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(All parts in English, Turkish)

As you have learned, this year begins with the question of psychoses. It is far from possible to speak immediately about the treatment of psychoses, let alone the treatment of psychosis in FREUD, which literally amounts to nothing, as FREUD never spoke of it, except in a completely allusive manner.

We will first attempt to start from Freudian doctrine to see what it contributes in this matter, then we will inevitably introduce—within the notions we have already developed over previous years—all the current problems that psychoses pose for us:

• Problems of a clinical and nosographic nature first, in which it seemed to me that perhaps the full benefit that analysis can bring has not been fully realized.
• Treatment issues as well: assuredly, this is where our work this year must ultimately lead.

Since this focus… and assuredly, it is no coincidence—let us call it a slip of the tongue: a significant slip of the tongue— this focus already raises for us a question that is a kind of primary evidence, as always, the least noticed is in what has been done, in what is being done, in what is underway. As for the treatment of psychoses, it is striking to see that one seems to approach much more readily, to take a much keener interest in, and to expect many more results from the approach to schizophrenias than from the approach to paranoias.

I propose to you, as a point of interrogation, this observation right now. We may remain for a long time in bringing the answer to it, but assuredly, it will remain underlying much of our approach, starting from the outset. In other words, the somewhat privileged, somewhat nodal situation—in the sense of being a knot, but also a resistant core—the situation of paranoias is something, and it is certainly not without reason that we have chosen it as a starting point to begin addressing the problem of psychoses in its relations with Freudian doctrine.

Indeed, what is striking on the other hand is that FREUD first took an interest in paranoia… he certainly did not ignore schizophrenia or the movement surrounding it, being a contemporary of the elaboration of schizophrenia… it is very striking and quite singular that—while he certainly recognized, admired, and even encouraged the work around the Zurich school and linked analytic concepts and theory with what was being developed around BLEULER—FREUD remained rather distant from it.

And to immediately point you to a text to which you can refer, we will return to it later, but it is not useless for you to become acquainted with it right away: I remind you that at the end of the observation of the SCHREBER case, which is the fundamental text of everything FREUD contributed regarding psychoses, a major text, you will see FREUD’s notion of a “watershed,” if I may put it that way, between paranoia on one side and, on the other, everything he says he would like to call “paraphrenia”… and which corresponds very precisely to the term he, FREUD, would like to assign to what is properly the field of schizophrenias, or again, what he proposes to call the field of schizophrenias in analytic nosology… paraphrenia, which exactly covers all dementia. I am giving you the reference points necessary for understanding what we will say later.

Thus, for FREUD, the field of psychoses divides into two: psychoses properly speaking… to know approximately what that covers in the entire psychiatric domain, psychosis is not dementia. Psychoses, if you will—there is no reason to deny ourselves the luxury of using this term— this corresponds to what has always been called, and continues to be legitimately called, “madness”… in the domain of madness, FREUD makes two very clear distinctions. He did not involve himself much in nosology—in terms of psychoses—but here he is very clear, and we cannot regard this distinction, given the stature of its author, as entirely negligible. I point out to you in passing that, as often happens, we can only notice that he is not absolutely aligned with his time, and that this is the ambiguity:

• Either because he is very behind the times,
• Or, on the contrary, because he is very ahead of them.

But at first glance, he is very behind the times. In other words, the expansion he gives to the term paranoia, it is entirely clear, goes much further than was given to that term in his era.

I provide some reference points for those who may not be familiar with these matters. I do not want to give you what is called the history of paranoia since it appeared with a psychiatrist, a disciple of KANT, at the beginning of the 19th century. That is entirely an episodic incidence.

The maximum extension of paranoia corresponds precisely to the moment when paranoia is almost indistinguishable from what we call “madness,” a moment that corresponds to approximately seventy percent of the patients who were in asylums and bore the label “paranoia.” That meant that everything we call psychoses or madnesses were paranoias.

But we have other tendencies in France to see the word paranoia taken, almost identified with the moment it appeared in French nosology… a moment extremely late: this spans about fifty years… and where it was identified with something fundamentally different in conception from everything it represented in German psychiatry.

