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(All parts in English)

The life of the psychoanalyst…
as was reminded to me several times on the same day by a sort of convergence, by my analysands…
the life of the psychoanalyst is not rosy. The comparison that can be made of the psychoanalyst to a garbage dump is justified, because indeed, throughout the day, they must “take in” words and discourses of undoubtedly dubious value, and even more so for the subject communicating them. It is a feeling that the psychoanalyst—if they are truly one—has not only become accustomed to overcoming but which, to the extent they are truly and authentically so, is in fact abolished.

On the other hand, I must say that it resurges in full force when their function requires them to exhaust the corpus of works constituting what is called analytical literature. There is no exercise more disconcerting for scientific attention, especially when one must literally apply oneself to it—that is, when one must read, in a short span of time, the seemingly homogeneous perspectives developed on the same subjects by different authors. And no one seems to notice the blatant, persistent contradictions that come into play every time fundamental concepts are invoked.

Take, for example, the case of President Schreber. You have only the general and almost inaugural framework of the demonstration of the major novelty psychoanalysis brought to the pathogenesis of paranoia, namely, that the tendency—or in other words, the fundamental drive, whose unconscious motive it would be—is none other than a homosexual tendency. Certainly, drawing attention to the array of facts grouped around such a notion was a groundbreaking innovation that profoundly changed our entire perspective on paranoia. But as to what this homosexuality is, and at what point in the subject’s economy it intervenes—in other words, how it determines psychosis—I believe I can testify that only the most imprecise and even contradictory approaches have been outlined in this regard.

The notion of “defense” against the supposed irruption—why at a particular moment, which remains to be determined—of the homosexual tendency is far from being proven, especially if one assigns a precise meaning to the term “defense.” Fortunately for the continuation of much analytical research, that is, the pursuit in the shadows of conceivable dreams, this notion of “defense” is, precisely, never clarified.

For it is very clear that there is a perpetual ambiguity between:

– the notion of “defense” in its relation to general psychopathology, as part of the disease itself, where “defense” has only a tenuous and non-univocal relationship to the cause provoking it—a defense that is considered merely a way of maintaining a certain equilibrium within itself or causing the disease,
– and the notion of defense as we advance it in the psychic realm, that is, something articulated, something remade, something transformed from a certain motive.

This specific tendency of the notion of “defense” is thus taken into account, and we are assured that the initial determining moments of Schreber’s psychosis must be sought in the moments of onset of the various phases of his illness.

You know that he had a first crisis around 1886 or 1887. Using his memoirs—where some information can be found—an attempt is made to show us its coordinates. At that time, we are told, one can note a feature of Schreber’s life: he was about to present his candidacy for the Reichstag. The illness intervened, and the candidacy was no longer in question. During the interval, that is, during the period following the first crisis, approximately a year, Magistrate Schreber was normal, except that he was unfulfilled in a desire—or even a hope—of fatherhood.

After a period of eight or nine years, something new happened to him: an ascent…
at a somewhat premature point, at an age that did not suggest he would be appointed to such a high position…
to the role of President of the Leipzig Court of Appeal. It is said that, at that moment, being elevated to this function—a position of eminence—gave him an authority which, in the terminology of our field, elevated him to a paternal role, with a responsibility that, though not entirely complete, was fuller and heavier than any he might have hoped for.

This gives us the impression that there is a relationship between this ascent and the onset of the crisis. In other words:

– in the first case, the inability to achieve his ambition triggered the crisis, seemingly to avoid facing the struggles,
– in the other case, the position was conferred on him from outside, in a way almost validated as unmerited, and it is assigned the same triggering value.

If President Schreber had no children, this fact is taken as evidence to show that the notion of fatherhood plays a crucial role, and that, insofar as he attained this paternal position, the fear of castration is assumed to have been reawakened in him…
a homosexual longing concerning the father…
is directly implicated in the crisis’s onset, leading to all the distortions, pathological deformations, and mirages that progressively shaped his delusion.

Certainly, the immediate presence in his delusion of male figures from the medical environment—named one after another, each coming to the forefront, at the center of the persecution of a very paranoid nature characteristic of Schreber—shows that these male figures hold a central role.

