INDEX
Publication
Publication in translation
Introduction to Russell Grigg’s translation : September 2020 : Laura Sokolowsky
Jacques Lacan’s references
Quotation from The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan : 1981 : Catherine Clément
Related texts
Index of ‘Motives of Paranoiac Crime’
Citations
Publication
i) Published Minotaure 3-4, 12thDecember 1933
Original publication available at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan /(143 Cover, table of contents, and Lacan’s article, Motifs du Crime Paranoïaque)
ii) p383-388 of De la Psychose Paranoraque dans ses Rapports avec la Personnalite (1932), Publication of Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis in French :
‘De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa’ (1932) Published: Paris: du Seuil, 1975
: Published at www.psychaanalyse.com or download available from www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /texts by request.
iii) Bilingual with 2 translations, Jon Anderson & Russell Grigg, see www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40. Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin)
Publication in translation
1) Translated by Jon Anderson, in Critical Texts 5.3 1988, Columbia University
Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan (December 1933)
Bilingual, see www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40. Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin)
Various newspaper articles from the trial are included in French with the translation. The index of these texts is given below.
2) Translation by Russell Grigg,
Published, bilingual, as Motives of Paranoic Crimes : The Crime of the Papin Sisters, in The Lacanian Review, Issue 10, September 2020, p16-34
3) Bilingual with 2 translations, Jon Anderson & Russell Grigg, see www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40. Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin)
Introduction to Russell Grigg’s translation : September 2020 : Laura Sokolowsky
The mystery of the Papin Sisters and the knot of Paranoia by Laura Sokolowsky,
The Lacanian Review, Issue 10, 2020, p14-15
Also available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan (December 1933)
“Lacan is a block, we take it as a whole, Lacan’s teaching is inseparable from his practice,” Jacques-Alain Miller claims. [1] This implies that we cannot separate Lacan the theoretician, the exceptional reader of Freud, the prodigious rhetorician, from the Lacan who was a practitioner of analysis. To take Lacan as a block is also to consider that his first explorations into psychosis (his 1932 thesis on the case of Aimée [i] is its highest achievement) can be reread in the light of his final teaching. In the Seminar Le Sinthome, [ii], when he is considering Joyce’s relationship to writing, Lacan himself refers to his article in “Ecrits [iii] – ‘Inspirées’: Schizographie” of l93I (published by Massan, Paris) (iv). What were Joyce’s writings inspired by, he asks?
The admirable article on the Papin sisters, published by Lacan in the Surrealist review Le Minotaure at the end of 1933[v], is no exception to this rule. It aims to elucidate the double crime that scandalized the era: two daughters of the common people massacre two members of the bourgeoisie; French society itself was attacked, and justice must be swift! The scandal and fascination block out the logic of a criminal act that Lucan succeeds in decoding, while also giving it its tragically human signification.
One night in February 1933, Christine and Léa Papin, until then irreproachable maids in the service of a well-to-do family in Le Mans, savagely assassinated their boss and her daughter. Having committed the double crime, the sisters washed themselves, changed, and locked themselves in their room. The police found them huddled together in a bed. During the hastily put together trial, experts concluded that the two sisters were of perfectly sound mind and that their fits of anger had escalated into a homicidal rage.
Using the only medical testimony that picked up on the strangeness of the psychological couple formed by Christine and Léa Papin, Lacan takes a view opposed to the experts who had not been able to identify the subtle signs of psychosis before the accomplishment of their murderous passage to the act. For Lacan, it was an obvious case of ‘folie à deux’. He also relies on an article by Freud that was written in 1921, in which Freud discusses narcissistic object choice and the passage from hatred to love in sibling relations, leading to an erotic and rejected homosexual fixation in the case of the paranoiac. [vi] Lacan shows that the Papin sisters were stuck in the dead end of a specular relation. In order to resolve the mystery of femininity’s connection to the phallus, these Siamese sisters only had at their disposal the real of two other female bodies, to be cut up and scrutinized. In addition, the figurative expression “to tear out the eyes” (crever les yeux à quelqu’un) was not a metaphor; since the Papin sisters did tear out the eyes of their victims while they were still alive.
In his seminar on Joyce the issues of ‘folie à deux’ and the continuation of the symptom return in the question that bears on James Joyce’s relation to his schizophrenic daughter Lucia. [vii] In addition, the knot of paranoia will correspond to the trefoil knot, and Lacan will show that when a subject knots together the imaginary, symbolic, and real, the knot is only supported by the continuity of these three dimensions, R.S.I. are from then on ‘one and the same consistence, and it is in this that paranoid psychosis consists, ” [2]
Laura Sokolowsky
References & Julia Evans’ Notes
[l] Jacques-Alain Miller, “L’homme décidé,” Vacarme, no.l8 (2002/1):51-54. Online: https://www.cairn.info/revue-vacarme-2002-1-page-51.html .
