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(All parts in English)

I believe that the more one tries to approach the history of the notion of paranoia, the more one realizes its highly significant character, the lessons that can be drawn from progress, even in the absence of progress, as you wish, which have characterized the psychiatric movement.

In the end, there is no notion more paradoxical, and it is not for nothing that I took care last time to highlight the old term “madness,” that is to say, the fundamental term commonly used to designate madness, which has always remained synonymous with paranoia. And truly, one can say that in the word “paranoia,” the authors have manifested all the ambiguity fundamentally expressed in the use of this term “madness.”

Certainly, if we consider the history of the term, it does not date from yesterday nor even from the birth of psychiatry, and without wanting to indulge here in those kinds of displays of erudition that are all too easy, I can still remind you that the reference to the term madness has always been part of the language of wisdom—or what is claimed as such—and that the famous “Praise of Folly” already marks a certain historical date.

This kind of emphasis on madness is something identical to normal human behavior, even though the word was not in use at that time. It is something that retains all its value. Simply put, we can say that what was said at that time in the language of philosophers, from philosopher to philosopher, spoke of wisdom while speaking of madness. Over time, this ended up being taken entirely seriously, quite literally. The turning point comes with PASCAL, with all the gravity and contemplation in his emphasis:
– that undoubtedly there is a necessary madness,
– that it would be mad, by another turn of madness, not to be mad with the madness of everyone else.

These reminders are not entirely useless when one considers the danger of implicit paradoxes already included in the premises, which are worth attempting to explore. One might say that until FREUD, madness was reduced to a certain number of behaviors, of “patterns,” while others, by these “patterns,” also thought they could judge everyone’s behavior.

In the end, the difference—pattern for pattern—does not immediately leap to the eye, and the emphasis was never quite placed on what allows one to construct the image of what constitutes “normal” or even understandable behavior, and to situate properly paranoid behavior.

Indeed, this is how things evolved through the history of this paranoia, and this in a more or less emphasized way, since after KRÆPELIN remained attached for a very long time to this notion, which was quite broad and, in short, tied to that kind of sensitivity that allows a person of practice, through this kind of gift, this sense—what is called the natural indicator, the true medical gift—a certain way of seeing, to recognize what precisely delineates reality. Let us remain here at the level of definitions.

The delineation of paranoia was undoubtedly broader and much more extensive throughout the 19th century than it became from a certain point corresponding to the end of the last century, that is to say, around 1899, during the fourth or fifth edition of KRÆPELIN. It was only in 1899 that KRÆPELIN introduced a more restricted subdivision within this fairly broad framework of paranoias… which until then broadly covered what, from this reduction onward, was brought under the framework of dementia praecox, turning it into the paranoid sector.

And then he provided a rather interesting definition of paranoia, distinguishing it from other modes of paranoid delusions that had so far been included in this vast class of paranoia:

“Paranoia is distinguished from others because it is characterized by the insidious development of internal causes and by a continuous evolution of a delusional system, persistent and unshakeable, which establishes itself while preserving complete clarity and order in thought, will, and action.”

A definition that one might say, under the pen of such an eminent clinician as KRÆPELIN, contradicts point by point all the data of clinical practice—in other words, none of it is true.

The “development” is not “insidious”; there are always surges, phases. It seems to me, though I am not entirely sure, that I introduced the notion of a “fruitful moment.” This “fruitful moment” is always perceptible; at the beginning of paranoia, there is always something that is a rupture in what he later calls “the continuous evolution of a delusion under the influence of internal causes.”

It is absolutely clear that one cannot limit the evolution of paranoia to “internal causes,” and it suffices to turn to the etiological chapter under the pen of the same author and contemporary authors, namely SÉRIEUX and CAPGRAS, who five years later carried out their work, to see that, precisely, when seeking the triggering causes of paranoia, one always considers something—with the necessary question mark—but something like a crisis, an emotional element in the subject’s life, a vital crisis. One will always look for something that indeed relates to the subject’s external relations.