In France, what we call a paranoiac…
or at least what we used to call a paranoiac before the thesis of a certain Jacques LACAN, “Paranoid Psychoses and Their Relations with Personality,” attempted to cause significant confusion in people’s minds—a confusion that remained limited to a small circle, as suited the situation: paranoiacs are no longer spoken of as they were before—
at that time, it was about “paranoid constitution,” meaning that they were considered mean, intolerant, and ill-tempered people: pride, distrust, susceptibility, and self-overestimation were the defining characteristics that, for everyone, formed the foundation of paranoia.

From this point, everything became simpler, everything was explained: when someone became excessively paranoid, they ended up delusional.

That’s roughly—without any exaggeration—where we stood in France. I’m not saying this followed the conceptions of SÉRIEUX and CAPGRAS…
because if you read them, you’ll see that, on the contrary, their work represents a very refined clinic that precisely allows us to reconstruct the bases and foundations of paranoid psychosis as it is structurally defined.
Rather, this view followed the dissemination of the book titled “Paranoid Constitution” by GENIL-PERRIN, who had imposed this characterological notion of personality anomaly, essentially defined within a structure that can indeed be described—as the book bears the mark and style of this inspiration—as a “perverse structure of character.” And like any perversion, it occasionally exceeded limits and led to that dreadful madness, which simply consisted of the disproportionate exaggeration of all the traits of this unfortunate character.

This conception, you’ll notice, can rightly be called a psychological or psychologizing, or even a psychogenetic conception of the matter. All formal references to an organic basis of the phenomenon—to temperament, for example—do not alter what we can call its “psychological genesis”:
it is precisely that, something that is appreciated, defined on a certain level, and then the relations and developmental links are conceived in a perfectly continuous way, with an internal coherence that is autonomous, self-sufficient within its own domain. Ultimately, it is indeed psychological science that is at stake, whatever repudiation from a certain point of view might be found in the author’s writings, it would not change anything.

I thus attempted, in my thesis, to introduce another perspective. At that time, I was still undeniably a young psychiatrist, and I was greatly guided by the work, direct teaching, and, I dare say, the familiarity of someone who played a very important role in French psychiatry at that time: Mr. DE CLÉRAMBAULT.

Mr. DE CLÉRAMBAULT…
I evoke his person, his action, his influence, and his name in this introductory talk for those among you who only have an average or approximate knowledge of his work, or know it second-hand—and I believe there must be quite a few of you—
is often considered the fierce defender of an extreme organistic conception, and assuredly, that was indeed the explicit intention behind many of his theoretical expositions.

Nevertheless, I believe that this is where a perspective can be drawn regarding the actual influence not only of his person and teaching but also of the true significance of his discovery. Indeed, regardless of his theoretical aims, his work has immense clinical value: the number of clinical syndromes—using this term in its broadest sense—that were identified by CLÉRAMBAULT in a completely original and novel way, and which have since become an integral part of psychiatric experience, is considerable.

In the realm of psychoses, CLÉRAMBAULT remains absolutely indispensable. He contributed extremely valuable insights that had never been observed before and, in fact, have not even been revisited since.
I am referring here to toxic psychoses, determined by substances: etheromania, etc.

The notion of mental automatism appears polarized in CLÉRAMBAULT‘s work and teaching by his concern to demonstrate its fundamentally anideic nature, as he put it—that is, not conforming to a sequence of ideas (a term that doesn’t have much more clarity in this master’s discourse)—or to the sequence of phenomena in the development or evolution of psychosis.

One can already notice that even identifying this phenomenon in terms of a supposed comprehensibility:

• Whether there could be a continuity called an idea,
• Whether the sequence of phenomena, as I indicated to you with the paranoiac and their delusional development, would naturally follow…

Thus, there is already a kind of reference to comprehensibility, and almost a determination of precisely what manifests itself to rupture the chain, presenting itself as an open gap, as something incomprehensible and disconnected from what follows.

This assumption should not be dismissed as naïve, as there is no doubt—none more common. Yet still, for many people…
and I fear, for you too, or at least for many of you…
the notion that has constituted the major advancement in psychiatry since the introduction of this investigative movement called analysis would consist in restoring meaning within the chain of phenomena.

This is not false in itself, but what is false is imagining…
as remains ambient in the minds of on-call rooms, in the average common opinion, in the “sensus communis” of psychiatrists…
that the meaning in question is something that can be understood. In other words, that what we have learned, the novelty here, is that we have come to understand patients.