[i] 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 (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
[ii] Seminar XXIII : 10th February 1976 : pVI 2-3 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, www.LacaninIreland.com. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760210)
pVI 2-3, And that is why I, why I should not be too astonished to find myself confronting Joyce. This indeed is why I dared to ask this question, a question that I asked earlier, was Joyce mad? Which is: what was it that inspired his writing?
Joyce left an enormous quantity of notes, of scribblings, scribbledehobble. That is how someone called Connolly, whom I knew at one time – I don’t know if he’s still alive – entitled a manuscript that he extracted, that he extracted from Joyce.
The question is in short the following: how to know, from his notes, and it is not by chance that he left so many, because anyway his notes, were drafts. Scribbledehobble is not random, it must well have been that he wanted that, and even that he encouraged those called researchers to go looking for them. He wrote an enormous number of letters. There are three volumes of them, as thick as that, which have come out. Among these letters, there are some that are quasi- unpublishable… I say quasi because you can well imagine that when all is said and done this is not something that would stop someone from publishing them. There is a final volume, Selected Letters, brought out by the priceless Richard Ellmann in which he publishes a certain number of them which had been considered as unpublishable in the first tomes. This whole hotchpotch is such that you cannot find your way in it. In any case, for my part I admit that I cannot find my way in it. I find my way, I find my bearings in it, by a certain number (96) of little threads, of course. I get a certain idea of his goings on with Nora from, from my, I am saying from my practice. I mean from the confidences that I receive, since I am dealing with people that I train so that they take pleasure in telling the truth.
Everyone says that if, if I manage that, anyway, I say everyone, Freud says that if I manage it, it is because they love me. They love me thanks to what I tried to pinpoint about the transference. Namely, that they suppose that I know. Well! It is obvious that I do not know everything. And, in particular, that in reading Joyce, this is the frightful thing about it, the fact is that I am reduced to reading him.
How know from reading Joyce what he believed about himself? Since it is quite certain that I did not analyse him. I regret it. Anyway, it is clear that he was little disposed to it.
[iii] Écrits : October 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661001 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
[iv] “Inspired” writings – Schizography : 12th November 1931 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19311112) for Jacques Lacan’s quoting Schizography.
pVI 2 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation of Scizography, First of all, because it is clear that the enjoyment of the Real comprises what Freud had glimpsed, comprises masochism; and it is obviously not from that step that he started. Masochism is the major part of the enjoyment the Real gives. He discovered it, he had not immediately foreseen it. It is certain that by entering onto this path you are drawn on, as is evidenced by the fact that I began by writing Ecrits Inspirés. It is a fact that that is how I began. And that is why I, why I should not be too astonished to find myself confronting Joyce.
[v] See www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan for the texts of these articles in Le Minautore
[vi] Probably
-Group (Mass) Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego : 1921 : Sigmund Freud, SE XVIII p69-143 : published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com or see this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19210101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts), probably Ch VI, SE XVIII p101-102,
Sokolov, He also relies on an article by Freud that was written in 1921, in which Freud discusses narcissistic object choice and the passage from hatred to love in sibling relations, leading to an erotic and rejected homosexual fixation in the case of the paranoiac. [vi] SE XVIII p101-102, Chapter VI, Further problems and Lines of Work,
And our attention will first be attracted by a consideration which promises to bring us in the most direct way to a proof that libidinal ties are what characterize a group.
Let us keep before our eyes the nature of the emotional relations which hold between men in general. According to Schopenhauer’s famous simile of the freezing porcupines no one can tolerate a too intimate approach to his neighbour.[1]
The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every intimate emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time-marriage, friendship, the relations between parents and children [2]–contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression. [3] This is less disguised in the common wrangles between business partners or in the grumbles of a subordinate at his superior. The same thing happens when men come together in larger units. Every time two families become connected by a marriage, each of them thinks itself superior to or of better birth than the other. Of two neighbouring towns each is the other’s most jealous rival; every little canton looks down upon the others with contempt. Closely related races keep one another at arm’s length; the South German cannot endure the North German, the Englishman casts every kind of aspersion upon the Scot, the Spaniard despises the Portuguese.[4] We are no longer astonished that greater differences should lead to an almost insuperable repugnance, such as the Gallic people feel for the German, the Aryan for the Semite, and the white races for the coloured.
