The 2008-9 lecture series on La paranoïa selon les grands psychiatres was organised by the Freudian Field Institute under the presidency of Jacques-Alain Miller. This lecture was presented on 17 June 2009. Philippe La Sagna, in 2012, is an Analyst Member of the École de la Cause freudienne and the New Lacanian School.
Publication
Published, translated from the French by Adrian Price, in Hurly-Burly vol 8 2012. Available www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /5 Other Authors A-Z (La Sagna)
Originally published in La Cause freudienne, Issue 74, 2010, pp. 201 -21.
Introduction by Jacques-Alain Miller:
The name Jules Séglas doesn’t seem to ring many bells these days. This contemporary of Freud was succeeded by Henri Claude, with whom Jacques Lacan sought refuge after his quarrel with Gaëtan Gatien de Clérambault. Philippe La Sagna is going to present Séglas’s book, Des troubles du langage chez les aliénés 1892), and in particular verbal motor hallucinations, to which Lacan makes reference in Seminar III and in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”. Next, Séglas went on to shed some light on melancholia starting off from phenomena of motor automatism, in other words, actions to which the subject is subjected beyond his will. He contrasted delusions of negation, which belong to melancholia, with delusions of persecution that evolve systematically, and which more or less overlap with paranoia. This carries a certain echo for us since in our Lacanian clinic paranoia and melancholia form two major poles, the genealogy of which we discover afresh in Séglas’s lectures. Philippe La Sagna will conclude by establishing a dialogue between Lacan and Séglas.
-References
P215 and in particular verbal motor hallucinations, to which Lacan makes reference in Seminar III, 23rd November 1955 Seminar III, see Seminar III The Psychoses (1955-1956) : from 16th November 1955 : Jacques Lacanat this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19551116 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts,
p23-24 of Russell Grigg’s translation, The question that has been advocated frequently enough here to be of full value, that of Who speaks?, must dominate the whole subject of paranoia.
I already pointed this out to you last time when I reminded you that verbal hallucination plays a central role in paranoia. You know how long it took to perceive what is nevertheless sometimes quite visible, which is that the subject himself utters what he says he hears – it took M. Séglas and his book Leçons cliniques.12 By a sort of brilliant stroke at the beginning of his career,
12 Jules Seglas, Lecons cliniques sur les maladies mentales el nerveuses (Salpeiriere, 1887-1894).
he pointed out that there were people having verbal hallucinations who could be observed, by quite obvious signs in some cases and by looking slightly more closely in others, to be uttering the words they accused their voices of having spoken to them, whether or not they were aware of it, or did not want to know. It constituted a small revolution to observe that the source of auditory hallucination was not external.
This is because, or so it was thought, the source is internal, and what is more tempting than to think that this corresponds to the tingling of a zone itself called sensory? It remains to be known whether this can be applied to the domain of language. Are there verbal psychical hallucinations properly so-called? Are they not always more or less psychomotor hallucinations? Can the phenomenon of speech, in both its pathological forms and its normal form, be dissociated from the fact, which is nonetheless perceptible, that when the subject speaks he hears himself? One of the essential dimensions of the phenomenon of speech is that the other isn’t the only person who hears you. The phenomenon of speech can’t be schematized by the image that serves a number of what are called communication theories – sender, receiver, and something that takes place in between. It seems to have been forgotten that among many other things in human speech the sender is always a receiver at the same time, that one hears the sound of one’s own words. It’s possible not to pay attention to it, but it’s certain that one hears it.
Such a simple remark dominates the entire question of what is known as verbal psychomotor hallucination, and it’s perhaps because it’s too self-evident that in the analysis of these phenomena it has moved into the background. Of course the little Séglasian revolution is far from having brought us a solution to the enigma. Séglas remained with the phenomenal exploration of hallucination, and he had to retract what was too absolute in his initial theory. He restored their place to certain hallucinations that are untheorizable in this register, and he threw some new clinical light and contributed a subtlety of description, neither of which can be ignored – I advise you to have a look at him.
If many of these episodes in the history of psychiatry are instructive, it’s perhaps more by virtue of the errors they bring into focus than by the positive contributions that supposedly result from them. But it’s not possible simply to devote oneself to negative experiences of the field concerned and construct solely on the basis of errors. Errors are in any case so abundant as to be almost inexhaustible. We shall just have to take a few shortcuts to try to get to the heart of the matter.
We shall do this by following Freud’s advice and, with him, enter into the analysis of the Schreber case.
– p215 of Miller’s Introduction, and in particular verbal motor hallucinations, to which Lacan makes reference … in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”.
See On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis : December 1957-January 1958 : Jacques Lacan. Also in Écrits : 1966 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580131 or 1966 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
P181 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, 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 that 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.
Further references as given by Philippe de Sagna are a work in progress