This is pure illusion! This notion of comprehensibility has a very clear meaning, which constitutes an absolutely essential springboard for our research: something can indeed be understood and remain indistinguishable from what is, for example, called a “relation of understanding,” which JASPERS made the cornerstone of his General Psychopathology.

There are things that seem understandable, that go without saying—for example, when someone is sad, it’s because they lack what their heart desires.
Nothing could be more false! There are people who have everything their heart desires and who are still sad; sadness is a passion of a completely different nature.

I would still like to insist a little: when you slap a child, it seems understandable that they cry, without anyone reflecting on the fact that they are not actually obliged to cry. I remember a little boy who, when slapped, would ask: “Was that a caress or a slap?” If told “It was a slap!” he would cry—it was part of the conventions, the rule of the moment: if it was a slap, one had to cry; if it was a caress, he was delighted.
It must be said that the nature of the relationship he had with his somewhat temperamental parents created this kind of active communication context, which is quite common in the notion of a “relation of understanding” as elaborated by Mr. JASPERS.

You can, before next time, refer to the very precise chapter titled “The Notion of the Relation of Understanding” in JASPERS. There you will see—because that is precisely the usefulness of sustained discourse—that inconsistencies appear quickly, and you will very rapidly see to what extent the notion is untenable. That is to say, ultimately, JASPERS evokes the relation of understanding only as something that is always at the limit, but as soon as one properly approaches it, it becomes elusive. The examples he holds to be the most evident, his reference points, the centers of reference with which he inevitably and necessarily confuses the notion of the relation of understanding, are, in a way, ideal references.

But what is most striking is that even in his own text, and even with the skill he employs to sustain this mirage, he cannot avoid providing examples other than those that have always been precisely refuted by facts. For example, the idea that suicide is certainly a tendency toward decline, toward death, suggests that anyone might indeed say—but only if prompted to say so—that suicide should occur more frequently during the decline of nature, that is, in autumn. But everyone has long known, according to statistics, that suicides occur far more frequently in spring.

This is neither more nor less comprehensible. It merely requires the necessary articulations and an explanation of whatever one wishes on this subject, admitting that there is something surprising about the fact that suicides are more frequent in spring than in autumn—something that can only rest on this kind of ever-insubstantial mirage called “the relation of understanding,” as if there were anything in this domain that could ever truly be grasped.

In this sense, even if we managed to conceive…
it is very difficult to conceive because it is literally inconceivable, but like all things not approached, not grasped closely, not captured within a true concept, it remains the latent assumption underlying everything considered a kind of change in the tone of psychiatry over the last thirty years…
if we managed to identify the notion of psychogenesis with that of the reintroduction—into the relationship with our psychiatric object, the patient—of these famous relations of understanding, if psychogenesis is that, I say…
because I think most of you are now perfectly capable of understanding what I mean after two years of teaching on the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real…
for those who are not yet there, I tell them: the great secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no psychogenesis.

If psychogenesis is that, then it is precisely what psychoanalysis:

• Through its entire movement,
• Through its entire inspiration,
• Through its entire momentum,
• Through everything it has contributed,
• Through everything it leads us toward,
• Through everything it must maintain us within,

…is, in fact, the farthest removed from.

Another way of expressing this, which goes even further, is that in the domain of what is properly psychological, if we try to grasp it more closely—if we place ourselves in a psychologizing perspective—the psychological is ethology. It is the set of behaviors, the set of relationships of the individual, biologically speaking, with what constitutes their natural surroundings. This is a completely legitimate definition of what can properly be considered psychology: it is an order of factual relations, something objectifiable, let’s say—a sufficiently limited field to constitute an object of science.

We must go a little further and even say that, as well-constituted as a psychology might be within its natural field, human psychology as such is exactly…
as VOLTAIRE said about natural history: “It is not as natural as all that.”
…to put it simply, it is the most antinatural thing imaginable.

Everything that properly belongs to the psychological order in human behavior is subject to profound anomalies. At every moment, it presents paradoxes sufficient in themselves to raise the question of what order must be introduced simply to make sense of it all—to allow the cat to find her kittens, so to speak.