Sigmund Freud’s footnotes p101
[1] ‘A company of porcupines crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again. And now, when the need for warmth brought them nearer together again, the second evil arose once more. So that they were driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other, until they had discovered a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist.’ (Parerga und Paralipomena, Part II, 31, ‘Gleichnisse und Parabeln‘.)
[2] Perhaps with the solitary exception of the relation of a mother to her son, which is based on narcissism, is not disturbed by subsequent rivalry, and is reinforced by a rudimentary attempt at sexual object-choice.
[3] James Strachey [In the first German edition the last clause read ‘which has first to be eliminated by repression’. It was emended in 1923.] [4] James Strachey [‘The narcissism of minor differences’, Chapter V of Freud, 1930a.]
When this hostility is directed against people who are otherwise loved we describe it as ambivalence of feeling; and we explain the fact, in what is probably far too rational a manner, by means of the numerous occasions for conflicts of interest which arise precisely in such intimate relations. In the undisguised antipathies and aversions which people feel towards strangers with whom they have to do we may recognize the expression of self-love-of narcissism. This self-love works for the preservation of the individual, and behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involved a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration. We do not know why such sensitiveness should have been directed to just these details of differentiation; but it is unmistakable that in this whole connection men give evidence of a readiness for hatred, an aggressiveness, the source of which is unknown, and to which one is tempted to ascribe an elementary character .[1]
Sigmund Freud’s footnotes p102
[1] In a recently published study, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920g, this volume, p. 53 ff.], I have attempted to connect the polarity of love and hatred with a hypothetical opposition between instincts of life and death, and to establish the sexual instincts as the purest examples of the former, the instincts of life.
OR – the alternative
-Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality : 1922b : Sigmund Freud, SE XVIII p221-231 : Published bilingually at www.Freud2Lacan.com , see this site, /3 Sigmund Freud (19210101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts) See above for quotation from Sokolov [vii],
SE XVIII p224-225, A,
Social conventions have wisely taken this universal state of things into account, by granting a certain amount of latitude to the married woman’s craving to attract and the married man’s thirst to make conquests, in the expectation that this inevitable tendency to unfaithfulness will thus find a safety-valve and be rendered innocuous. Convention has laid down that neither partner is to hold the other accountable for these little excursions in the direction of unfaithfulness, and they usually result in the desire that has been awakened by the new object finding satisfaction in some kind of return to faithfulness to the original object. A jealous person, however, does not recognize this convention of tolerance; he does not believe in any such thing as a halt or a turning-back once the path has been trodden, nor that a flirtation may be a safeguard against actual infidelity. In the treatment of a jealous person like this, one must refrain from disputing with him the material on which he bases his suspicions; one can only aim at bringing him to regard the matter in a different light.
The jealousy that arises from such a projection has, it is true, an almost delusional character; it is, however, amenable to the analytic work of exposing the unconscious phantasies of the subject’s own infidelity. The position is worse as regards jealousy belonging to the third layer, the true delusional type. It too has its origin in repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness; but the object in these cases is of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy is what is left of a homosexuality that has run its course, and it rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula: ‘I do not love him, she loves him!’ [1] In a delusional case one will be prepared to find jealousy belonging to all three layers, never to the third alone.
[p225, Footnote 1] See the Schreber analysis (1911c) [Part III].
B
Paranoia.-Cases of paranoia are for well-known reasons not usually amenable to analytic investigation. I have recently been able, nevertheless, by an intensive study of two paranoics, to discover something new to me. ..
[vii] Seminar XXIII : 17th February 1976 : pVII 6, VII 7, VII 8-9 & Diagram VII-6 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, www.LacaninIreland.com, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760217)
Sokolovsky, In his seminar on Joyce the issues of ‘folie à deux’ and the continuation of the symptom return in the question that bears on James Joyce’s relation to his schizophrenic daughter Lucia. [vii]
pVII 5-6 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, How can we not all sense that the words on which we depend, are in a way imposed on us? This indeed is why what is called a sick person sometimes goes further than what is called a healthy man. The question is rather one of knowing why a normal man, one described as normal, is not aware that the word is a parasite? That the word is something applied. That the word is a form of cancer with which the human being is afflicted. How is it that there are some who go as far as feeling it?
It is certain that Joyce gives us a little taste of this. I mean that the last time I did not speak about his daughter, Lucia, since he gave his children Italian names, I did not speak about the daughter Lucia with the intention of not getting into, into what one could call gossip. The daughter Lucia is still alive. She is in a nursing home in England. She is what is called, like that, nowadays, a schizophrenic.
