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

- Link: https://eksis.eu/tension-psychose-sujet-signifiant/?lang=en
- Published: 2026-10-17T11:24:11+00:00
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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. […]