It would be quite astonishing not to have to consider, in a delusion essentially characterized as a delusion of relations—”delusion of relations,” a term not coined by KRETSCHMER but invented by WERNICKE—external causes.

The “continuous evolution of a delusional system, persistent and unshakeable…”

There is nothing more false. It is entirely evident, even in the slightest observation of paranoia, that the delusional system varies. Whether it has been shaken or not seems to me to be a secondary question. Indeed, it is something that has a certain relationship with an inter-psychology, with external interventions, with maintaining a certain order in the world surrounding a paranoia, which is far from ignoring this and seeks, throughout the evolution of its delusion, to integrate it into its composition.

“…which establishes itself with a complete preservation of clarity and order in thought, will, and action.”

Of course, what will be most striking is precisely the question of knowing what we call “clarity” and “order,” and whether this something that deserves such a name can be found in the subject’s account of their delusion. This is something far from being the least interesting aspect of paranoia cases. However, this remains an entirely approximate characterization, one that naturally leads us to question the notion of “clarity” and the notion of “order” in this context.

As for “…thought, will, and action,” that is precisely the issue at hand. We are here rather to try to define thought, will, and action based on a certain number of concrete behaviors, among which the behavior of madness is included, rather than starting from this thought, this will, and this action, which draw us into an academic psychology that seems to need to be reworked before becoming the subject of concepts rigorous enough to be exchanged, at least at the level of our experience.

I believe that the ambiguity of all this progress surrounding the notion of paranoia is linked to many things—undoubtedly to an insufficient clinical subdivision. I think that among psychiatrists here, there is enough knowledge of the different clinical types to know, for example, that a “delusion of interpretation” and a “delusion of revendication” are not at all the same thing. The structure of these two forms of delusions is sufficiently differentiated to raise precisely the questions of what makes:

– one delusion a “delusion of interpretation,”
– while another is not a “delusion of revendication.”

I believe, however, that it is not in the direction of some kind of scattering, of pulverizing clinical types, that we must orient ourselves to understand where the real problem lies. In other words, the difference between paranoid psychoses and passion psychoses, although it was admirably highlighted by the work of my mentor CLÉRAMBAULT—whose role, function, personality, and doctrine I began to outline for you last time—may not have been situated in quite the massive way it was initially. It is precisely in the realm of psychological distinctions that his work gains the greatest significance. We will have to demonstrate this in more detail in an upcoming seminar.

I believe, nonetheless, that there is great value in seeing that the problem we face is situated within the overall framework of paranoia, and that the essential difficulty—one that truly gives the feeling that a century of clinical practice has done nothing but slip constantly around this problem—lies in the fact that every time it advanced slightly in its deepening, it immediately lost the ground it had conquered. I would say this happens through the very way of conceptualizing what was immediately sensitive and tangible at the heart of observations. Nowhere is the contradiction between mere observation, even simply read, and theorization more evident. One could almost say that there is no discourse on madness more apparent and more perceptible than that of psychiatrists, precisely on the subject of paranoia.

There is something that seems to me to belong entirely to the nature of the problem and which we will approach in the following way: if you read, for example, the work I have done on paranoid psychosis, you will see that I emphasize—to try to take clinical analysis back to the point that is truly the nerve of the problem—the emphasis I place on what I call “elementary phenomena.” I intentionally borrow this term from my mentor CLÉRAMBAULT. By focusing precisely on elementary phenomena, I try to demonstrate the radically different nature of these phenomena compared to anything that could be deduced from what he calls “ideational deduction,” that is, from what is comprehensible to everyone. In reality, these phenomena are no more elementary than what underlies the entire construction of a delusion.

Even at that time, I did not emphasize with less firmness the fact that this phenomenon is no more elementary than, in relation to a plant, the leaf where one can observe a certain detail in the way the veins intertwine and insert themselves. There is something common to the entire plant that reproduces or conceals itself in certain forms that make up its totality.