But the matter was recalled to me during my last case presentation, by the fact that the case that I was presenting had undergone a deterioration. [A Lacanian Psychosis: 12th February 1976: An encounter between Gérard Primeau & Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760212)]
pVII 7-9 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, What pushed me today to speak to you about the daughter Lucia, is very exactly the fact, I was really careful about it the last time, in order not to get involved in gossip, is that Joyce, Joyce fiercely defended his daughter, his daughter the schizophrenic, what is called a schizophrenic, from being taken over by doctors. Joyce only articulated a single thing, which was that his daughter was a telepath. I mean that, in the letters that he wrote about her, he formulated that she is much more intelligent than anybody else, that she informs him, miraculously is the word to be understood, about everything that is happening to a certain number of people, that for her these people have no secrets.
Is there not here something striking? Not at all that I think that Lucia was effectively a telepath, that she knew what was happening to people about whom she did not have, about whom she did not have any more information than anyone else. But that (115) Joyce for his part attributes this virtue from a certain number of signs, of declarations that he, he understood in a certain way. This is really something where I see that in order to defend, as one might say, his daughter, he attributes to her something, an extension of what I will momentarily call his own symptom. Namely – it is difficult in his case not to evoke, not to evoke my own patient and how this had begun with him – namely, that with respect to the word, one cannot say that something was not imposed on Joyce. I mean that in the more or less continuous progress that his art constituted, namely, this word, the word that had been written, to break it to dislocate it, to ensure that at the end what seems in reading him to be a continual progress – from the effort that he made in his first critical essays, then subsequently, in the Portrait of the Artist, and finally in Ulysses and ending up with Finnegans Wake – it is difficult not to see that a certain relationship to the word is more and more imposed on him. Imposed to the point that he finishes by, by dissolving language itself, as Philippe Sollers has very well noted, I told you that at the beginning of the year, to impose on language itself a sort of breaking, of decomposition which means that there is no longer any phonological identity.
No doubt there is here a reflection at the level of writing. I mean that it is through the intermediary of writing that the word is decomposed in imposing itself. In imposing itself as such. Namely, in a distortion as regards which there remains an ambiguity as to whether it is a matter of liberating oneself from the parasite, from the wordy parasite of which I spoke earlier, or on the contrary something which allows itself to be invaded by the properties of the word that are essentially of the phonemic order, by the polyphony of the word.
[Diagram/Figure VII-6 is missing]
In any case the fact that Joyce articulates in connection with Lucia, in order to defend her, that she is a telepath, seems to me – by reason of this patient whose case I was considering the last time when I made what is called my presentation at Ste. Anne [A Lacanian Psychosis: 12th February 1976: An encounter between Gérard Primeau & Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760212)] -seems to me certainly indicative. Indicative of something as regards to which I will say that Joyce, that Joyce bears witness at this very point (VII-6), (116) which is the point that I designated as being that of the paternal lack. What I would like to mark, is that what I am calling, what I designated, what I am supporting by this sinthome which is marked here by a ring, by a ring of string, which is supposed, by me, to be produced at the very place where, let us say, there is an error in the layout of the knot.
It is difficult for us not to see that the slip is what, in part, the notion of the unconscious is grounded on.
[2] Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xxiii, ed J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity: 2016), p41.
16th December 1975 : See Session of Seminar XXIII : 16th December 1975 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751216). Cormac Gallagher’s translations are always preferred.
Sokolov, In addition, the knot of paranoia will correspond to the trefoil knot, and Lacan will show that when a subject knots together the imaginary, symbolic, and real, the knot is only supported by the continuity of these three dimensions, R.S.I. are from then on ‘one and the same consistence, and it is in this that paranoid psychosis consists,’ [2]
pIII 10 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, There was a time when I was advancing along a certain path, before I had got onto the path of analysis, it was that of my thesis: Paranoid psychosis in its relationships, I said, with the personality*. If I resisted the republication of my thesis for so long, it is simply for the following reason: the fact is that paranoid psychosis and personality, as such, have no relationship; simply because of the fact that it is the same thing. In so far as a subject knots together in three, the Imaginary the Symbolic and the Real, it is supported only by their continuity. The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are one and the same consistency. And it is in this that paranoid psychosis consists.
*See On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Jacques Lacan’s references
***
-Jon Anderson’s translation, P14-15 of F2L, We conceive of it then as being subject to variations of this drive, as for example in the drop that results from its gratification: in the original case of the particular type of paranoia that we have described (the Aimée case), [9] the delirium (délire) vanished when the aim of the action was accomplished.