If one forgets what is truly the essential foundation, the essential momentum of psychoanalysis, one returns…
and this, incidentally, is naturally the constant, daily tendency of psychoanalysis…
one returns to all sorts of myths that have been constructed since a time still to be precisely defined:
roughly from the end of the 17th century up to psychoanalysis.

These types of myths can indeed be defined in this way if one were to constitute the entire ensemble of what is called traditional psychology and psychiatry:

• Myths of unity of personality,
• Myths of synthesis,
• Myths of higher and lower functions,
• Confusion concerning the terms of automatism,

…every type of organization of the objective field that, at every moment, reveals cracks, splits, tears, denials of facts, and even misrecognition of the most immediate experience.

That said, let there be no mistake—I am not here giving the slightest indication in favor of a myth of this “immediate experience” which forms the basis of what is called psychology, or even existential psychoanalysis. This “immediate experience” has no more privilege to stop us, to captivate us, than in any other science. That is to say, it is by no means the measure of what we must ultimately arrive at as a satisfactory elaboration of what is at stake.

In this respect, what Freudian doctrine and Freudian teaching provide is—as you know—entirely in line with what has happened in the rest of the scientific field. As different as we may conceive it from this myth that is uniquely our own, like other sciences, it introduces dynamics that lie beyond this immediate experience, dynamics that cannot be captured in a tangible way.

There, as in physics, it is not ultimately the color that we retain in its felt character, differentiated by direct experience; it is something behind it that conditions it.

We cannot overlook this entirely essential dimension of Freudian progress either. It is something that is also—not to be confused with the relation of understanding I spoke of earlier—something that does not simply stop at immediate experience. This experience is not something that, at any moment, is taken as pure, pre-conceptual, pre-essential, or a kind of pure experience.

It is indeed an experience already structured by something artificial, which is very precisely the analytic relationship. The analytic relationship is constituted by the subject’s confession of something they come to tell the physician and by what the physician does with it. Everything is elaborated from there, and this is what forms its initial operative instrument, its primary mode of operation.

Through everything I have just reminded you of, you must, it seems to me, have already recognized the three orders of the field I have been teaching and reiterating to you for some time, emphasizing how necessary they are to our perspective in order to understand anything about this experience, namely:

• The symbolic,
• The imaginary,
• And the real.

The symbolic—you have just seen it appear very precisely earlier when I alluded in a very clear way, and through two different approaches, to what is manifestly beyond any understanding, within which all understanding is inserted, and which exerts such a manifestly disturbing influence on everything concerning human and especially inter-human relations.

The imaginary—you have also seen it emerge in my previous discourse through that single reference I made to animal ethology, that is, to those captivating or capturing forms that, in a way, provide the tracks and sequences within which animal behavior is directed, conducted towards its natural goals.

Mr. PIÉRON, who does not enjoy much favor with us, titled one of his books: “Sensation, Guide of Life.” It’s a very beautiful title. I don’t know if it applies as much to sensation as he claims. In any case, the content of the book certainly does not confirm it, but there is, of course, a fundamentally accurate point in this perspective. This title seems somewhat appended to his book; it feels like a purpose the book itself fails to fulfill.

But the imaginary is assuredly a “guide of life” for the entire animal realm, and the role that the image plays in this deeply structured field by the symbolic, which is ours, is, of course, central. This role is entirely taken up, reshaped, and reanimated by this symbolic order. The images—as far as we can grasp anything that allows us to seize them in a pure state—are always more or less integrated into this symbolic order, which, I remind you, is defined in humans by its essentially organized structural character.

By contrast, what difference is there between something that belongs to the symbolic order and something that belongs to the imaginary or the real? In the imaginary or the real, we always have a more or less around whatever constitutes a threshold; we have a margin, a more or less, a continuity. In the symbolic order, every element holds value only insofar as it is opposed to another.

To enter, for example, into the field of experience we are about to approach—that of our psychotic subject—let us consider something entirely elementary. One of our psychotic patients recounts the strange world he has entered in recent times: for him, everything has become a sign. Not only, as he tells it, is he spied upon, observed, and watched: “They talk, they speak, they indicate, they look at him, they wink,” but this can go much further—it can invade (you will immediately see the ambiguity arise)—let us say, the realm of inanimate, non-human real objects.

Let us look more closely before determining what this means. If, for example, he encounters a colored car in the street, it will have a specific value for him—a car is not absolutely what we would call a natural object. If this car is red, it will have a particular meaning for him—it is not for nothing that a red car passed by at that exact moment.