And I insist very precisely on what constitutes the delusion: analogous structures are found, whether one considers things at the level of the composition, the motivation, the thematization of the delusion itself, or at the level of the elementary phenomenon. In other words, it is the same structuring force—if we may express ourselves this way—that is found whether one considers it in one of its parts or in its totality.

The importance of the “elementary phenomenon” is therefore not as something that would be some sort of initial nucleus, a “parasitic point,” as CLÉRAMBAULT expressed it, within the personality, around which the subject would construct a kind of fibrous reaction intended to encyst it by enveloping it while integrating it—in other words, explaining it, as is often said.

The delusion is not destroyed; it reproduces the same constituent force. The delusion—itself—is also an elementary phenomenon. That is to say, the notion of elementary is not to be taken in any way other than as a direct notion of utility—that is, a structure that is precisely differentiated, irreducible to anything other than itself, and which defines itself as a structure.

I believe that what has caused this aspect of the structure to be so profoundly misunderstood, what makes all the discourse I was referring to earlier about paranoia retain this persistent character of power, is something you can test while reading FREUD, and almost all the authors. You will always find entire pages, sometimes entire chapters—extract them from their context, read them aloud, and you will find the most marvelous developments concerning the behavior of everyone [i.e., “normal”].

It would take very little for what I read to you earlier about KRÆPELIN’s definition of paranoia to be a definition of normal behavior. But you will constantly encounter this paradox, even among analytical authors, precisely when they place themselves on the level of what I referred to earlier as the pattern, a term that has recently become dominant in analytical theory but has been present in potential for a very, very long time. For example, in preparation for this discussion, I reread an already old article—around 1908—by ABRAHAM concerning dementia praecox. He was called upon to discuss the relationship of the precocious dement to objects.
He says: look at this precocious dement, who for months and months has piled stone upon stone. These are ordinary pebbles, which, for him, are imbued with the greatest value.

He sets out to explain the subject’s affectlessness, who finds an over-affective value in keeping objects that are collected and over-valued. This is where the disorder lies: the subject piles them on a shelf until it breaks, causing a great crash in the room, after which everything is swept away. And here is the paradox, ABRAHAM tells us: this character, who seemed to attach so much importance to these objects, pays no attention to what happens—no protest at the general evacuation of the objects of his attention and desires. He simply starts again and begins to accumulate others.

It is clear that this concerns dementia praecox, but presented in this way, this little parable has such an evidently human character that one would like to turn it into a fable and show that this is what we do all the time. I would even say more: this ability to accumulate a multitude of things that have no value to us, and to see them pass overnight into losses and gains, only to simply start again, is even a very good sign. If one were to remain attached to what one has lost, that would be the moment to say: there is an overvaluation of objects whose loss or frustration cannot be borne by the subject.

The total ambiguity of these supposedly demonstrative mechanisms in description is something that makes one wonder how the illusion can be maintained for even an instant, except by—I don’t know what—a sort of clouding of critical sense that seems to seize all readers from the moment they open a technical book, particularly in the field of our experience and profession.

This remark I made to you last time—how the term “comprehensible” is something completely elusive and evasive—it’s surprising that it is not posed as a kind of primordial lesson, a required formulation at the very threshold.

Start by not believing that you understand! Begin with the idea of a fundamental misunderstanding.

This is a primary disposition; without it, there is truly no reason why you should not understand everything and anything. An author presents a behavior as a sign of affectlessness in one context; elsewhere, it would instead be excessively valued that the character could start over his work after merely acknowledging its loss.

There is perpetually a kind of appeal to notions considered as received, fundamental, while they are not so in any way. And, to put it plainly, this is where I want to arrive: this difficulty in approaching the problem of paranoia lies precisely in grasping that:
– paranoia is situated precisely on this level of understanding,
– “the elementary phenomenon”—in the sense I defined it earlier, the irreducible phenomenon—whether it is at the level of the delusion or at the level of interpretation.

