1 Psychosis As a Disorder at the Level of the Imaginary
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Notes 1 Psychosis as a Disorder at the Level of the Imaginary 1. This does not imply that Lacan disregards cases in which disintegration and chaos are more pronounced. Indeed, several cases taken from his clinical case presentations, which can be found in Seminar III, belong to this category. 2. ‘réactions du sujet à des situations vitales’. 3. ‘qui touche son affectivité de façon profonde’. 4. ‘l’expérience originale qui détermine la psychose, est celle qui révèle au sujet sa propre insuffisance, l’humilie sur le plan éthique’. 5. ‘Ces réactions sont caractérisées par leur insertion dans un développement psychologique compréhensible, par leur dépendance de la conception qu’a le sujet de soi-même,delatension propre à ses relations avec le milieu social’. 6. ‘cause efficiente’. 7. ‘déterminante de la structure et de la permanence des symptômes’. 8. ‘tout son pouvoir de sympathie’. 9. ‘du déclenchement des symptômes’. 10. ‘un épisode toxique endogène ou exogène, un processus anxieux, une atteinte infectieuse, un trauma émotionnel’. 11. ‘tare biologique de la libido’. 12. In this respect Lacan disagreed with his contemporary Henri Ey. In the text Remarks on Psychic Causality, Lacan (1947, pp. 123–32) strongly criticized Ey’s idea that cerebral processes and lesions can completely account for the cause of psychosis and explain its symptoms. 13. ‘la clinique ne nous montre pas ces mécanismes’. 14. ‘Certes, dans l’étude des psychoses, chaque jour semble apporter quelque corrélation organique nouvelle; qu’on y regarde de près: ces corrélations, que nous ne songeons pas à discuter, n’ont qu’une portée partielle, et ne prennent leur intérêt que du point de vue doctrinal qu’elles prétendent renforcer’. 15. ‘phase aiguë’. 16. ‘phase de méditation affective’. 17. ‘phase d’organisation du délire’. 18. ‘cause spécifique’. 19. ‘le sens du délire’. 20. This was the mother of the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who was later in analysis with Lacan. At the beginning of this analysis neither of them knew of their common relation with Marguerite Anzieu (see: Allouch, 1994; Roudinesco, 1994). 21. ‘J’ai fait cela parce qu’on voulait tuer mon enfant’. 22. ‘Nous étions deux amies’. 23. ‘Un jour, dit-elle, comme je travaillais au bureau, tout en cherchant comme toujours en moi-même d’où pouvaient venir ces menaces contre mon fils, 172 Notes 173 j’ai entendu mes collègues parler de Mme Z. Je compris alors que c’était elle qui nous en voulait’. 24. This claim had already been made in his article on the structure of paranoid psychoses (1931). 25. ‘s’opposent à celles de notre sujet “comme à l’objet de son image inversée dans le miroir”’. 26. ‘Des deux amies, l’une est l’ombre de l’autre’. 27. ‘la femme qui à un degré quelconque, jouit de la liberté et du pouvoir sociaux’. 28. ‘Aimée frappe l’être brillant qu’elle hait justement parce qu’elle représente l’idéal qu’elle a de soi’. 29. ‘les doublets, triplets et successifs “tirages” d’un prototype’. 30. ‘attribuée à l’objet’. 31. ‘Aimée frappe donc en sa victime son idéal extériorisé, comme la passionnelle frappe l’objet unique de sa haine et de son amour’. 32. ‘un énorme besoin de compensation affective’. 33. In 1932 Lacan translated Freud’s article Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality (1922). 34. ‘elles expliquent de façon lumineuse la structure de délire’. 35. ‘le problème thérapeutique des psychoses nous semble rendre plus néces- saire une psychanalyse du moi qu’une psychanalyse de l’inconscient; c’est à dire que c’est dans une meilleure étude des résistances dusujetetdans une expérience nouvelle de leur manœuvre qu’il devra trouver ses solutions techniques’. 36. ‘Lacan a éclairé d’une lumière scientifique un phénomène obscur pour la plupart de nos contemporains – l’expression paranoïa – et lui a conféré sa vraie signification’. 37. ‘Une satisfaction psychique privilégiée’. 38. When using the concept identity, I start from Lacan’s logical discussion of the concept. In his seminar on Identification (Lacan, 1961–2), Lacan indi- cates that identity can be defined as an entity that is equal to itself (i.e. A = A). Punning on this logical formula, he asks how it comes about that someone can start experiencing one as ‘one-self’: how does it hap- pen that I consider the idea of a ‘me’ as part of my own self? And why in fact do we say ‘my-self’? Is it not self-evident that this ‘my’ is a part of the ‘self’? And isn’t it curious that the word ‘self’, which we use to make auto-references, is in many languages also used to refer to sameness? Along this way Lacan indicates that the experience of iden- tity is a result of the mechanism of ‘identification’, which functions as an answer to a question that lies at the basis of subjectivity: ‘Who am I?’