Tension Between the Position of Psychosis and the Subject as Effect of the Signifier

The experience of the clinical presentations of the Cardo is remarkable in that it confronts the patient, the psychoanalyst, and the entire audience with the dimension of the signifier in what is surprising and dynamic about it. Indeed, the signifier, as brought to light by Lacan, occupies a wholly central place. As such, the way one hears the signifier conditions the entire practice of psychoanalysis; which fundamentally implies receiving the signifier independently of considerations tied to differential diagnosis. If the question of psychosis is interrogated during the Cardo encounters, the aim here is to ask how psychosis illuminates what is at stake in the signifier. My remarks draw on my reading seminar around Christian Fierens’s Logique de l’inconscient – Lacan ou la raison d’une clinique, and more specifically the subchapter entitled “The Diachronic Difference Proper to the Signifier”.

1. The Signifying Process Illuminated by the Position of Psychosis

By “diachronic difference”, one must understand the symbolic process of the function of the signifier in the Lacanian sense. We will see further on how the famous verbal hallucination “sow” (truie) cited by Lacan in “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1958) makes it possible to locate how the signifying process—insofar as it implies diachronic difference—is encountered in the psychoanalytic clinic. Most of the time, psychosis is quickly reduced to Lacan’s quote according to which what is rejected from the symbolic returns in the “real”, testifying to the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. Such a reading ultimately rests on a linguistic conception of the signifier and cuts short the dynamic of the analytic cure by inviting the clinician to prop up imaginary identifications, whereas what is required is on the contrary to accentuate the symbolic process of erasing the imaginary proper to the signifying function.

On this point, in Seminar Book III: The Psychoses, Lacan essentially seeks to show that the psychoses can only be heard through the signifier—that is, by considering the difference inherent to the signifier itself on the basis of its repetition, paving the way for Seminar IX: Identification. What does the position of psychosis show regarding the process of the signifying function? That is precisely what I intend to discuss with you. […]