Towards ‘Discreet signs in Ordinary Psychosis, clinic and treatment’, the XIVth New Lacanian School’s Congress of Psychoanalysis in Dublin, Ireland on July 2nd & 3rd 2016
Chosen by Florencia F.C. Shanahan
Circulated on New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, Messager, as [nls-messager] 1990.en/ NLS Congress – ORIENTATION 3
On 22nd March 2016
Available http://www.amp-nls.org/page/gb/49/nls-messager/0/2015-2016/2448 or below
Information on full text : Lost in Cognition – Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences : 2008 (French), 2012 (Hebrew), 2014 (English) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)
Extracts
Excerpt From: Éric Laurent. “Lost in Cognition: Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences.” : translated by Adrian Price : Karnac 2014 : p4 : CHAPTER ONE : Chomsky with Joyce : See Chomsky with Joyce : 11th April 2005 (Paris) : Éric Laurent, at this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent) :
The following lecture was delivered at the École de la Cause Freudienne on 11 April 2005. Under Serge Cottet’s chairmanship, Jacques Aubert and Éric Laurent were invited to present the recently published Book of Lacan’s Seminar, Le Sinthome.
-p4 Laurent, Lost in Cognition, “Suddenly, in December 1975, a glimmer of light came peeping through. Lacan had just got back from the US and was speaking about Chomsky (Lacan, 2005a, pp. 27–43 [1]). We were acquainted with Chomsky. We had been able to take advantage of the lessons of Jean-Claude Milner, who was and has long remained the leading French Chomskyan. We thought, therefore, that we might find something here, some point of support. Next, in February 1976 [2], a lesson of the Seminar ended with the following declaration: “Mad […]? […] this is not a privilege, […] in most people the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are tangled up […].” (Lacan, 2005a, p. 87)”
“We were starting to understand. For some of his audience a door was opening: we were hearing the flipside to “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” (Lacan, 2006, pp. 445–458 [3]). What had been established, or so we believed, as a radical distinction between madness as a result of foreclosure, and that which is not affected by foreclosure, was now being displaced. Between neurosis and psychosis, which hitherto stood apart like two distinct continents, there emerged a passage of generalisation. We didn’t understand everything, but an altogether different world was fanning out for us, which we were just starting to glimpse. Likewise, the knots looked to be a theoretical instrument that was highly abstract (a long way from where we were standing) and yet clinical and pragmatic. The many indications about rectifying the “slipped knot” by means of the sinthome lay in this direction.”
Lost in Cognition – Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences : 2008 (French), 2012 (Hebrew), 2014 (English) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)
References:
***
[1] 9th December 1975, Seminar XXIII, pII IV of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : www.LacaninIreland.com, See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or 19751209 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
I start from my condition which is that of bringing to man what scripture states as, not a help for him, but a help against him. And, from this condition, I try to find my bearings. This indeed is why I was truly, in a way that is worth remarking, why I was led to this consideration of the knot. Which, as I have just told you is properly speaking constituted by a geometry that one may well say is forbidden to the imaginary, which can only be imagined through all sort of resistances, indeed of difficulties. This is properly speaking what the knot, in so far as it is Borromean, substantifies.
If we start, in effect, from analysis, we affirm, it is something different to observing, one of the things that most struck me when I was in America, was my encounter which was certainly not by chance, which was altogether intentional on my part, it was my encounter with Chomsky. I was properly speaking, I will say stupefied by it. I told him so. The idea that I realised he held, is in short one that I cannot say can in a way be refuted. It is even (29) the most common idea, and it is indeed what before my very ears he simply affirmed, which made me sense the whole distance I was from him. This idea, which is the idea, that in effect is common, is this, which appears precarious to me. The consideration, in short, of something that presents itself as a body, a body provided with organs, which implies, in this conception, that the organ is a tool, a tool for gripping, a tool for apprehending. [pII V] And that there is no objection in principle to the tool apprehending itself as such, that, for example, language is considered by him as determined by a genetic fact, he expressed it in these very terms before me; in other words, language itself is an organ. It seems quite striking to me, this is what I expressed by the term stupefied, it seem quite striking to me that from this language, a return can be made back on itself like an organ.
If language is not considered from the angle, that it is, that it is linked to something which, in the Real, makes a hole, it is not simply difficult, it is impossible to consider how it can be handled. The observation method cannot start from language without admitting this truth of principle that in what one can situate as Real, language only appears as making a hole. It is from this notion, the function of the hole that language puts into operation its hold on the Real. It is of course not easy for me to make you feel the whole weight of this conviction. It appears inevitable to me from the fact that truth as such is only possible by voiding this function.
