This article appeared in the Semaine des Hôpitaux de Paris, no 14, July 1931, pp. 437‐445. and was published again as Structure des psychoses paranoiaques in Ornicar?, lssue 44, March 1998, pp.5-18.
Jacques Lacan cites this article four times in his doctoral thesis: pp. 26, 72, 241, and 358 (bibliography) – see On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 1932 : Jacques Lacan this site /4. Jacques Lacan (7th July 1932 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Available, bilingual, translated by Richard G. Klein from 1931 publication, and Russell Grigg using the French text from Lacan’s Premiers écrits 2023, at www.Freud2Lacan.com / Lacan (17. Structures des psychoses paranoïaques, 1931)
Headings
History of the group and purpose of this Study
References used by Jacques Lacan in Richard Klein’s translation
P2 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, But the progress of the clinic, Kraepelin, the Italians*, Sérieux and Capgras, successively isolated it from the paranoid states attached to early dementia, from chronic hallucinatory psychoses, finally from those more or less transitory forms of delusion (délires) which constitute acute paranoia and which must fit into various frameworks, from polymorphic delusional (délirantes) outbursts to pre‐dementia states through mental confusion.
*Eugenio Tanzi, AugustoTamburini, Enrico Morselli and Ernesto Lugaro.
P3 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, We grasp there, in fact, the discontinuity with normal psychology, and the discontinuity between them, of these states that with Professor Claude[1], who again brought them closer to paranoid states in order to better define them, we designate by the name paranoid psychoses.
[1] Henri CLAUDE, “The paranoid psychoses”, the Encéphale , March 1925.
P4 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, And only the notion, recent in biology and quickly grasped by psychiatry of “reaction to vital situations”[2], seems to us comprehensive enough to account for this total evolutionary imprint on the person, that the use we make of this term attributes to him each day.
[2] This notion, was introduced in biology by von Uexküll, has since been used by many authors. Let us quote for psychiatry Kretschmer, – in the United States, A. Myers.
P6 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Montassut* seems to insist on the note of intellectual disorder, by linking this fundamental attitude to systematic misunderstandings,
here misunderstanding of the “equation 
[3].
[3] M. Lévy‐Valensi, on the other hand, depicts this same proud attitude of the paranoiac in relation to the extremely vast metapsychological conception that M. Jules de Gaultier has placed under the symbol of bovaryism.
* ( Richard Klein’s note) Marcel Montassut (1897‐1975) was a French psychiatrist. He worked in the Centre Neuro‐Psychiatrique de Moiselles as an interim director in 1940, as well as at the Hôpital Psychiatrique de Villejuif as Médecin‐Chef from 1942 to 1960. During World War I and World War II, he served as a medical assistant and doctor. Montassut also held the presidency of the Société Française de Médécine Psychosomatique in 1960. Montassut published many articles on depression, epilepsy, fatigue, and psychosomatics.
P7 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Among these reasoning madmen (Sérieux and Capgras), a whole hierarchy is established, from the moron with absurd constructions to the self-taught or cultivated theoretician who moves at ease in abstract ideas.
P8 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, As we can see, under these various characteristics, we are touching a single reality whose various manifestations are closely linked. These are the four faces of the same square. At the centre is this psychorigidity that Montassut[4] has so rightly highlighted:
[4] MONTASSUT, La constitution paranoïaque, Thesis, Paris, 1925.
P10 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Finally, we will quote this type of “passionate idealists” portrayed by Dide*.
* (Richard Klein’s note) Maurice Dide (1873‐1944), one of the most attractive figures of 20th‐century French psychiatry, incarnated the committed physician, both scientist and man of action. Born in Paris, he studied psychiatry at the Salpêtrière. Among his abundant neuropsychiatric works, three main contributions should be emphasized. In 1902, he described a neurological syndrome caused by a bilateral obstruction of the posterior cerebral arteries, which is internationally known as Dide‐Botcazo syndrome. His description of doctrinaire torturers (doctrinaires tortionnaires) in his book Les idéalistes passionnés, published in 1913, appears prophetic of Nazi genocide. Skilled in neurological anatomy and histology, he linked the negative symptoms of schizophrenia to anatomic and histologic lesions in the basal ganglia and the thalamus. During World War II, Maurice Dide, committed himself to the fight against the German army of occupation and became the regional leader of the Resistance network, Combat. He was arrested after being denounced by a Gestapo agent and was sent to the concentration camp of Buchenwald. He died there some weeks later as the result of dog bites he sustained after helping an ill prisoner.