But by now, I believe you have enough elements to understand what it is about: it is a subject for whom the world began to take on a meaning. What is interpretation? Here is a subject who, for some time, has been prey to a number of phenomena in which, on the street, he notices things happening—but what things? If you question him, you will discover many aspects.

You will indeed see that there are points that remain mysterious to him and others on which he expresses himself. In other words, he symbolizes what is happening. And how does he symbolize it?

It is already in terms of meaning, meaning that he does not always know—and very often, if you press closely, he is not entirely capable of saying whether things are favorable or unfavorable to him. He searches for what is indicated by this or that behavior of his peers or by this or that observed feature in the external world considered significant.

Last time, I spoke to you about a red car, and on that occasion, I sought to show you how vastly different the significance of the color red can be, depending on whether it is considered:
– in its perceptive value,
– in its imaginary value,
– and I even said that you must carefully distinguish, in this regard, how its symbolic value is something that must be differentiated—and this is very easy to grasp—from its imaginary value.

In human behaviors, there are also a number of features that appear in the perceptual field, in this world that is never simply and purely an inhuman world but a world composed by the human, where previously entirely neutral features take on a value for him.

What does the subject ultimately say, especially at a certain stage of their delusion?
It is that the notion of signification comes above all—it is signification, although they do not know which one. It is the moment, with its salient features that emerge for them. The field of their relationship is charged with meaning. In many cases, they cannot go much further, but what is striking is that this meaning comes entirely to the forefront.

It imposes itself; it is a defiance; it is perfectly comprehensible to them. And precisely because it pertains to this register, we also understand that it is precisely because it operates on the level of understanding—as an incomprehensible phenomenon, if I may say so—that paranoia holds both this character so difficult to grasp and this most compelling interest for us.

But if people have spoken in this regard of “reasonable madness,” of “preservation,” and of “clarity and order in will,” it is only because of this feeling that, however far we go into the phenomenon, we remain in the realm of the comprehensible—even when what we understand cannot properly be articulated, named, or inserted by the subject into a context that truly explains it.

The mere fact that it concerns something already on the plane of understanding makes us feel indeed capable of understanding—provided that it is simply a matter of going a little further. But if it is about things that already, in themselves, lend themselves to being understood, this is where the illusion arises: since it is a matter of understanding, we understand.

Well, precisely not! As someone once remarked, but confined themselves to this strictly elementary observation. Charles BLONDEL wrote a book titled La conscience morbide, where he said that the hallmark of psychopathologies is precisely that they deceive this understanding. It was a valuable work, but he obstinately refused to understand anything brought to him subsequently by psychiatric experience or by the development of ideas in psychopathology after that work.

Yet this is precisely where the problem must be revisited: it is that, indeed, it is always understandable. Furthermore, it is an observation we can make in the training we give students in case analysis: it is always there that they must be stopped. It is always the moment when they have understood that coincides with the moment when they have missed the interpretation—whether it should have been made or not.

There is always a moment in the subject’s discourse that stands out sharply—as presenting the opening for the problem, the dialectical entry into the case. It is always the moment when the beginner rushes to fill the case with an understanding, the formula for which they usually express with complete naivety: “The subject meant to say this.” What do you know?

What is certain is that they did not say it, and in listening to what they actually said, it becomes clear that at the very least, a question could have arisen, could have been posed—and perhaps this question alone would have sufficed to constitute a valid interpretation, or at least to initiate one.

In fact, I will already give you an idea of the point where this discourse converges.
What is important is not that any given moment:
– of the subject’s perception,
– of their delusional deduction,
– of their self-explanation,
– of their dialogue with you,

…is more or less understandable. It is that something happens at certain of these points, which is characterized—and cannot be characterized otherwise—by the following formula: there is indeed, at a certain point, a core that is entirely understandable, if you insist, but it is of absolutely no interest that it is understandable.