Language moreover eats this Real. I mean that it only allows this Real to be tackled, this genetic Real, to speak like Chomsky, in terms of sign. Or, in other words, of message which starts from the molecular gene by reducing it to what brought fame to Crick and Watson. Namely, this double helix from which there are supposed to start these different levels that organise the body throughout a certain number of stages. First of all the division of development, of cellular specialisation, then subsequently this specialisation of starting from hormones which are so many elements on which there are conveyed, as many sorts of messages, for the direction of organic information.
This whole subtilising of what is involved in the Real by so many of these aforesaid messages, but in which there is only marked the [pII VI] veil drawn over what is the efficacity of language. Namely, the fact that language is not in itself a message, but that it is only sustained (30) from the function of what I called the hole in the Real.
For this there is the path of our new mos geometricus, namely, of the substance that results from the efficacity, from the proper efficacity of language, and which is supported by this function of the hole. To express it in terms of this famous Borromean knot in which I put my trust, let us say that it is entirely based on the equivalence of an infinite straight line and a circle.
Seminar XXIII The Sinthome or Joyce and the Sinthome (1975-1976) : from 18th November 1975 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or 19751209 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts.
***
[2] 10th February 1976, Seminar XXIII, pVI 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation.
And what I am raising as a question, since what is at stake, is whether yes or no Joyce was mad, why after all would he not have been? All the more so in that this is not a privilege, if it is true that in (106) most, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are entangled to the pint they are continued from one to the other, if there is not an operation that distinguishes them in a chain, properly speaking, the Borromean knot, of the supposed Borromean knot, for the Borromean knot is not a knot, it is a chain. Why not grasp that each of these loops is continued for each one into the other in a way that is strictly not distinguished and that at the same time, it is not a privilege to be mad.
Session of Seminar XXIII : 10th February 1976 : Jacques Lacan with interventions by Jacques Aubert at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760210) or Seminar XXIII The Sinthome or Joyce and the Sinthome (1975-1976) : from 18th November 1975 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or 19760210 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
***
[3] Points 1 to 4, Section I – Towards Freud, p179-184 of Alan Sheridan’s translation of On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis – two most important parts of Seminar III : December 1957-January 1958 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580131 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts.)
I Towards Freud
1. Half a century of Freudianism applied to psychosis leaves its problem still to be rethought, in other words, at the status quo ante.
It might be said that before Freud discussion of psychosis did not detach itself from a theoretical background that presented itself as psychology, but which was merely a ‘laicized’ remainder of what we shall call the long metaphysical coction of science in the School (with the capital ‘S’ that it deserves).
Now if our science, which concerns the physis, in its ever purer mathematization, retains from this cooking no more than a whiff so subtle that
one may legitimately wonder whether there has not been a substitution of person, the same cannot be said of the antiphysis (that is, the living apparatus that one hopes is capable of measuring the said physis), whose smell of burnt fat betrays without the slightest doubt the age-old practice in the said cooking of the preparation of brains.
Thus the theory of abstraction, necessary in accounting for knowledge, has become fixed in an abstract theory of the faculties of the subject, which the most radical sensualist petitions could not render more functional with regard to subjective effects.
The constantly renewed attempts to correct its results by the varied counterweights of the affect are doomed to failure as long as one omits to ask if it is indeed the same subject that is affected.
2. It is the question that one learns on the school bench (with a small ‘s’) to avoid once and for all: for even if the alternations of identity of the percipiens are admitted, its function in the constitution of the unity of the perceptum is not discussed. The diversity of structure of the perceptum affects in the percipiens only a diversity of register, in the final analysis, that of the sensoriums. In law, this diversity is always surmountable if the percipiens is capable of apprehending reality.
That is why those whose task it is to answer the question posed by the existence of the madman could not prevent themselves from interposing between it and them those same school benches, which provided such a convenient shelter.
Indeed, I would dare to lump together, if I may say so, all the positions, whether they are mechanist or dynamist, whether they see genesis as deriving from the organism or from the psyche, and structure from disintegration or from conflict. All of them, ingenious as they are in declaring, in the name of a manifest fact that a hallucination is a perceptum without an object end up asking the percipiens the reason for this perceptum, without anyone realizing that in this request, a step has been skipped, the step of asking oneself whether the perceptum itself bequeathed a univocal sense to the percipiens here required to explain it.
This step, however, ought to appear legitimate in any unbiased examination of verbal hallucination, because it is not reducible to a specific sensorium, still less to a percipiens in the sense that the latter would give it its unity.