Let us ask ourselves questions about such a simple phenomenon, the phenomenon of the delusional intuition this subject has regarding the value of this red car. Very often, he is entirely incapable—even though it holds maximum significance for him—of specifying this significance, which remains ambiguous: Is it favorable? Is it threatening? Sometimes he is unable to decide on this characteristic, but assuredly, the car is there for a reason.

Regarding this phenomenon, which I would say is the most difficult to grasp, the most undifferentiated, we will recognize that, for example, we can have three completely different conceptions of the encounter of a subject (whose specific classification within psychosis I have not yet stated) with this declaration about a red car:

• If we consider it from the angle of a perceptual aberration. Do not think we are far removed from this—it was not long ago that the question of what an alienated subject experienced, at an elementary level, was posed in terms of perceptual phenomena. If it were a color-blind person who sees red as green, or vice versa—nobody investigated this. He does not simply fail to distinguish the color.
• If we consider this encounter with the red car in the same register as what happens when a robin, encountering another of its kind, displays the well-known red breast that gives it its name. It is solely because of this encounter that it is there, as has been demonstrated through a series of experiments showing that this plumage corresponds to territorial boundaries. By itself, this determines a certain adversarial behavior at the moment of encounter. The imaginary function of this red, if you will, translates in the relation of understanding as something that has accelerated a perception in the subject, something that seemed to carry in itself the expressive and immediate character of hostility or anger.
• Or, on the contrary, we can understand this red car—a third way of understanding it—in the symbolic order, namely, as one understands the color red in a deck of cards. That is, as opposed to black, as part of an already organized language.

These are precisely the three registers distinguished, and equally the three levels on which our understanding can be engaged, in the very way we question the elementary phenomenon and its current value at a specific moment in the subject’s evolution.

It is absolutely clear, overwhelmingly so, that what FREUD introduces when he approaches the field of paranoia…
and this is even more striking here than anywhere else, perhaps because it is more localized, because it contrasts more sharply with contemporary discourse…
when it comes to psychosis, we immediately see that FREUD, with an audacity that has the character of a kind of absolute beginning…
we end up no longer realizing the technical fabric, it is a kind of creation. No matter how much we say that sciences had already taken an interest in the meaning of dreams, it has absolutely nothing to do with the method applied in Traumdeutung, with this pioneering work already being carried out before our eyes, which culminates in the formula: “the dream tells you something.” And the only thing that interests us is the elaboration through which it tells something—it tells something the way one speaks. This had never been said before.
It had been said that there was meaning, that we could read something in it, but the dream says something, it speaks. Admittedly, there might have been something of this through various innocent practices, but that FREUD would take the book of a paranoiac—this book of SCHREBER, which he quite platonically recommends reading at the moment he is writing his work, as he says, “Do not fail to read it before reading me”—
FREUD thus takes this book, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and delivers a Champollion-like deciphering, a deciphering in the way one decodes hieroglyphs. He discovers, behind everything this extraordinary character tells us…
for among all literary productions of the kind of pleadings, communications, or messages made by someone who, having crossed the limits, speaks to us from the realm of that profoundly exterior, strange experience that is that of the psychotic, this is certainly one of the most remarkable books, one of a truly privileged character. There is an exceptional encounter here between FREUD’s genius and something extremely rare.
In his development, FREUD takes the text, and he does not make an empty promise: we will see together that, at a certain moment, there is, on FREUD’s part, a true stroke of genius, which owes nothing to what one might call “intuitive penetration.” It is literally the stroke of genius of the linguist [Champollion], who, in the text, sees the same sign appear several times and presupposes, begins with the idea, that this must mean something—for example, the most frequent vowel, “e,” in the language in question, based on what we vaguely know—and who, from this stroke of genius, manages to reconstruct approximately the usage of all the signs in question in that language.

For FREUD, for example, this prodigious identification he makes of “the birds of heaven” in SCHREBER with “young girls” has something entirely of this phenomenon—an extraordinary hypothesis that allows, from there, the reconstruction of the entire chain of the text, and more: the understanding not only of the signifying material in question but also of the reconstruction of the language, this famous “fundamental language” of which SCHREBER himself speaks, the language in which the entire text is written.