It is, to put it plainly, a transfer, though not in the sense we ordinarily understand it, but something of that order, uniquely linked to those who had taken care of him. The choice of characters is thus sufficiently explained, but before attempting to be satisfied, so to speak, with this kind of overarching coordination, it would be worth noting that in justifying them, we act in a way that I would say completely neglects proof by contradiction. In other words, we fail to see that we take the fear of struggle and, I would say, the premature and even unwarranted success, as having the same positive signification in both cases.

If President SCHREBER, by chance, had become a father between his two crises, emphasis would obviously be placed on this fact, and full weight would be given to the idea that he would not have been able to bear this paternal role.
In short, the notion of conflict is always invoked in a way that can rightly be called ambiguous, since it seems that the source of the conflict is placed on the same level as something much less visible in certain cases, namely the absence of conflict itself. That is to say, it is because conflict leaves, so to speak, a space—a void left by conflict—that something emerges: a reaction, a construction, a staging of subjectivity.

This is merely a passing indication, intended simply to show you that, in understanding the mechanism, we find the same ambiguity that we discussed in our last lesson—namely, the ambiguity of the very meaning of delusion. Let us be clear that this concerns what is usually referred to as the content, which I would rather call the “psychotic discourse.” The ambiguity of this surprising value can be observed at every level:

– From the clinical approach, where you may believe, at least for a time, that you are dealing with someone who communicates with you because they speak the same language,

– And then, when you push further, especially if you are a psychoanalyst, you realize that what they say is also comprehensible—so comprehensible, as I showed you last time, that at certain moments you have the illusion, or a mirage, that you are dealing with someone who has penetrated, in a more striking and profound way than is granted to ordinary mortals, the very mechanism of the unconscious system.

Somewhere in a second chapter, SCHREBER expresses it in passing:

“I have been given insights that are rarely given to a mortal.”

This ambiguity, suggesting that it is precisely in the system of the delusional that we might sometimes find the most remarkable elements of comprehensibility, is something my lecture today will address. I aim to show you the approach I wish to take so that we may attempt to elucidate this double question:

– The meaning of psychosis on the one hand, that is, the “psychotic discourse,”

– And the mechanism of psychosis on the other hand, namely, how a subject enters psychosis, which is equally important as the first.

I will try to show you the path I intend to follow and how it seems to me that only this approach can truly situate these questions without the confusion that is always maintained across different levels of our explanation, even our psychoanalytic explanation, of delusion. I remind those attending my clinical presentations that last time I presented a clearly psychotic patient. They will remember how long it took me to extract, so to speak, the stigma—the sign that indicated we were indeed dealing with a delusional person, and not merely with an anomaly of character, nor with someone of a difficult temperament who quarrels with those around them.

It took nothing less than an interrogation far exceeding the average time devoted to such work for it to become clear that, at the boundary of this same language—almost impossible to steer her away from—there existed, nonetheless, another language. A language with that peculiar flavor, sometimes extraordinary, which is precisely the language of the delusional: a language where certain words take on a special accent, a unique density, a language that sometimes manifests itself in the very form of the word, in the form of the signifier—that is, it gives the word a frankly neological character, something so striking in the productions of paranoia.

In the case of our patient from the other day, the word “galopiner” finally emerged, and it undoubtedly provided the signature for everything she had told us until then—something we might just as easily have translated. How easily we could have done so, since even the patients themselves guide us in this, and since the term “frustration” has long been part of the vocabulary of decent society. Who does not spend their day speaking of the frustrations they have suffered, will suffer, or that others around them suffer?

But it was indeed something entirely different from a frustration of dignity, independence, or minor affairs that the patient was a victim of. She was evidently in another world—a world where precisely the term “galopiner”, and undoubtedly many others she kept hidden from us, constitute essential reference points.

And this is the point at which we will begin to clarify the issue, to take the external approach—the first examination. This is where I would like to pause for a moment to make you feel how important the categories I attempted to familiarize you with last year are. For it is not enough to merely present linguistic theory. You will remember that in linguistics there is the signifier and the signified, and that the signifier must be understood as the material aspect of language. The trap, the pitfall one must avoid, is to believe that the signified refers to things or objects.

The signified is something entirely different—it is the meaning I explained to you last year and the year before, following the linguist Saint AUGUSTINE. The chapter on meanings has shown us, as M. BENVENISTE did, that meaning always refers to another meaning. That is to say, the system of language, wherever you grasp it, never leads to an index pointing directly to a piece of reality. The entirety of reality is covered by the network of language, and you can never say: “That is what is designated.” For even if you could do so, you would never know whether I am designating, in this table, for example, its color, its thickness, the table as an object, or something else entirely.