TN9 Jon Anderson: This case is treated in Lacan’s thesis, On Paranoiac Psychosis in Relation to Personality. For a brief summary and analysis of this case, see Catherine Clements, The Lives and Legends of Jaques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (NY: Columbia University Press, 1983): 74‐75.
See The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan : 1981 : Catherine Clément. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Clément) or /1 A Lacanian Clinic /D Lacanian Transmission (1. Lacanian History)
P70-75 of Clément, But psychoanalysis, with no claims to expertise in criminal matters [in France the exclusive province of psychiatrists—trans.], has nothing to do with labelling criminals or deciding upon their responsibility or lack of responsibility for their acts. Rather, it explores their childhood, looking for causes while the police are looking for motives. Almost the same thing, but not quite: the psychoanalyst traces the criminal’s whole life since childhood, whereas the police confine their investigations to the adult life of the accused and to his or her most immediate desires—what we call ‘‘motives,” the forces that set the criminal act in motion. Last but not least, psychoanalysis has a concept that corresponds to the uniqueness of the act, nowhere so apparent as in the case of the Papin sisters. Nothing foretold the murder they were to commit, much less the extraordinary way in which they were to go about it, and no act of violence followed the crime, at any rate none aimed at another member of civil society. Psychology, in the early days of its association with criminology, referred to such unique acts as “monomanias,” a convenient term for describing a form of madness that manifests itself only once. This concept broke new ground. The psychoanalyst refers to the act as an instance of “acting out.”
If the insane act is a question of acting out, this means that it is the result of an implacable logic that has been in preparation for a long time—not to say forever. For it is not only the childhood of the person concerned that shapes the sudden act of violence—or in less dangerous cases the action that is merely out of the ordinary—but also the childhood of his mother, or of his father; at one further remove, it is the institution of the family, as far back as memory can go. These are the root causes of a social malady that may ultimately take the form of true insanity. We now know that family memories rarely extend back more than three generations or so. This is the pattern revealed by the oldest known myths and cultures. Nevertheless, every act of madness has in some sense been in preparation since the beginning of time: as the psychoanalyst sees it, the question is always why it should be acted out in any particular instance. But then the act vanishes behind the process of anamnesis and the interminable search for the past. It is abolished by all that precedes it. As for its consequences, society decides what is to be done about them. Christine and Léa Papin were at first sentenced to be guillotined on the town square of Le Mans. Aimée was confined to a mental hospital. And yet the difference between the two acts was not one of kind but one of degree. To be sure, social aggression had assumed ancient proportions, and the open-mouthed horror of civil society in the face of such acts accounts for the primitive harshness of the sentence, proportionate to the disproportionateness of the crime. Later the sentence was reduced, as if society finally took note of the fact that the act committed was a question not for the courts but for the hospitals. Had the sentence been maintained, it would have confirmed the existence of crimes that had long since been wiped from the slate of the Law. A dead past had worked its way to the surface, and this past was not simply that of two sisters who had been reared in a climate of extreme emotional deprivation. The prudent thing to do was to entrust the whole matter to the psychiatrists and the analysts. For the “‘acting out’ had transgressed the boundary between the imaginary and the real, the myth and the fact, the repressed history and the sudden actuality of the deed.
The first point of similarity linking Christine, Léa, and Aimée is their status as women. Just as women alone can experience ecstasy without knowing what its nature is, so these women were able to act out their conflicts once and for all, releasing all their tensions and deciding their fate. In prison the Papin sisters became what they had previously been only in principle: stark raving mad. Once hospitalized, Aimée was delirious at first but within six months was cured. For acting out, however dangerous it may be, is also therapeutic, monstrously so. A conflict that becomes a deed, a fact, ceases to exist. Mental calm can then be restored. Such acts are little different from those that have been part of female mythology from time immemorial: from Penthesilea who devoured Achilles raw and then fell asleep quite rested to Pentheus’ mother, Agave, a Bacchante subject to trances, who mistook her son for a wild beast and tore him limb from limb; from Corneille’s Camille to Michelet’s witches, from Judith to Charlotte Corday, the list of women who owe their renown to crime is endless. These women are heroines, and it is as heroines that they fascinated Lacan. Consider the conclusion of his article in Le Minotaure:
They plucked out their victims’ eyes as the Bacchantes castrated
their victims. The sacrilegious curiosity that has anguished men
since the beginning of time moved them in their desire for their
victims, in their search in the dead women’s gaping wounds for
what Christine, in all innocence, later described to the court as “‘the
mystery of life.’’ [22]
Calmly, he foreshadows the final explanation, the revelation of the secret shared in common by these two female crimes. In order to discover what this secret is we must trace the histories of both crimes back through time, step by step. We must follow Jacques Lacan as he makes the discovery that became the source of all his subsequent thought. The enigma stands before us: we must now decipher it.