* Dide introduces in his 1913 work, Les idéalistes passionnés, published by F. Alcan, the psychological mechanism of passion, combined with idealism, as the organizer of a new form of mental pathology. He distinguishes the idealists passionate about love (chastity), goodness (religion, society, nature), then beauty and justice (claimants, reformers), this last form leading to cruelty. It is based on numerous historical examples, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, and on a few observations. These subjects are characterized by the predominance of anomalies in the affective sphere, to which judgments and representations are subordinated, by a fixed inclination crystallizing suddenly, by their passionate intensity, which refers rather to a personality disorder than to a psychotic pathology. G. de Clérambault created in 1921 the group of delusions or passional syndromes, whose main form is erotomania, which he radically distinguishes from the passionate idealism of love. In his manual, Henri Ey integrates delusions of passion and claim within chronic paranoid delusions.
P11-12 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, It seems to us, however, that we must stop short of the imaginative effects and the reactions, which the term bovaryism*, taken here in a clinical sense, would designate in normal life. [5]
*(Julia Evans notes) A reference to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
[5] See GENIL-PERRIN, Les paranoïaques, Doin.
P12 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, The delusion (délire) of interpretation. Masterfully described by Sérieux and Capgras, it is the second delusional (délirante) variety that we encounter among paranoid syndromes. It is also a second degree in the delusional (délirante) index by which one could situate delusions (délires) according to reality (réel).
P12 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Playing on “affective complexes”, “empirical residues”, “affective logic”, Dromard* (in the Journal de Psychologie*) (440) drew the curve which goes from character to delusional (délirante) conviction. He did not succeed in bridging the gap between the two structures. Moreover, the clinic does not show us these mechanisms.
*(Richard Klein’s note) Gabriel-René Emile Dromard (1874-1918) a student of the French psychologist, Théodule-Armand Ribot, was a French psychiatrist. He was winner of the l’Académie de Médecine, deputy doctor of the public asylums for the insane, corresponding member of the Société médico-psychologique and the Société de Médecine légale de France and author of over thirty-six books and articles.
* (Richard Klein’s note) Lacan cites Dromard eleven times in his doctoral thesis and lists two articles of his in his bibliography (the same two articles which are in fn. 47). See the following two footnotes:
“47. Dromard, « L’Interprétation délirante, J. de Psychol., 1910, p. 233, 266; « Le Délire d’interprétation », J. de Psychol., 1911, p. 289-303, 406. 416.” (p.70)
“51. Dromard, art. cité, 1911, p. 301. C’est nous qui soulignons. –“ (p. 71)
Dromard’s psychological theories, especially those on delusional interpretation, seem to form the basis of Salvador Dalí’s reflections on paranoia between 1929 and 1930. (See Astrid Ruffa’s Dalí, photographe de la pensée irrationnelle; Une appropriation créative des théories psychologiques de Gabriel Dromard)
P14 of www.Freud2Laan.com, The essential point of the delusional (délirante) structure seems to us to be this: the interpretation is made of a series of quasi-intuitive, quasi-obsessive primary givens, which are not originally ordered, either by selection or by grouping, by any reasoning organization. This is, it has been said, “an annelid, not a Vertebrate[6]”.
[6] (Jacques Lacan) This image is borrowed from the verbal teaching of our master M. G. de Clérambault, to whom we owe so much in matter and in method, that we should, in order not to risk being a plagiarist, pay homage to him with each of our terms.
P16-17 of www.Freud2Laan.com, Delusions ( délires) of passion, Very different from the previous ones and located on a different register than them, these delusions (délires) owe to the state of manic sthenia which underlies them, to have been brought closer by Clérambault to this chronic emotional state, where one wanted to define passion. It is through their second characteristic, constant, the prevailing idea, that they enter into the etymological framework of paranoia and find their place in our study of delusional (délirantes) structures.
P17 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Clérambault distinguishes three forms:
– the delusion (délire) of claiming (revendication), which Sérieux and Capgras had already isolated from the delusion (délire) of interpretation;
* (Richard Klein’s note) Revendication is the act of demanding or claiming something that was taken or wrongfully held by someone else. It can also refer to a legal action to recover property.
– erotomania;
-the delusion (délire) of jealousy.
P18 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, This passage to the act (passage à l’acte), when it is formulated, takes on the character of an obsessive impulse, which has this particularity, as H. Claude has shown, of being half integrated into the personality in the form of the prevailing idea.