This distinction is essential to keep in mind. For now, we will pause at this small and initial phenomenon, the term “galopiner”, in the case of the patient from the other day. And there are other terms—those SCHREBER himself constantly highlights when he speaks of the “adjunction of nerves”. He specifies clearly that this was told to him by the examined souls or divine rays.

There are words that are, in a way, key words—words he himself emphasizes that he would never have formulated on his own, original words, full words, very different from the others he employs to construct his discourse, to communicate his experience. He himself does not mistake them: there are different levels here. It is precisely at this level, distinct from the level of the signifier, that you must grasp terms like “galopiner” or “adjunction of nerves”—in their material character, through that special form of discordance with common language called neologism.

But there is something else worth pausing on, which can only become apparent if you begin with the idea that, in language, meaning always refers to another meaning:

– It is precisely that these words, as seen in SCHREBER’s text, closely follow the phenomenon when you are in the presence of any patient whatsoever.
– It is that, in delusional language, these words that arrest your attention always have this particularity: they are never exhausted by referring to another meaning. Their meaning, if I may say so, has the property of essentially referring to Meaning.

It is a meaning that, in certain respects, refers to nothing but itself; something irreducible always remains. The patient himself emphasizes:
– that the word, in some way, cannot truly be defined; the word carries weight in itself,
– that before being reducible to another meaning, it signifies in itself something precisely ineffable. It is a meaning that refers above all to meaning as such.

And we see it at the two poles of the concrete manifestations of all these phenomena of which these subjects are the locus. That is to say—to limit ourselves to this phase of the phenomenon—that no matter the degree to which this endophasia, which encompasses all the phenomena manifested and emphasized by the subject, is taken, there are indeed two poles where we find this characteristic at its most prominent point.

And here again, SCHREBER’s text highlights it for us: there are two types of phenomena:

1. Those where neologism, communicated by the source, emerges: delusional intuition is a sort of full phenomenon, one that, in a way, inundates and fills the subject with revelations of an entire perspective of experience that is, for him, new. He emphasizes its original stamp, its very particular flavor, which is indeed what he highlights when he speaks of the fundamental language with which he was initiated, introduced by his experience. Here, the word—whatever it is, in whatever form it takes—renders precisely this characteristic of designating the use of that same term. The word, as we use it with its full emphasis, is the word of the enigma, the word of mystery; it is the soul of the situation…
2. And then, on the opposite side, this other form that meaning takes when it no longer refers to anything—a complete void, namely, the formula that repeats, reiterates, drones on, and takes on other modes to express this stereotyped insistence of what is communicated to them. This is what we could call, in contrast to the word, the refrain.

In these two forms [of meaning]…
– one the fullest [1],
– and the other the emptiest [2],
…if it is indeed a meaning, it is precisely at this stage that these points arrest us: it is a kind of lead weight in the net, in the subject’s discourse network. This is the structural characteristic by which, from the very first clinical observation, we recognize that there is something here that gives their discourse the character, the signature of delusion.

It is indeed, as you can already see, this term “language”…
the same language which, at first contact with the subject, even the most delusional one, we might be tempted to take at face value…
that leads us to surpass the notion of language and to introduce the term discourse. For indeed, what constitutes the interest, even the meaning of these patients, is that they speak the same language as us.

Without this element, we would know absolutely nothing about them. But it is:
– in the economy of discourse,
– in the relationship of meaning to meaning,
– in the relationship of their discourse to the common arrangement of discourse,
…that already lies the essential feature by which we distinguish that we are dealing with delusion, and specifically in the analysis of the discourse of the paranoid or paraphrenic psychotic.

I once attempted to sketch this out, to experiment with it in an article published in the Annales Médico-Psychologiques around the 1930s. It was the analysis of a case of schizophasia, where it was indeed an analysis of discourse at all levels—that is, at the level of the semanteme, at the level of the taxeme—that allowed us to discern the structure. And most probably at the particular level of what is perhaps not incorrectly called, though not entirely understood in this context, “schizophrenic disintegration.”

I have spoken to you about language, and at this point, you must also perceive and grasp the insufficiency, the trap, and the misleading inclination sufficiently marked in the formula of those analysts who say:

“One must speak to the patient in their own language.”