When Christine was imprisoned, she was, as is natural in a French prison, separated from Léa. Five months later the effects of this separation made themselves felt. Christine suffered hallucinations; she attempted to tear her eyes out. Confined in a straitjacket, she refused to eat, she engaged in acts of self-punishment, she “expiated”’ her sins, and of course she began to rave madly. When Lacan learned of these facts – from the press and from the court psychiatrist, Doctor Logre—he immediately understood that the separation was the cause of the delirium, just as the close relationship between the two sisters was the cause of the crime. He understood this because the case of Aimée had already put him on the right track, and because feminine paranoia, even more than its masculine counterpart, had shed light on what is known in Freudian jargon as repressed homosexuality. But this was not the first explanation: it was to be the final one.
The first explanation involved language: this trail is already familiar to us. It begins with words and leads to action. In order for a paranoid crime to be committed, a metaphor must enter into reality. “I’ll tear her eyes out’’—this is hatred speaking, hatred at its most harmless. But when the metaphor is realized and the barrier between fantasy, imagination, and reality is eliminated, most people, Lacan tells us, react to the magnitude of the deed: their reaction is “ambivalent, double-edged, a product of the emotional contagion of the crime and the demand for punishment raised by public opinion.” [23]
The extraordinary crime of the sisters Papin could occur only on one condition: each sister had to constitute the entire world of the other. “Genuine Siamese souls, they formed a permanently closed world. Reading their depositions after the crime, Doctor Logre remarked that ‘you would think you were seeing double.’ With no other resources than those they found on their solitary island, they had to resolve their enigma, the human enigma of sex.”[24]
In other words, here we have a couple of sisters who, because they were brought up together, never had to faceup to the existence of the Other, man. Two sisters who found their pleasure together; who, in murder, found a sacred form of ecstasy; and who, after killing their victims and laying bare their sexual parts, fastened themselves on their thighs. “I am certain,’’ said Christine, ‘‘that in another life I was supposed to be my sister’s husband.” Actually she was her sister’s husband in his life as well.
When another female couple appeared in a hostile guise, the Papin couple let go. Their “‘twin insanity” had done its work. Its root cause was the ‘“‘difficulty of being two,” the impossibility of distinguishing themselves from one another, to the point that the other ceased to exist. From these circumstances came loss of identity and madness.
Lacan himself compared the two sisters to Aimée. Just as Christine and Léa were inseparable, so Aimée was also “inseparable.” Over the course of her life, however, she was “inseparable’’ not from a single woman but from a succession of different figures, and it was probably this that allowed her to stop short of murder. For Aimée, the primary object of identification was her mother—the same as herself. ‘““We were such friends,’ as Aimée tearfully put it. Next came a fallen aristocrat, Mademoiselle C. de la N., “a subtle schemer.’’ Reading Lacan’s thesis, it is easy to imagine the woman: a person who looked upon work as degrading, who ruled her colleagues with the authority of a duchess rebuking her lackeys, and who laid down the standards of good and bad taste with an iron hand. Her swagger fascinated Aimée, who first heard about the celebrated Madame Z in conversation with this woman. This fallen duchess frequently told Aimée that she, Aimée, was “masculine.’’ Here we detect a muffled echo of Christine’s belief that she was her sister’s husband. But Mademoiselle C. de la N. did not prevent Aimée from marrying, more for convenience and ‘Don Juanism” than for love. It was then that the third woman, the third double, entered Aimée’s life: her own sister, who came to live with the young newlyweds. Aimée’s sister had had a hysterectomy and so had no hope of having a child. Aimée twice became pregnant. The first child was stillborn; the second lived. In both cases the sister made no secret of her unsatisfied desire to be a mother herself. Christine had been so close to Léa that she could only project her hatred along with Léa onto another female couple. Aimée, on the other hand, would take some time to work out the amorous hatred that she secretly bore toward her alter ego, and the forms taken by the fantasies derived from this hatred became increasingly remote from their original object. Finally she left home in the grip of a fantasy that took her ever closer to those creatures of luxury and bright lights who were plotting against her, the courtesans and actresses of Paris. Love or hate? The word is ambivalence. ‘‘Each of these female persecutors was in fact merely a new image of the sister whom our patient had taken as her ideal. In other words, they were mere prisoners of Aimée’s narcissism. Now we can understand what the glass obstacle was that prevented her from knowing that she loved her persecutors, although she cried that she did: they were merely images.”[25]
Woman to woman, Aimée assaulted Madame Z: paranoia as self-punishment. Woman to woman, Christine and Léa, whose unconscious minds did not admit the existence of the Other, assaulted two women. They attacked, just as those mystics in whom Lacan later took an interest allowed themselves to be wounded by a God who loved them and hated them to the point of inflicting on them every imaginable suffering, in His own image, since He himself had undergone them. The “psychic inversion’’ that Lacan discusses in the case of Aimée and Christine, which made each of them a male figure in a homosexual couple, has affinities with the “‘eternal couple of the criminal and the (female) saint,” and with the exemplary story of Jean Genet.