P19 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, At the limit of these delusions (délires) are the political, magnicidal assassins, who struggle (442) for years with their murderous project before resolving to do so[7].
[7] LÉVY-VALENSI, Rapport au Congrès de Médecine légale, 1931.
P20 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Clérambault’s erotomaniacal delusion (délire). This “paradoxical” ideational organization, which translates the pathological hypertrophy of a chronic passionate state, goes through three phases:
-Euphoria;
-out of spite;
-of resentment.
P23 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Both of these patients are very abundant in writings. Those of the interpreters will be the least rich in calligraphic particularities, difference in size of the letters, underlined words, arrangements of the paragraphs, which will on the contrary abound in the writings of the passionate[8].
[8] Thesis of S. ELIASCHEFF, Paris, 1928.
P24-25 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, Any alteration of the interpretative delusion (délire) type should remind us of the acute[9] interpretive states that can be symptomatic of mental confusion, the onset of general paralysis, subacute alcoholism, chronic hallucinatory psychosis, a presenile involution, of a melancholy (with its delusion (délire) of self-accusation so different, (444) centrifugal, resigned, bearing on the past), of a delusional (délirante) whiff/episode (bouffée) so-called degenerates, finally of an evolving paranoid dementia, each of these states having quite different prognostic and therapeutic significance.
[9] Thesis of R. VALENCE, Contribution à l’étude des états interprétatifs, Paris, 1927.
P29 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, And for the American school (Allen*), the careful social investigation would always reveal some anomaly in the home in the relations of the child observed, with his entourage: influence of a stepmother or a stepfather, bullying or simple predominance of a sibling, hurtful emotional preferences, clumsy sanctions.
* (Richard Klein’s note) Dr. Fredrick H. Allen (1890-1964) was instrumental in “salvaging” thousands of “maladjusted” children during his twenty-five years as director and a practicing psychiatrist at Philadelphia’s Child Guidance Clinic. Treatment was believed to have rescued many of these children from likely juvenile delinquency or mental illness. Allen was a pioneer in holistic child therapy, combining psychiatric treatment with psychiatric social work. He worked closely with the child and parents (in some cases, foster or adoptive parents) to guide the child to a “happy, normal life.”
P30 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, It has been reported among the paranoid internees (2% of patients – and especially men according to Kraepelin) a rather heavy neuropathic heredity, 70%. The difficulty of making the paranoid an overall statistic encourages us to hold back. Note here the absence in these states are classic somatic signs of degeneration.
P30-31 of www.Freud2Lacan.com, As for the value of delusion (délire) itself, does it represent one of those lower functions of the psyche revealed by the liberation from control and higher inhibitions, a conception whose schema borrowed from neurology is temptingly simple? Can we even compare it to certain forms of primitive thought, according to the phylogenic conceptions of Tanzi* and the Italians? This is an area where nothing comes to test the hypothesis.
* Eugenio Tanzi (1856–1934) was one of the most influential Italian psychiatrists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He became one of the first in Europe to support Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s neuron theory, destined to play a fundamental role in the development of neuroscience. In 1896 Tanzi, Tamburini and Enrico Morselli founded the Rivista di Patologia Nervosa e Mentale (RPNM), one of the first Italian reviews on neuropsychiatry. Tanzi’s own best-known works include a co-study with Riva on paranoia (1884), whilst he co-published the two- volume Trattato delle malattie mentali (Treatise on Mental Maladies) with his former student Ernesto Lugaro in 1904, with the latter remaining a central text for Italian psychiatry until the late 1920s and a long-term influence on psychopathology and psychiatric clinics.
Tanzi is listed in the bibliography of Lacan’s doctoral thesis, Tanzi (E.) et Lugaro (E.) «La Paranoïa », Trattato delle mallatie mentali, t. II, p.738-775,
as well in the following two footnotes on page 26:
- Tanzi et Lugaro, Trattato délie malattie mentali, t. II, p. 740. « Les paranoïaques sont des anachronismes vivants… » « L’atavisme se révèle encore plus nettement dans la paranoïa que dans l’immoralité constitutionnelle parce que les idées changent d’une façon plus précise et plus visible que les sentiments… »; Riva, « E. nosog. délia paranoïa», Rel.XlV Congresso de! Soc, fren. ital,, 1913; voir Alberti, « La Paranoïa suivant les derniers travaux italiens », Note e revista di Psychiatria, 1908.
- Tanzi et Riva, Arch. Riviste frenat., 1894, vol. IX, X, XII.