De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personalité

DE LA PSYCHOSE PARANOIAOUE DANS SES RAPPORTS AVEC LA PERSONNALITE (ON PARANOIAC PSYCHOSIS IN ITS RELATION TO PERSONALITY) A monograph is at the center of this doctoral thesis: Le cas Aimee (The Case of Aimee), from the name given by the patient to the heroine of her first novel. The Surrealists were enthusiastic; Pierre Janet praised it in 1935, in the A"nales Medico-Psychologiques, with regard to "malfunctions of social personality." I, in turn, find this case study, unique in Lacan's works, fascinating.

The beginning of the work provides a mine of information concerning psy�chiatric and psychological theories in France and Germany. It displays a broad range of knowledge, eclectic curiosity, and mastery of the topic. The end opens vast perspectives on a future of a "science of the personality." Could it be the first draft of that science of the subject, whose project will increas�ingly pervade the seminars? Lacan makes the case of Aimee the first case of a particular form of para�noia, that of self-punishment or psychosis of the superego. He defends his method (a concrete and exhaustive phenomenological study), which is linked to his conception of mental illness as an "illness of the personality" in its "development and structure." In this text, the notions of "vital milieu" and of "vital conflict"-which are still present in Le My the du nevrose (22)�designate in fact the social environment, including the family.

"Our research in psychoses takes up the problem at the point where psy�choanalysis left off." Here, narcissism, conceived as terra incognita, is al�ready a land to be explored.