The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan : 1981 : Catherine Clément, Chapter 2. The Ladies’ Way from p53, Footnotes
P73 Footnote 22, Clément, Consider the conclusion of his article in Le Minotaure:
They plucked out their victims’ eyes as the Bacchantes castrated their victims. The sacrilegious curiosity that has anguished men since the beginning of time moved them in their desire for their victims, in their search in the dead women’s gaping wounds for what Christine, in all innocence, later described to the court as “‘the mystery of life.’’ [22]
22. “‘De la psychose paranoiaque,”’ Premiers Ecrits. . . , p. 398. 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) P30 of www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40)
P71 Footnote 23, Clément, But when the metaphor is realized and the barrier between fantasy, imagination, and reality is eliminated, most people, Lacan tells us, react to the magnitude of the deed: their reaction is “ambivalent, double-edged, a product of the emotional contagion of the crime and the demand for punishment raised by public opinion.” [23]
23. Ibid., p. 393. 2, Jacques Lacan, De In psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, 1932. [Reprinted in De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa (Paris: Seuil, 1975).] p13 of www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40 Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin) – see 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)
P72 Footnote 24, Clément, The extraordinary crime of the sisters Papin could occur only on one condition: each sister had to constitute the entire world of the other. “Genuine Siamese souls, they formed a permanently closed world. Reading their depositions after the crime, Doctor Logre remarked that ‘you would think you were seeing double.’ With no other resources than those they found on their solitary island, they had to resolve their enigma, the human enigma of sex.”[24]
24. Ibid., p. 397. P28 of of www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40 Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin) – see 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)
P75 Footnote 25 Clément, Love or hate? The word is ambivalence. ‘‘Each of these female persecutors was in fact merely a new image of the sister whom our patient had taken as her ideal. In other words, they were mere prisoners of Aimée’s narcissism. Now we can understand what the glass obstacle was that prevented her from knowing that she loved her persecutors, although she cried that she did: they were merely images.”[25]
25. See also “Propos sur la causalité psychique’’ in Ecrits: ‘‘The series of female persecutors who figure in her story all personify, virtually without variation, an ideal of evildoing, against which her need for aggression increased constantly.” This implacable mechanism, in which aggression turns outwards to strike at another self in the other, Lacan calls the “paranoia of self-punishment.” See Presentation on Psychical Causality : 28th September 1946 (Bonneval Hospital, Paris ) : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19460928). Also in Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan.
P138 of Bruce Fink’s translation, I claim to have followed his method in the analysis of the case of paranoiac psychosis discussed in my thesis; I demonstrated the psychogenic structure of the case and designated its clinical entity with the more or less valid term of “self-punishing paranoia.” …
The structural points that prove to be essential in this analysis can be formulated as follows:
(a) The succession of female persecutors in her history repeated almost without variation the personification of a maleficent ideal, and her need to aggressively strike out at this ideal kept growing.
However, not only did she constantly seek to curry both favor and abuse from the people to whom she had access in reality who incarnated this stereotype, but in her behavior she tended to carry out, without recognizing it, the very evildoing she denounced in them: vanity, coldness, and abandonment of one ’s natural duties.
***
P29, Jon Anderson’s translation of Lacan’s text, Christine’s statement—“I really think that in another life I must have been my sister’s husband”—is reproduced in our patients by many fantastic themes which one has only to heed in order to take in.
TN18: “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality” may be found in English in Freud’s Collected Papers, vol. 2, trans. Joan Riviere. N.Y. Basic Books, 1959: 232‐243. See pages 241‐243 for Freud’s argument concerning “a new mechanism leading to homosexual object choice” (241). See Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality : 1922b : Sigmund Freud, SE XVIII p221-232, at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19220101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts.
SE XVIII p231-232, Such an outcome of the attachment to the mother shows various interesting relations with other processes known to us. First of all it is a complete contrast to the development of persecutory paranoia, in which the person who has before been loved becomes the hated persecutor, whereas here the hated rivals are transformed into love-objects. It represents, too, an exaggeration of the process which, according to my view, leads to the birth of social instincts in the individual.[1] In both processes there is first the presence of jealous and hostile impulses which cannot achieve satisfaction; and both the affectionate and the social feelings of identification arise as reactive formations against the repressed aggressive impulses.