What is utterly striking is that it is inaccessible, inert, stagnant with respect to any dialectic.
Take the element of signification that exists in elementary interpretation. This element is repetitive; it proceeds through reiterations. It is more or less pushed, more or less elaborated. Sometimes the subject goes much further in the elaboration of signification. But what is certain is that, for at least a certain time, it will always repeat itself with the same question mark it carries—without ever receiving any answer, without any attempt to integrate it into a dialogue.

The phenomenon remains reduced to something that is absolutely closed to any properly dialectical composition. In passionate psychosis, which seems, in appearance, so much closer to what is called the normal, what does the emphasis placed on the prevalence of passionate revendication mean?

The fact that a subject cannot endure such a loss or damage, and that their entire life seems centered on compensation for the damage suffered, on the revendication it entails, on the entire processivity that will so dominate the foreground that it sometimes seems to overshadow by far the importance of the issue it carries—this, too, belongs to the same order. It is also a standstill in any possible dialectic, though this time centered in an entirely different way.

Last time, I pointed out to you what surrounds the phenomenon of interpretation: something that participates in both the self and the other, very precisely to the extent that analytical theory allows us to define the self as always relative. Here, in passionate psychosis, it is obviously much closer to the subject’s I that what is called this understandable core is situated—but a core of dialectical inertia that constitutes the subject’s defining characteristic.

In short, it is precisely because this dialectical dimension in the phenomenology of our pathological experience has been so profoundly misunderstood, and always radically ignored—a characteristic one could say of a certain class of minds—that it seems the entry into the field of clinical human observation, over the century and a half in which it has been established as such since the beginnings of psychiatry, has substituted this kind of initial formula, the general admission of which I wished for earlier. This is that all understanding is first substituted by this: from the moment we deal with humans, we radically misrecognize this dimension, which nevertheless seems, everywhere else, alive, accepted, commonly handled, I would even say, in the sense of the human sciences: the very autonomy of the dialectical dimension.

It is pointed out that the faculties of the subject remain intact, as KRÆPELIN said earlier: “will” and “action”, which seem entirely consistent with everything we expect from human beings. There is no deficit, no flaw, no disturbance of functions. The only thing that is absolutely not called into question is the following:

– that the hallmark of human behavior is to orient its actions, desires, and values in a dialectical movement that causes us to see them not only change at every moment but continuously, and even to shift to strictly opposite values based on a mere turn in dialogue,

– and to realize that this absolutely fundamental truth, hidden even in the apologues of the question, is veiled in the form of the most popular fables: what was at one moment loss and disadvantage can become, in the very next instant, the happiness granted by the gods,

– this perpetual possibility, at every moment, of questioning every part of desire, of attachment, even of the most persistent meaning of a human activity,

– this perpetual possibility of reversing the sign based on the dialectical totality of the individual’s position.

This is something so universally experienced that one is absolutely astonished simply by the fact that, suddenly, one is confronted with something objectifiable: his fellow human being. This dimension is entirely forgotten. However, it has never been completely erased; we find traces of it at every moment:

– whenever the observer allows themselves, in some way, to be guided by their instinct, by a feeling of what is at stake,
– and in the text of “reasonable madness”, which is much more expressive, significant, and intended to show us what it is all about.

It is indeed clear, in the phenomena in question, that the term interpretation lends itself—especially in the context of this “reasonable madness” where it is inserted—to all sorts of ambiguities in speaking of combinatory paranoia, where the secret lies precisely in the combination of phenomena.

In other words, the term which has been promoted—at least here—to take its full value, so that we do not hesitate to apply it, is the term: “Who is speaking?” It seems simply to be the term that must dominate the entire question of paranoia. I already mentioned this to you briefly last time by recalling the absolutely central role in paranoia of what is called verbal hallucination and the theories constructed around it, and the time it took to realize—sometimes quite visibly—that, literally, in the sense of “Who is speaking?”, in the sense of hallucination, the subject was there articulating in front of you what they claimed to be hearing.

