth's political disengagement is not apathy but 'reflexive impotence'—a self-fulfilling epistemological posture produced by the control society's logic of indefinite postponement, depressive hedonia, and the privatization/pathologization of systemic problems, which forecloses politicization more effectively than overt repression.

     'With the breakdown of the signifying chain', Jameson summarized, 'the Lacanian schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time'.