. In saying and believing that ‘I am me’ and that ‘I’ mirrors ‘myself’, people produce answers to this question (see Vanheule and Verhaeghe, 2009). 39. Lacan’s (1945) text on ‘logical time’ makes clear that hesitation is the emi- nent characteristic of the way in which the neurotic deals with information that concerns his own being. The neurotic cannot see who he is and looks for clues about his own being in others. These clues never define the subject’s being, but create the conditions based upon which a conclusion about one’s ownbeingcanbemade. 174 Notes 2 Towards a Structural Study of Psychosis 1. I was made aware of this example by Lieven Jonckheere (Jonckheere, 2003, pp. 11–12, 44–6). 2. In the English version of correspondence between Freud and Fliess, que faire is wrongly printed as qué faire. In the German version, que faire is spelled correctly. 3. In line with Lacan I write analysant with a ‘t’ and not with a ‘d’. The term ‘analysand’ denotes a passive position – it’s the word used to refer to a per- son who undergoes analysis. ‘Analysant’ points to an active position; it is the active form of the French verb analyser (to analyse). Lacan prefers the expres- sion analysant because of the active role it gives to the one who decides to engage in a psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1972a). 4. ‘c’est du langage que nous tenons cette folie qu’il y a de l’être’. 5. This idea returns in Lacan’s discourse theory (Lacan, 1969–70): the subject is not conceptualized as the agent or determining force of discourse, but as a pawn in the structure of discourse. 6. See also Parker (2003) for an excellent discussion of this signifying function. 7. ‘Dans la paranoïa, le signifiant représente un sujet pour un autre signifiant’. 4 A Novel Approach to Hallucinations 1. ‘Un homme qui a la conviction intime d’une sensation actuellement perçue, alors que nul objet extérieur propre à exciter cette sensation n’est à portée de sessens,estdansunétatd’hallucination’. 2. ‘perception sans objet à percevoir’. 5 Delusions Scrutinized 1. In the I-schema (Lacan, 1959, p. 476), the zeroed-out father is symbolized by ‘P0’. In this symbol ‘P’ refers to Father, Père in French, and ‘0’ refers to the zeroing-out of the father function. 2. In the I-schema (Lacan, 1959, p. 476), the missing phallus is symbolized by ‘0’. In this symbol ‘’ refers to the phallus while ‘0’ refers to the zeroing-out of the phallus. 3. Lacan (1959, p. 468) says the autonyms qua Created are attributed to an ulti- mate Creator, God, and that via autonyms all kinds of Creatures come into existence. 4. Lacan (1959, p. 471) suggests that that ‘unmanning’ is a bad English transla- tion of the German entmannen. He prefers translating it as ‘emasculation’. 5. Schreber (1903, p. 61) indicates that twice before he experienced the ‘miracle of unmanning’ on his body: ‘The rays of the lower God (Ariman) have the power of producing the miracle of unmanning; the rays of the upper God (Ormuzd) have the power of restoring manliness when necessary’. 6. These opposing positions are reminiscent of Freud’s (1910) theory of object choice in men, albeit in Schreber’s case the positions refer to his own identity, and not to the identity of objects. Notes 175 7. In terms of the I-schema (Lacan, 1959, p. 476), the role of retaining integrity is visualized by making a graphical connection between ‘loves his wife’ and ‘m’, which is the letter that symbolizes the ego (moi)and‘a’, which refers to the mirror image. 6 The Object a and Jouissance in Psychosis 1. Prior to the 1960s Lacan occasionally used the concepts ‘jouissance’ and ‘object a’. Jouissance is extensively discussed in Seminar VII (Lacan, 1959–60; De Kesel, 2009; Miller, 1999), where it refers to lust beyond satisfaction. The object a in its turn is occasionally used to refer to the imaginary object upon which desire is oriented (Miller, 1999, 2004a). 2. ‘sujet de la jouissance’. 3. ‘le sujet hypothétique à l’origine de cette dialectique’. 4. ‘le sujet encore non-existant, qui a à se situer comme déterminé par le signifiant’. 5. Further discussions on the topic of jouissance can be found in Fink (2002) and Verhaeghe (2002). 6. The pleasure principle denotes the tendency to avoid and reduce the displea- sure evoked by an overwhelming rise in somatic tension, and the tendency to optimize the experience of pleasure. 7. This scheme can be found in the French edition of the seminar; however, instead of O and barred O Lacan (1962–3, p. 189) uses A and barred A. A is the abbreviation of the French word Autre.