It took M. SÉGLAS, in his book Clinical Lessons at the beginning of his career, to cause a kind of sensation by pointing out that verbal hallucinations occurred in people who could be observed—in very obvious signs in some cases, and in others by looking a little closer—to be themselves articulating, whether knowingly, unknowingly, or refusing to know, the very words they accused of hearing.

This was indeed a small revolution: the realization that auditory hallucination must be something whose source is not external but internal. And what could be more tempting than to think that it might correspond to some irritation of a so-called sensory zone?

It remains to be seen whether this continues to be applicable, for example, in the domain of language, and whether these famous psychic verbal hallucinations truly exist, whether they are not always more or less psychomotor hallucinations. In short, whether what could be easily summarized as the phenomenon of speech—in its pathological forms—can, in its normal forms, be dissociated from this phenomenon… which seems to have simply approached things from a concrete point of view… from this fact, which is nonetheless quite remarkable and perceptible: that when the subject speaks, they hear themselves.

This is one of the absolutely essential dimensions of the phenomenon of speech, on the level of the most elementary experience: it is not simply the other who hears you. What is entirely impossible to schematize is the phenomenon of speech based purely on the image that serves as the foundation for a certain number of so-called communication theories: an emitter, a receiver, and something that happens in between.

It seems to be forgotten that in human speech—among many other things—the emitter, when it comes to human speech, is always at the same time a receiver. In other words, one hears the sound of one’s own words. One may not pay attention to it, but it is certain that one hears it. Observations as simple as this seem to dominate the entire question of so-called psychomotor verbal hallucination, which, perhaps because of its very obviousness, was relegated to the background in the analysis of these phenomena.

In reality, of course, this small SÉGLASian revolution was far from having provided us, on its own, with the solution to the enigma.

SÉGLAS remained at the level of the phenomenal exploration of hallucination, and he had to revisit what was overly absolute, enveloping, and all-encompassing in his initial theory. He restored to its proper value the notion of certain hallucinations that are absolutely untheorizable within this framework. He brought clinical clarity and finesse in description that cannot be overlooked, and which I advise you to make an effort to become familiar with. Many of these observations are instructive, perhaps more for their errors than for what they constitute as genuine contributions.

One cannot engage in a sort of negative experience of the field in question, that is to say, construct something solely on errors. On the other hand, this domain of errors is so abundant that it is almost inexhaustible. Nevertheless, we will have to take a few detours to cut through and attempt to reach the heart of the matter.

We are going to do this by following FREUD’s advice—that is, with FREUD—by delving into the analysis of the SCHREBER case, by conducting a reading, however cursory, but complete, of the SCHREBER case. I will try to present to you as many passages as possible because I cannot conduct this reading in its entirety, as it would be tedious.

SCHREBER is a figure who held a fairly important position in the German judiciary and who, after a short illness that occurred between 1884 and 1885—
– an illness of which he himself gives us the details,
– a mental illness consisting of a sort of hypochondriacal delusion—

…was discharged from Professor FLECHSIG’s psychiatric clinic, where he was treated and apparently cured completely, without any apparent aftereffects.

At this point, he led an apparently normal life for about eight years. He himself remarked that there was only one disturbance to his domestic happiness, which consisted of the regret he and his wife felt about not having children. At the end of these eight years—all the authors agree in noting in SCHREBER’s writings that this corresponds with a very important promotion in his career: he was appointed President of the Court of Appeal in the city of Leipzig—he received the announcement of this promotion before the so-called vacation period and took office in October.

It seems—just as happens often in many mental crises—that at a certain point, he became somewhat overwhelmed by his responsibilities. This promotion, which he received at the age of—apparently, by cross-referencing—fifty-one years (a young age for the title of President of the Court of Appeal of Leipzig), unsettled him somewhat. He found himself surrounded by people far more experienced than himself, much more adept at handling delicate affairs. For about a month, he had to overwork himself, as he put it, and after this month, he began to experience severe disturbances.

