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Defined in clincal psychiatry as a serious mental illness affecting the whole of the personality.
Unlike a patient suffering from [[neurosis]], the psychotic cannot be treated on a consensual basis and may therefore have to be committed to a psychiatric institution.
The word ''Psychose'' has been current since the 1840s, but was originally used to refer to any form of mental illness.<ref>Laplanche and Pontalis 1967</ref>
The distinction between psychosis and neurosis was introduced and gradually refined in the course of the nineteenth century, and is basic to psychoanalysis.
In psychoanalysis, 'psychosis' is used to describe conditions such as hallucinatory confusion, paranoia and schizophrenia.
Freud's theory of psychoanalysis was developed primarily with reference to neurosis.
Lacan, in contrast, began his career by working with psychotics in
psychiatric hospitals before he became a psychoanalyst (1932) and therefore elaborates a more specific theory of the origins of psychosis.
Contrasting neurosis snad psychosis, Freud argues that, whilst both conditions originate in a conflict between the ego and other agencies of the psyche, psychosis results from a disturbance in the ego's relationship with the external world, neurosis from a conflict between the ego and the id.
In psychosis the ego withdraws from some part or aspect of the rela world, either fialing to perceive it or being unaffected by its perceptiuon of it..
Lacan draws on Freud's comment and remarks on the case of Daniel Paul Schrebe, an appeal court judge who wrote an autobiographicla account of his paranoid delusions, to elaborate the thesis that psychosis is trigged by the specific mechanism of [[foreclosure]].<ref>Lacan 1957-8, 1981</ref>
A key signifier or the name of the father is expelled or foreclosed fromt he subject's symbolic world and a hole or rent is left in its ploace.
The foreclosed signifier is not integrated into the unconscious thanks to an act of repression,a nd therefore cannot return on the form of a neurotic signifier.
It returns, rather, in the real, usually in the form of persecutory hallucinations and delusions.
A mental condition whereby the patient completely loses touch with reality.