In effect, it is an error to hold it as essentially auditive when it is conceivable that it be not so at all (for a deaf-mute, for example, or in somc non-auditive register of hallucinatory spelling). It is an error moreover because we realise that the act of hearing is not the same, according to whether it aims at the coherence of the verbal chain, namely, its over-determination at each instant by the deferred action (après-coup) of its sequence, as, too, the suspension at each instant of its value at the advent of a meaning, ever ready for return – or according to whether it accommodates itself in speech to sound modulation, to this or that end of acoustic analysis: tonal or phonetic, even of musical power.
These very brief remarks were enough to bring out the difference of the subjectivities concerned in the perspective of the perceptum (and the extent to which it is misunderstood in the questioning of patients and the nosology of ‘voices’).
But one might claim to reduce this difference to a level of objectification in the percipiens.
This, however, is not the case. For it is at the level at which subjective ‘synthesis’ confers its full meaning on speech thar the subject reveals all the paradoxes of which he is the patient in this singular perception. These paradoxes already appear when it is the other who offers speech: this is sufficiently evidenced in the subject by the possibility of his obeying this speech in so far as it governs his hearing and his being-on-his-guard, for simply by entering the other’s auditory field, the subject falls under the sway of a suggestion from which he can escape only by reducing the other to being no more than the spokesman of a discourse that is not his own or of an intention that he is holding in reserve.
But still more striking is the subject’s relation to his own speech, in which the important factor is rather masked by the purely acoustic fact that he cannot speak without hearing himself. Nor is there anything special about the fact that he cannot listen to himself without being divided as far as the behaviour of the consciousness is concerned. Clinicians did better by discovering verbal motor hallucination by detecting the outline of phonatory movements. Yet they have not articulated where the crucial point resides; it is that the sensorium being indifferent in the production of a signifying chain:
(a) this signifying chain imposes itself, by itself, on the subject in its vocal dimension;
(b) it takes as such a reality proportional to the time, perfectly observable in experience, that its subjective attribution involves;
(c) its own structure qua signifier is determinant in this attribution, which, as a rule, is distributive, that is to say, possesses several voices, and, therefore, renders equivocal a supposedly unifying percipiens.
3. I shall illustrate what I have just said with a phenomenon taken from one of my clinical presentations for the year 1955-6, that is, the year of the seminar referred to here. Let us say that such a discovery can be made only at the cost of complete submission, even if it is intentional, to the properly subjective positions of the patient, positions which all too often one distorts in reducing them to a morbid process, thus reinforcing the difficulty of penetrating them with a not unjustified reticence on the part of the subject.
It was a case in fact of one of those shared delusions, of which I long ago showed the type in the mother/daughter couple, in which a sense of intrusion, developing into a delusion of being spied on, was merely the development of the defence proper to an affective binary relation, open as such to any form of alienation.
It was the daughter who, when interviewed, gave me as proof of the insults to which both of them were subjected by their neighbours a fact concerning the lover of the neighbour who was supposed to be harassing them with her attacks, after they had had to break off a friendship with her that was at first encouraged. This man, who was no more therefore than an indirect party to the situation, and indeed a somewhat shadowy figure in the patient’s allegations, had, apparently, called after her, as he passed her in the corridor of the block of flats in which they lived, the offensive word: ‘Sow!’.
Upon which, I, little inclined to see in it a counter-thrust to ‘Pig!’, which would be too easy to extrapolate in the name of a projection which, in such a case, is never more than the psychiatrist’s own projection, went on to ask her what she might have said the moment before. Not without success: for, with a smile, she conceded that, on seeing the man, she had murmured the apparently harmless enough words: ‘I’ve just been to the pork butcher’s…’
Who were these words directed to? She was hard put to say it, thus giving me the right to help her. For their textual meaning, we cannot ignore the fact, among others, that the patient had suddenly taken leave of her husband and her family-in-law and thus given to a marriage that her mother disapproved of an outcome that has remained unchanged. This departure rested on the conviction she had acquired that these peasants proposed nothing less, in order to put an end to this good-for-nothing city girl, than to cut her into pieces.
What does it matter, however, whether or not one has to resort to the phantasy of the fragmented body in order to understand how the patient, a prisoner of the dual relationship, responds once more here to a situation that is beyond her comprehension.