After these eight years of normal life, he began to have disturbances again, starting with various symptoms: insomnia, mentism (an obsessive flood of thoughts), and the appearance of increasingly disturbing themes in his thinking. These led him fairly quickly to seek consultation again and, ultimately, to what can properly be described as internment. This internment first took place in the same psychiatric clinic in Leipzig under Professor FLECHSIG. After a short stay in another clinic—Professor PIERSON’s in Dresden—he was interned in a psychiatric facility near Pirma.

He would remain there until 1901—from 1894 to 1901—and it was there that his delusion would go through an entire series of phases. At least in appearance, he was able to give us an extraordinarily composed account of these phases, seemingly extremely precise with dates. He did so during the final months of his internment, preparing a book he would publish immediately after his release. Therefore, he concealed from no one, at the moment when he claimed the right to be released, that he would share it with all of humanity, with the very specific intention of informing it of the revelations his experience contained, which he considered highly important for everyone.

It is this book, published in 1905, that FREUD took up in 1909. He discussed it during his vacation with FERENCZI, and in December 1910, he wrote the essay we have on the autobiography of a case of paranoid delusion.

We are simply going to open SCHREBER’s book. The letter preceding it, addressed to the Privy Councillor Professor FLECHSIG, is significant because it clearly shows us the medium in which a delusional subject can establish a critique of the terms most important to him. For at least some of you who do not have such extensive experience with these cases, this letter has a value worth noting. You will see that Professor FLECHSIG occupies a central place in the construction of SCHREBER’s delusion.

[Reading of Schreber’s letter to Prof. Flechsig, dated March 1903, in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Paris, Seuil, 1975, pp. 11–14.]

You can see, therefore, from the tone of courtesy, the clarity and order with which he introduces this book—whose first chapter is composed of an entire theory concerning, at least apparently, God and immortality—that the terms at the center of SCHREBER’s delusion consist of the very first admission of the function of the “nerves of time.”

[Reading an excerpt from the first chapter of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, pp. 23–24.]

Everything is there: these rays that are not limited, and even less so to the limits of human individuality as it is commonly recognized. These rays, which will form the explanatory network, are far from being merely explanatory, as they are also experienced. They are the web on which our patient will weave the entirety of his delusion.

This relationship between the nerves, and primarily between the subject’s nerves and the divine nerves, will involve an entire series of events, among which is the term Nervenanhang—that is, “attachment of nerves”—a form of attraction that can intervene in these exchanges and is capable of placing the subject’s nerves in a state of more or less dependence on the enterprises of some character, regarding whose intentions the subject himself takes various stances over the course of his delusion.

In other words, he tries to precisely situate these intentions, which, of course, are far from benevolent at the start—if only because of the catastrophic effects experienced by the patient—but which certainly do not exclude all ripostes. For, during the course of the delusion, the function assigned to these intentions is transformed and integrated into a true progressivity, for example:
– at the beginning of the delusion, where the personality of Dr. FLECHSIG dominates,
– and at the end of the delusion, where the entire structure of God—and you will see that it is far from simple—is profoundly engaged.

There is verification, and even a characteristic progression, of the divine rays—in other words, what constitutes the foundation of souls. However, this does not merge with the identity of the said souls, because he emphasizes that the immortality of these souls should not be considered as something that must be concluded and reduced strictly to the level of the person, of the soul’s identity in itself.

All of this is presented with a degree of plausibility that does not render his theory unacceptable. This preservation of the identity of the self is something that does not seem to him to require justification. On the other hand, the support, the intrinsic quality, and the expressions recorded by the said nerves become, subsequently, what is reincorporated into the divine rays. This is something akin to a kind of raw material that can always be reused, set into motion again by divine action, which both nourishes this divine action and is, conversely, constituted by this divine action in its later creations.