The absolutely dominant character of symbolic interpretation as such, in the full, fully structured sense that I emphasize, must always be situated within the original plane of analytical discovery, where it is more evident than anywhere else. Is that sufficient to say?

Certainly not, because, at the same time, nothing in this case would go beyond this, indeed, extraordinary translation. But at the same time, it would leave precisely the field in which FREUD operates on the same plane as that of neuroses. That is to say, the application of the analytic method would show nothing more here than that it is indeed capable, in the symbolic order, of performing an equally valid reading but would be entirely incapable of accounting for their distinction and originality.

It is therefore quite clear that it is well beyond this—and this will undoubtedly be demonstrated once again through the reading of FREUD—that the problems we will study this year are posed, and that they also justify their place in our program: in this discovery of the meaning of discourse.

Strictly speaking, it is discourse—and printed discourse, indeed—that is at stake: the discourse of the alienated.
That we are in the symbolic order and that it is the symbolic order that can account for it is manifest.
Now, what does the material of this alienated discourse show us?

He speaks, but it is not at the level of his words that the meaning translated by FREUD unfolds. It is at the level of what is named: the elements of naming in this discourse are borrowed from something whose connection, as you will see, is extremely close to the subject’s own body. It is through the doorway of the symbolic that we arrive at glimpsing, at penetrating this relationship of man with his own body, which characterizes the ultimately reduced, but truly irreducible, domain in man known as the imaginary.

For if something in man corresponds to this imaginary function of animal behavior, it is everything that binds him in an elective way, always as elusive as possible—that is, at the limit of any symbolic participation—but nevertheless irreducible. And it is precisely psychoanalytic experience that has made it possible to grasp this in its ultimate mechanics: man has a certain number of formal mechanisms that are the general form of the body, where this or that point is referred to as an erogenous zone of this body.
This is what the symbolic analysis of the SCHREBER case demonstrates to us.

From there, the questions posed precisely surround the categories that are effectively active, effective, in our operative field. It is a classic statement that, in psychosis, the unconscious is present on the surface. This is even why it seems as it already is, and there appears to be no better or greater effect.
We do not know very well how we will account for it. It is certainly true that, in this somewhat instructive perspective, we can immediately note that it is probably not purely and simply—as FREUD always emphasized—through this negative trait, of being an Unbewusst, an unconscious, that the unconscious holds its effectiveness.

We translate FREUD and say: this unconscious is a language. It is certainly much clearer in our perspective: the fact that it is articulated, for example, does not imply, after all, that it is recognized. The proof is that everything happens as if FREUD were translating a foreign language and even reconstructing it through an absolutely fundamental breakdown.

The subject may simply be in the same relationship with his language as FREUD is with his. He certainly is. That is to say, the phenomenon of Spaltung can legitimately be evoked here. And—if we admit the existence of someone who can speak in a language they entirely ignore—it is the metaphor we choose to describe what is unknown in psychosis. Will we be satisfied with this?

Certainly not, because the question is not why this unconscious, which is articulated right on the surface, remains excluded, so to speak, unassumed by the subject. The question is why this unconscious appears in the real, for that is ultimately the essential question.

I hope there are enough among you who remember the commentary Mr. Jean HIPPOLYTE gave us here on Freud’s “Verneinung”, and I regret his absence this morning, as I would have liked to repeat before him—and ensure through his presence that I am not distorting them—the terms he extracted from this Verneinung.

What emerged clearly from the analysis of this striking text is that in what is unconscious, not everything is merely repressed, that is to say, unknown to the subject after having been verbalized, but that behind the entire process of verbalization, one must admit a primordial Bejahung [affirmation], an admission in the symbolic sense, which itself can fail.

This point is corroborated by other texts—I am only referring to those we have paused on here—and especially by a very significant passage, as explicit as possible: it admits that this phenomenon of exclusion, for which the term Verwerfung may, for certain reasons, seem entirely valid, must be distinguished from Verneinung, which belongs to a much later stage.

At the beginning of symbolization—that is, at an already advanced stage of the subject’s development—it can happen that the subject refuses access to their symbolic world to something they have nonetheless experienced, which in this case is nothing other than the threat of castration. And we can know from the subject’s subsequent development that he refuses to know anything about it, and Freud says this explicitly, in the sense of the repressed.