This new mechanism of homosexual object-choice-its origin in rivalry which has been overcome and in aggressive impulses which have become repressed-is sometimes combined with the typical conditions already familiar to us. In the history of homosexuals one often hears that the change in them took place after the mother had praised another boy and set him up as a model. The tendency to a narcissistic object-choice was thus stimulated, and after a short phase of keen jealousy the rival became a love-object. As a rule, however, the new mechanism is distinguished · by the change taking place at a much earlier period, and the identification with the mother receding into the background. Moreover, in the cases I have observed, it led only to homosexual attitudes which did not exclude heterosexuality and did not involve a horror feminae.
[1 p232] Cf. my Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego {1921,). [See above, SE XVIII p. 119 ff.] See Mass (mistranslated as Group) Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego : 1921 [1922] : Sigmund Freud, at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19210101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts). [Massenpsychologie und Ich-analyse]. Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Freud (The Metapsychological Papers, Papers on Technique and others)
***
For other texts on Aimée see 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 (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
&
The category in the right column, j) Aimée, in 1 A Lacanian Clinic
Related Texts
On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 1932 : Jacques Lacan : Check this site, www.LacanianWorks.org /4 Jacques Lacan (19320707 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
The Problem of Style and the Psychiatric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience : June 1933 : Jacques Lacan : See this site, www.LacanianWorks.org /4 Jacques Lacan (19330601)
Index of ‘Motives of Paranoiac Crimes’ as posted at www.Freud2Lacan.com/Lacan
/Lacan (40. Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin—2 translations & Le problème du style… & Motifs du crime paranoïaque: le crime des sœurs Papin)
INDEX
Translator’s Introduction : Jon Anderson
“The Problem of Style and the Psychiatric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience” appeared in the first number of Le Minotaure in June 1933 : Jacques Lacan (Le problême du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoiaques de l’experience) and was reprinted as P383-388 of the 1975 Seuil edition. (Translated by Jon Anderson: p4-6 of Critical Texts 5(3), 1988)
ALSO
Comment jouer les bonnes by Jean Genet
Documents rassembles et presentes par Jean Allouch :
– Littoral n” 9
Exorbitantes soeurs Papin
– Littoral n” 9
Paris-soir 29 septernbre 1933
A la veille des Assises du Mans les mobiles du crime des soeurs Papin reslent obscurs
L’hypothèse de Ia folie a été rejetée par les experts
“Si elle recommence, avait dit autrefois Léa, après une réprimande de sa patronne, je ne me laisserai pas faire..
(De notre envoye special Jérôme et Jean Tharaud)
– Littoral no 9
Paris-soir 30 septembre 1933
Les Soeurs Papin ont comparu cet après-midi devant les jurés de la Sarthe
Christine, à qui il avait fallu passer la camisole de force, semble avoir maintenant retrouvé son calme.
(De notre envoyé spécial Jérôme et Jean Tharaud)
– Littoral 9
Paris-soir 8 octobre 1933
L’affaire Papin et les experts
(Par Jérôme et Jean Tharaud)
Citations
P74 & p76 of The Mad Love of a Mother : 1st July 2023 : Éric Laurent. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Laurent)
-p74 Behind the paranoiac crime of passion, there is the fundamental crime, …
Motives of Paranoiac Crime : December 1933 : Jacques Lacan. This text.
-p76 Beyond infanticide, the history of great psychotic crimes is always fascinating for civilization. For example, that of the Papin sisters, of which every decade a play is made, a film, a work of art, etc. At the time, it had aroused the passion of the society of the 1930s. Lacan had written “in the heat of the moment” a contribution on “‘The crime of the Papin sisters” to enlighten opinion.
The Problem of Style and the Psychiatric Conception of Paranoiac Forms of Experience : June 1933 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan
On the Problem of Hallucinations : 7/8 October 1933 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan
Motives of Paranoiac Crime : December 1933 : Jacques Lacan. This text, see from p14 of www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (40) Articles from Le Minotaure BY JACQUES LACAN
-Le problème du style as it first appeared in Minotaure no. 1 (June 1, 1933)
Minotaure 1, June 1933. Original publication available at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan /41: Cover, table of contents, and Lacan’s article,
-Motifs du Crime Paranoïaque
Minotaure 3-4, 12th December 1933. Original publication available at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan /42 Cover, table of contents, and Lacan’s article,