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[[Left]]-wing [[philosophers]] likewise fell under the spell of Lacan's book. [[Paul]] Nizan, a careful reader of Jaspers, published a [[summary]] of it the [[communist]] daily L'humanité for February 10, 1933; Lacan's talk of a "[[concrete]]" [[psychology]] related to "social [[reality]]" sufficed to open that [[particular]] door. Jean Bernier, in La critique social, a journal to the left of the Communist Party, offered a brilliant [[reading]] of Lacan's thesis, despite being marred by misunderstandings of psychoanalysis so common among revolutionary critics.
Lacan's [[doctoral thesis]] was significant in [[another]] way too: it was his declaration of allegiance to psychoanalysis. He undertook a personal [[analysis]] and trained under the auspices of the recently established Société psychanalytique de [[Paris]] (Paris [[Psychoanalytic]] [[Society]]). In his thesis, he hailed "the scientific import of [[Freudian]] [[doctrine]]," the only theory capable of apprehending the "[[true]] nature of pathology," as opposed to [[other]] methods, which, despite their "very valuable observational syntheses," failed to clear up uncertainties (1932, p. 255). Lacan's study of the case of Aimée and his overall view of [[The Psychoses|the psychoses ]] were thoroughly imbued with Freudian [[teachings]]. Thus he saw the psychogenesis of Aimée's pathology in light of the theory of the development of the [[libido]], as rounded out a few years earlier by Karl [[Abraham]] (1924/1927). And he [[understood]] delusion as the [[unconscious]] offering itself to the [[understanding]] of [[consciousness]]. "Ça joue au clair," Lacan reiterated in his [[seminar]] on the psychoses (1981/1993, [[session]] of 25 January 1956).
For Lacan, the notion of personality certainly implied "a conception of oneself" (1932, p. 42), but in his view this conception was based on "[[ideal]]" [[images]] brought up into consciousness. Under the acknowledged influence of Angelo Hesnard and René Laforgue's report to the Fifth Conference of French-[[Speaking]] [[Psychoanalysts]] in June 1930, Lacan advanced his hypothesis of psychosis as "self-punishment" under the influence of the [[superego]]. He suggested that a nosological [[distinction]] be drawn for cases where an element of hate and a "combative attitude" turn back upon the [[subject]] in the shape of self-accusation and self-depreciation, and concluded by proposing the category of "psychoses of the [[super-ego]]," to include contentious and self-punishing forms of paranoia (1932, p. 338).
The most striking aspect of Lacan's thesis, in the context of the time, was the evidence it offered of his solid Freudian grounding, gleaned in part, no [[doubt]], from his [[translation]] into French, in that same year of 1932, of Freud's paper "Some [[Neurotic]] Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and [[Homosexuality]]" (1922b [1921]). What Lacan drew from this important work underlay his assertion that "Aimée's entire delusion" could "be understood as an increasingly centrifugal [[displacement]] of a hate whose direct [[object]] she wished to misapprehend" (1932, p. 282). At the beginning of his [[discussion]], Lacan derived a general proposition from the same source: "The [[developmental]] distance, according to Freud, that separates the [[homosexual]] [[drive]], the [[cause]] of [[traumatic]] [[repression]], from the point of [[narcissistic]] [[fixation]], which reveals a completed [[regression]], is a measure of the seriousness of the psychosis in any given case" (1932, p. 262).
The case of Aimée continued to play a part in Lacan's [[life]]. For one, he had [[good]] cause to [[remember]] it when, years later, Aimée turned out to be the [[mother]] of one of his [[patients]], the [[psychoanalyst]] Didier Anzieu. Furthermore, the themes explored in De la psychose paranoïaque continued to preoccupy him in his later work. Most significantly, his resolutely psychoanalytic approach to the psychoses was confirmed by his defining work of the 1950s (1993, 2004), whose great [[theoretical]] import was rivaled only by what he called "fidelity to the [[formal]] envelope of the [[symptom]]" (1966, p. 66). This remark does far more than endorse the precepts of a grand [[clinical]] [[tradition]]; it distills certain constants of Lacan's [[thinking]]. As he adds in the same passage, the formal envelope of [[The Symptom|the symptom ]] may stretch to a "[[limit]] where it reverses direction and becomes creative." This was a crucial issue for Lacan throughout his life, and in many different ways. The culmination of this concern was his engagement with the work of [[James]] [[Joyce]], which informed his seminar of 1975-1976 on the "[[sinthome]]" (1976-1977). On the same page ofÉcrits (p. 66), Lacan, reviewing his own [[past]] itinerary, described what might be considered the function of the symptom: to keep up, despite the ever-[[present]] risk of slipping, with what he called "confronting the abyss." Psychosis exemplified such confrontation, which was why Lacan returned here to how "passing to [[The Act|the act]]" may serve to "fan the fire" of delusion—an original theme explored in his thesis. How such [[acts]] relate to [[literary]] creation, the function of the symptom, and passing to the act were thus just so many issues first broached in the case of Aimée.
BERNARD TOBOUL