This is the formula he uses, and it means this: there is a distinction between:

• What is repressed,
• And what, by the very fact of being repressed, returns.

For these are but two sides of the same coin. The repressed is always there, but it expresses itself in a perfectly articulated way in symptoms and in a multitude of other phenomena. This is entirely different, and it is for this reason that my comparison from last year of certain phenomena of the symbolic order with what happens in machines is not so useless to recall.

I briefly remind you: you know that everything introduced into the circuit of machines—in the sense we understand it: our little machines, in the modern sense of the term, machines that do not quite speak yet but are about to speak any minute—these machines, into which we input data, as they say, meaning sequences of small numbers, after which we expect major transformations that would allow the machine to return results that might otherwise take us one hundred thousand years to calculate.
These machines can only receive data if we respect their own rhythm, that is, a kind of fundamental rhythm whose existence we must respect; otherwise, everything else falls below and fails to enter, unable to be integrated. We can revisit an image to represent this, but there is a phenomenon: “everything that is refused in the symbolic order reappears in the real.”

On this point, Freud’s text is unambiguous: if the Wolf Man is not without psychotic tendencies or properties—as the continuation of the observation demonstrated, he is not without holding certain resources on the side of psychosis, as shown in this brief paranoia he exhibited between the end of Freud’s treatment and the moment when he is again observed by Freud—
if the Wolf Man has always refused his accession—though apparent in his behavior—to castration in the symbolic register, if he rejected it from the properly symbolic function, from its assumption not only in actuality but even as a possibility by an “I”, there is the closest link between this and the fact that—retracing back into childhood—he had this brief hallucination, which he recounts with extremely precise details: he saw, while playing with his knife, that he had cut his finger, and that his finger was hanging on by just a small piece of skin.

The subject recounts this with a precision and style that, in a way, mimics lived experience. The fact that the scene is apprehended for a brief moment, and it even seems that all sense of temporal reference has disappeared: he was sitting on a bench next to his nanny, who was precisely the confidant of his earliest experiences. He does not dare to tell her about it—how significant this is, this suspension of all possibility of speaking to the person with whom he spoke about everything, especially this.
There is here a kind of abyss, a true temporal plunge, a rupture in psychological experience for a brief moment, after which he emerges and says, “Everything is fine, let’s not talk about it anymore.”

The relationship Freud establishes between this phenomenon and this very particular “knowing nothing about the thing itself” in the sense of the repressed, expressed in Freud’s text, is translated as follows: “what is refused in the symbolic order reappears in the real.”

You know this is precisely the essence, the meaning, the crux of the entire Verneinung text:

• What does a certain mode of appearance of what is at stake in the subject’s discourse mean, under this very particular form, denial?
• And why is what is present there also ineffective?

The close relationship between these two registers:

• That of denial and that of reappearance in the purely intellectual order, unintegrated by the subject,
• And that of hallucination, that is, the reappearance in the real of what is rejected by the subject,

shows a range, a spectrum of relationships, a connection that is of absolute primary importance.

The question, therefore, is: What is at stake when it comes to a properly hallucinatory phenomenon?
A hallucinatory phenomenon has its source in what we may provisionally call—I do not know if I will always maintain this conjunction of terms—the “subject’s history in the symbolic.”
It is difficult to sustain because the entire history is, by definition, symbolic. But let us adopt this formula for now.

The distinction is essential to establish: whether neurotic repression has the same origin, whether it belongs to the same level of “history in the symbolic” as the repression involved in psychosis. Of course, the closest relationship exists with the contents in question, but what is most striking is to see that assuredly:

• These distinctions immediately allow, in a way, recognition within these contents,
• And, in truth, they already, in themselves, provide a key that enables us to pose these problems in a much simpler way than they had been posed until now.

It is absolutely certain, for example, that the phenomenon of verbal hallucination, as it presents itself in the form of this kind of duplication of the subject’s behavior and activity, is heard as if a third party were speaking and saying: “She does this, or he does that. He spoke to me, but he will not respond. He is dressing or undressing or looking at himself in the mirror…”
What is at stake here is something that, from the perspective of our schema from last year:

• Of the subject and this Other, with whom the direct communication of full speech in the completed symbolic order is interrupted by this detour and passage through a and a’—the two selves and their imaginary relations.

