Psychosis

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"psychosis" (Fr. psychose)

Sigmund Freud

The term psychosis arose in psychiatry in the nineteenth century as a way of designating mental illness in general.

During Freud's life, a basic distinction between psychosis and neurosis came to be generally accepted, according to which psychosis designated extreme forms of mental illness and neurosis denoted less serious disorders.

This basic distinction between neurosis and psychosis was taken up and developed by Freud himself in several papers.[1]

Jacques Lacan

Lacan's interest in psychosis predates his nterest in psychoanalysis.

Indeed it was his doctoral research, which concerned a psychotic woman whom Lacan calls Aimée that first led Lacan to psychoanalytic theory.[2]

It is often remarked that Lacan's debt to this patient is reminiscent of Freud's debt to his first neurotic patient's (who were also female).

In other words, whereas Freud's first approach to the unconscious sis by way of neurosis, Lacan's tortured and at times almsot incomprehensible style of writing and speaking to the discourse of psychotic patients.

Whatever one makes of such comparisons, it is clear that Lacan's discussions of psychosis are among the most significant and original aspects of his work. ---

Lacan's most detailed discussion of psychosis appears in his seminar of 1955-6, entitled simply The Psychoses.

It is here that he expounds what come to be the main tents of the Lacanian approach to madness.

Psychosis is defined as one of the three clinical structures, one of hwihc is defined by the operation of foreclosure.

In this operation, the Name-of-the-Father is not integrated in the symbolic universe of the psychotic (it is "foreclosed"), with the result that a hole is left in the symbolic order.

To speak of a hole in the symbolic order is not to say that the psychotic does not have an unconscious; on the contrary, in psychosis "the unconscious is present but not functioning."[3]

The psychotic structure thus results from a certain malfunction of the Oedipus complex, a lack in the paternal function; more specifically, in psychosis the paternal funciton is reduced to the image of the father (the symbolic is reduced to the imaginary).



---

The language phenomena most notable in psychosis are disorders of language, and Lacan argues that the presence of such disorders is a necessary condition for a diagnosis of psychosis.[4]

Among the psychotic language disorders which Lacan draws attention to are holophrases and the extensive use of neologisms (which may be completely new words coined by the psychotic, or already existing words which the psychotic redefines).[5]

In 1956, Lacan attributes these language disorders to the psychotic's lack of a sufficient number of points de capiton.

The lack of sufficient points de capiton means that the psychotic experience is characterized by a constant slippage of the signified under the signifier, which is a disaster for signification; there is a continual "casscade of reshapings of the signifier fromw hich the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified are stablized in the delusional metaphor."[6]

Another way of desribing this is as "a relationship between the subject and the signifier in its most formal dimension, in its dimension as a pure signifier."[7]

This relationship of the subject to the signifier in its purely formal aspect constitutes "the nucleus of psychosis."[8]

"If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language."[9]



Of all the various forms of psychosis, it is paranoia that most interests Lacan, while schizophrenia and mani-depressive psychosis are rarely discussed.[10]

Lacan follows Freud in maintaining a structural distinction between paranoia and schizophrenia.

  1. Freud, 1924b and 1924e
  2. Lacan, Jacques. p.1932.
  3. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.208
  4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.92
  5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p.167
  6. {E}} p.217
  7. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.250
  8. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.250
  9. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.250
  10. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56. Trans. Russell Grigg. London: Routledge, 1993. p.3-4