For our present purposes, it is enough that the patient should have admitted that the phrase was allusive, even though she was unable to be anything other than perplexed as to which of the two present or the one absent person was being alluded to, for it thus appears that the I, as subject of the sentence in direct style, left in suspense, in accordance with its function as a ‘shifter’, as it is called in linguistics,[1] the designation of the speaking subject, for as long a the allusion, in its conjunctory intention no doubt, itself remained in a state of oscillation. After the pause, this uncertainty came to an end with the apposition of the word ‘sow’, itself too loaded with invective to follow the oscillation isochronically. Thus the discourse came to realize its intention as rejection in hallucination. In the place where the unspeakable object is rejected in the real, a word makes itself heard, so that, coming in the place of that which has no name, it was unable to follow the intention of the subject without detaching itself from it by the dash preceding the reply: opposing its disparaging antistrophe to the cursing of the strophe thus restored to the patient with the index of the I, resembling in its opacity the ejaculations of love, when, lacking a signifier to name the object of its epithalamium, it employs the crudest trickery of the imaginary. ‘I’ll eat you up . . . Sweetie!’ ‘You’ll love it . . . Rat!’
4. I have referred to this example here only to show in living, concrete detail that the function of irrealization is not everything in the symbol. For, in order that its irruption into the real should be beyond question, it has only to present itself as it usually does, in the form of a broken chain.[2]
We also touch here upon the effect that every signifier has, once it is perceived, of arousing in the percipiens an assent composed of the awakening of the hidden duplicity of the second by the manifest ambiguity of the first.
Of course, all this may be regarded as mirage effects from the classical point of view of the unifying subject.
But it is striking that this point of view, reduced to itself, should offer, on hallucination for example, only views of such poverty that the work of a madman, no doubt as remarkable as Judge Schreber in his Memoirs of my Nervous Illness[3] may, after being welcomed most enthusiastically, before Freud, by psychiatrists, be regarded, even after him, as a collection of writings to be offered as an introduction to the phenomenology of psychosis, and not only for the beginner.[4]
He provided me, too, with the basis of a structural analysis, when, in my seminar for the year 1955-56 on Freudian structures in psychosis, I followed Freud’s advice and re-examined his case.
The relation between the signifier and the subject that this analysis reveals is to be met – it is apparent in this address – with the very appearance of these phenomena, if, returning from Freud’s experience, one is aware of the point to which it is leading.
But this departure from the phenomenon, if properly carried out, would lead us back to that point, as was the case for me when an early study of paranoia led me thirty years ago to the threshold of psychoanalysis.[5]
Nowhere, in fact, is the fallacious conception of a psychical process in Jaspers’ conception of this process, in which the symptom is merely the index, more irrelevant than in the approach to psychosis, because nowhere is the symptom, if one can decipher it, more clearly articulated in the structure itself.
Which makes it incumbent on us to define this process by the most radical determinants of the relation of man to the signifier.
5. But we do not have to have reached that stage to be interested in the variety of verbal hallucinations to be found in Schreber’s Memoirs, or to recognize in them differences quite other than those in which they are ‘classically’ classified, according to their mode of involvement in the percipiens (the degree of his ‘belief’) or in the reality of the same (‘auditivation’): or rather, the differences that derive from their speech structure, in so far as this structure is already in the perceptum.
Simply by considering the text of the hallucinations, a distinction arises for the linguist between code phenomena and message phenomena. …
Jacques Lacan’s Notes
[1] Roman Jakobsen borrows this term from Jesperson to designate those words in the code that take on meaning only from the coordinates (attribution, date, and place of emission) of the message. According to Pierce’s classification, they are index-symbols.” Personal pronouns are the best example: the difficulties involved in their acquisition and their functional deficiencies illustrate the problematic generated by thee signifiers in the subject. (Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” Russian Language Project, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 1957.)
[2] See the seminar held on 8th February 1956, in which I discussed the example of the “normal” vocalization of “la paix du soir.” [See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19560208 or 19551118 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts] [3] Denkwúrdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, von Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber, Senätspräsident beim kgl. Oberlandesgericht Dresden a-D. (Leipzig: Oswald Mutze, 1903), a French translation of which I prepared for the use of my group. [See this site /5 Authors A-Z (Schreber or Index of Authors’ texts) & published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Homepage (Schreber’s MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS with Lacan’s intro to the French translation. Part 1, Part 2,] [4] This is, notably, the opinion expressed by the authors of the English translation of these Memoirs, which was published the year of my seminar (see Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, London: W. M. Dawson & Sons), in their introduction, p25. They also give an account of the book’s success on pages 6-10 [Translator’s introduction & analysis of D. P. Schreber’s case : 1955: Ida MacAlpine & Richard Hunter, see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Macalpine or Index of Authors’ texts) or www.Freud2Lacan.com /Homepage (Schreber’s MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS with Lacan’s intro to the French translation. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
[5] This was my doctoral thesis in medicine, entitled De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, which Professor Heuyer, in a letter to me, judged very pertinently in these terms: “One swallow does not make a summer,” adding, in connection with my bibliography, “If you’ve read all that, I pity you.” In fact, I had read it all. [On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320707 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts). Also available bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com.]