It is absolutely clear that the essential triplicity—at least at the forefront—that this implies for the subject is something that directly corresponds to the fact that something, which is undoubtedly the subject’s ego, speaks and can normally speak about the subject in the third person to another, and speak about him, speak about the S of the subject.

This—within the perspective of the fundamental structuring of the subject and his speech—has nothing absolutely explicit, nor even entirely comprehensible. Just as a whole part of psychotic phenomena is understood in this way: in an extremely paradoxical yet exemplary manner, the subject—in the way Aristotle pointed out—“One must not say the soul thinks, but rather that man thinks with his soul.”

We are already far from this formula, since I believe we are much closer to what happens by saying that, here, the psychotic subject, at the moment when it appears in the real, when it appears with this “sense of reality”, which is the fundamental characteristic of the elementary phenomenon, in its most characteristic form of hallucination, the subject, quite literally, speaks with his ego.

This is something we will never encounter fully. The ambiguity of our relationship with the ego is absolutely fundamental and sufficiently marked. There is always something profoundly revocable in every assumption of our ego. What certain elementary psychotic phenomena show us is literally the ego fully assumed instrumentally, so to speak—the subject identified with his ego, with which he speaks. It is he who speaks about himself, the subject, or about himself as S, in both equivocal senses of the term:

• The letter S,
• And the Es in German.

I am giving you this today, in this form, only to indicate where our attempt this year will lead us in situating ourselves precisely in relation to these three registers: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, and the various forms of psychosis.

They will lead and keep us within what already seemed to be the object of our research, specifically to enable us to clarify, in its ultimate mechanisms, the function that we must assign in treatment, in the cure, to a register, to a mechanism like that of the ego, for example, with all that this entails.

Because, finally, what can be glimpsed at the limit of such an analysis is the entire question of the object relation. If the analytic relationship is founded on a misrecognition of the autonomy of this symbolic order, which automatically entails a confusion between the imaginary plane and the real plane—although, of course, the symbolic relation is not eliminated since speech continues, and indeed that is all that happens—it follows that what in the subject seeks to be recognized on the proper plane of authentic symbolic exchange…
(which is not so easy to reach, as it is perpetually interfered with by the other)…
what seeks to be recognized in its symbolic authenticity is not only literally misrecognized, but is replaced by this particular kind of recognition: the imaginary, the phantasm, which is, properly speaking, what is called the anteroom of madness—a certain way of authenticating everything in the subject that belongs to the imaginary order, and something for which we must simply marvel that it does not lead to a deeper alienation.

Without a doubt, this sufficiently indicates that some predisposition is necessary, and we certainly do not doubt that conditions exist. As I was once asked in Vienna, a charming young man, to whom I was trying to explain a few small things, asked me if I believed psychoses were organic or not. I told him that this question was completely outdated, surpassed, and that it had been a very long time since we made a distinction between psychology and physiology. And certainly, not just anyone becomes mad, as we had written on the wall of our on-call room in that ancient, slightly archaic time.

Nevertheless, it remains true that it is a certain way of managing the analytic relationship—and which is specifically about authenticating the imaginary relationship we just discussed, this substitution of recognition on the symbolic plane with recognition on the imaginary plane—that must be attributed to the well-known cases of relatively rapid triggering of delusions, more or less persistent, and sometimes definitive, caused by imprudent handling at the onset of analysis of the “object relation.”

The facts are acknowledged, categorized, and it is well known that this can happen. However, no one has ever explained why this happens, why analysis, in its initial moments, can trigger psychosis.
This is evidently both a function of the subject’s predispositions, as is always remarked, but also of a certain way of handling analysis.

I believe that today I have done nothing more than provide you with an introduction to the importance of what we are going to do, an invitation to grasp that, for us, this represents a perspective of notional elaboration, of the refinement of concepts, their application, and consequently, our training in analysis. It is useful for us to concern ourselves with this field, however ungrateful and arid paranoia may appear to be. I also believe that, at the same time, I have fulfilled my program—that is, today’s title—and have also pointed out some very precise implications.

This notional elaboration, with what it involves for us in terms of training, in the sense of rectifying perspectives, is something that can have the most direct implications for the way we will think—or, at the very least, the way we will guard ourselves against thinking—about what the experience of each day is and what it must aim to be.