There is an entire metabolic image developed on a very broad and extremely detailed plane, as you will see, because the detail of these functions is of enormous importance. However, what we can already observe is that it is in the nature of the divine rays to speak. There is the soul of the nerves, which merges with a certain fundamental language. I will show you, with the appropriate passages, just how precisely it is defined by this subject and with a finesse whose prominence deserves to be emphasized right now.

The relatedness of this fundamental plane with a flavorful German language, with an extremely advanced use of euphemisms that goes so far as to exploit the ambivalent power of words, is something I will perhaps be able to distill for you more effectively in our next session. Because what is evidently quite striking is that one cannot help but recognize in it a truly remarkable kinship with FREUD’s famous article on The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words. You will recall this article where FREUD believed he had found an analogy between the language of the unconscious, which does not admit contradictions, and the fact that primal words supposedly have the property of designating the same trait considered at its two poles—the same word being able to signify “good” and “bad”, “young” and “old”, “long” and “short”, etc.

We heard last year, during a conference, the entirely effective critique made by Mr. BENVENISTE from a linguistic point of view. Nevertheless, FREUD’s observation retains all its weight from the experience of neurotics, and if something were to give it value, it would be the emphasis placed on it by the aforementioned SCHREBER.

What we must notice in our first approach to this book is that the construction of the delusion—whose richness and the number of structures it allows us to highlight will soon become apparent—is something that presents surprising analogies:
– not simply by their content, by everything they entail of what is commonly referred to as “the symbolism of the image”,
– but in their very structure, in certain schemas that closely resemble what we ourselves might be called upon to extract from our experience.

You can glimpse and sense in this theory of divine nerves that speak—in other words, of something that can at once be integrated by the subject but also remain entirely and radically separate from them—a theory not entirely different from what I teach you about how one must describe the functioning of the unconscious.

In this case of SCHREBER, we see a certain form of objectivation of something theoretically assumed to be entirely correct, with, of course, the possibility of reversal—namely, whether human quality might not participate in some deliriously theorized case.

This is the question that arises regarding every kind of emotional construction in the delicate domains within which we usually move. And it is noteworthy that this remark was made by FREUD himself, who, in some way, authenticated the homogeneity by noting himself, at the end of his analysis of the SCHREBER case, that, after all, he had never seen anything that so closely resembled libido theory—
with all the disinvestments, the potemization, the reaction of separation, the influence at a distance that this entails—
he had never seen anything that so closely resembled libido theory, his libido theory as formulated, as SCHREBER’s theory of the divine rays.

And he was not at all disturbed by this because his entire development had been aimed at demonstrating the idea of what such a surprising approximation of the structural relationships of inter-individual exchange, as well as intra-psychic economy, might relate to in the SCHREBER case.

We are, therefore—as you can see—dealing with a very advanced case of madness, because these delusional introductions to everything that the SCHREBER case will develop can give you all sorts of insights into the extraordinary, utterly bewildering richness of SCHREBER’s elaboration.

You can see that we are entirely within this ambiguity, this time brought to a maximum level of effectiveness, as it will extend much further in this contribution at the surface level, which, until now, has been the method used to circle around the delusion.

For the first time, with a case as exemplary as that of SCHREBER, with the intervention of such a penetrating mind into structural notions that are entirely evident—whose possible extrapolation, whose applications to all cases, appear to be an absolutely dazzling novelty, simultaneously enlightening and allowing, in particular, a reclassification of paranoia on entirely new foundations.

At the same time, we find, in the very text of the delusion, in what the subject expresses, something that is not there as an implication, as a hidden relationship, as we find in neuroses, but something truly explicit, theorized, even developed.

The delusion already provides a kind of perfectly legible double from the moment one has—it cannot even be said a key, but merely the thought to look at it, to take it for what it is—a kind of double of what is approached by theoretical investigation.

It is here that lies the exemplary and significant character of this particular field of psychoses, which I have proposed you keep as broadly and flexibly defined under the name of paranoia. This is where it becomes justified that we grant it this special attention this year.