Relation of Understanding

The "relation of understanding" (Verstehensbeziehung) is Karl Jaspers's foundational criterion for general psychopathology: certain psychological states are held to be intelligible — self-evident, empathically accessible — because they follow from their context in a way that "makes sense" to the clinician's common intuition. In Seminar III, Lacan identifies this Jaspersian pivot as the conceptual engine of psychogenesis: the theoretical tendency to explain mental phenomena by appeal to lived experience, characterological continuity, and the felt plausibility of psychological causation. The "relation of understanding" is, in this sense, the imaginary short-circuit that substitutes empathic recognition for structural analysis — the clinician assumes that because a psychotic patient's behaviour seems graspable through ordinary human motivation, it must be caused by a disturbance at that same psychological level.

Lacan's critique is that this approach is structurally blind. Psychoanalysis, for Lacan, operates precisely beyond immediate experience; it does not ask whether a phenomenon "makes sense" but what position the subject occupies in relation to the signifier, the Other, and the mechanism of foreclosure. The "relation of understanding" presupposes a continuous, legible ego-world relation — which is to say, it operates entirely within the Imaginary register — and thereby forecloses access to the structural dimension that distinguishes psychosis from neurosis. The empathic intelligibility that Jaspers prizes is, from Lacan's standpoint, the very thing that prevents the clinician from recognising foreclosure as such.

This concept appears once, in jacques-lacan-seminar-3 (p. 20), at the opening moment of Lacan's argument for a structural rather than psychogenetic account of psychosis. Its principal target is Psychogenesis — the tendency to explain mental disturbance through psychological causation and experiential continuity — which Lacan traces directly back to Jaspers's "relation of understanding" as its theoretical source. By naming Jaspers explicitly, Lacan is marking out the epistemological enemy: a phenomenological-empathic psychiatry that treats intelligibility as proof of causation.

The concept is positioned against the cluster of structural concepts that Seminar III is building toward: Foreclosure (the specific mechanism that distinguishes Psychosis from neurosis), Clinical Structures (the tripartite formal taxonomy that replaces characterological typology), and Mental Automatism (Clérambault's clinical datum, which Lacan valorises precisely because it points beyond empathic understanding to the autonomous insistence of the signifier — the Automaton). Where the "relation of understanding" anchors pathology in the Imaginary register of felt continuity and specular recognition, Lacan's structural program anchors it in the Symbolic (the signifying chain, the Name-of-the-Father, foreclosure). The "relation of understanding" thus functions in Seminar III as a negative foil: its refusal is the condition of possibility for properly structural — and properly psychoanalytic — work with psychosis.

Seminar III · The PsychosesJacques Lacan · 1955 (p.20)

It's a source that, under the name of relation of understanding, Jaspers has made the pivot of all so-called general psychopathology. It consists in thinking that some things are self-evident

The phrase "some things are self-evident" is theoretically loaded because it names the imaginary criterion — self-evidence, immediate intelligibility — that Lacan is dismantling; calling it the "pivot" of Jaspers's entire system underscores that Lacan's structural alternative requires displacing not just a method but the foundational epistemological standard of a whole tradition of psychopathology.