You see at what primary level we are. Undoubtedly, of course, those who speak this way must be forgiven, like all those who do not know what they are saying… [Luke XXIII, 34]

But this already tells you how much this is merely a kind of return of the signs of repentance from a whole domain, or an entire term of the analytical experience—a struggle with which one quickly settles accounts when one refers to it in such a cursory manner.

Except that what is revealed here is, assuredly, this condescension, which clearly marks the distance maintained from the object in question, namely, the patient, since, after all, there they are:
– We speak their language.
– We speak the language of the simple-minded and the fools.

Marking this distance, occasionally reducing language to a pure and simple instrument, as they say—a way of making oneself understood by those who understand nothing—is precisely already an opportunity to completely elude the matter at hand, namely, the reality of speech.

In the end, that is indeed what it is all about. In fact—and let me set analysts aside for a moment—we see the crux around which psychiatric discussion revolves, whether it calls itself phenomenology, psychogenesis, or organogenesis of delusion. If we examine what the extraordinarily fine and penetrating analyses of a CLÉRAMBAULT signify, what is the true meaning of this discussion?

Some believe it concerns whether it is an organic phenomenon or one that is not. Apparently, this would be evident in the phenomenology itself. I am willing to concede this, but let us look closer. The question is this: Does the patient, ultimately, truly speak?

Naturally, if we have not made the distinction between language and speech, then yes, it is true: the patient speaks. But they speak like an advanced doll that opens and closes its eyes, absorbs liquid, etc. If you are satisfied with that, then indeed, the doll speaks.

In the end, it becomes clear what is at stake when a DECLÉRAMBAULT, analyzing elementary phenomena, seeks in their structure the signature: it concerns something that one can call whatever one wishes—“mechanical,” “serpiginous,” or whatever other terms, often filled with neologisms.

It becomes apparent that even in this analysis, personality is always assumed; it is never defined. It is assumed because it is based on what he calls “the ideogenic character” of an initial comprehensibility, the connection of affects and their linguistic expression, which is itself assumed to be self-evident. This is the starting point for proving something secondary, by which the first is articulated. Whether or not this second element is described as “automatic” changes nothing in the question.

We are told: if the evidently automatic character of what occurs at this secondary level can be demonstrated through phenomenology itself, this proves that the disorder is not psychogenetic.

However, this is still based—first and foremost—on a psychogenetic reference itself, which defines the phenomenon as “automatic,” “mechanical,” or “non-psychogenetic.” It is assumed that there is a subject who comprehends by default, and it is this subject who observes himself. This is self-evident because, if it were not so, how could other phenomena be perceived as foreign?

Take careful note here of what is at stake. We are not dealing with the classic philosophical problem, which is whether thought…
—a problem that has stalled all philosophy since LEIBNIZ, or at least since the moment when emphasis was placed on consciousness as the foundation of certainty—
…is whether thought, in order to be thought, must necessarily think itself as thinking. That is, whether a thought, as such, must necessarily be a thought that realizes it is thinking about its own thinking.

This, of course, is far from simple. It immediately opens up an “endless hall of mirrors,” and everyone who has stopped at this problem has noted along the way that if it is in the nature of thought to think itself as thinking, there will be a third thought thinking itself as thinking that it is thinking, and so on. The little problem has never been resolved. By itself, it suffices to demonstrate the insufficiency of the subject as the foundation of thought as transparent to itself. But that is not at all the issue here; our problem is something else.

From the moment we are faced with a phenomenon experienced, felt as parasitic, and we admit that the subject is aware of it as such…
—that is to say, as something objectively unmotivated, registered only within the structure defined by the apparatus, within the disruption of supposed neurological pathways—
…we cannot escape the notion that the subject is structured in such a way that they have an “endoscopy” of what is happening within themselves.

By this, we mean what actually happens in these apparatuses—a notion of endoscopy that arises at every level of the text—and it is by apprehending all subjective discordances as such, at every moment, that any theory centering on what happens within the subject, around intra-organic phenomena, is compelled.

Agreed! FREUD approaches these matters more subtly than other authors, or at least in an implicit way that does not even recognize other problems. He is forced to admit that the subject must necessarily occupy a privileged corner, where they are permitted an endoscopy of what happens within themselves. This notion surprises no one when we speak of more or less delusional endoscopies that the subject has of what happens inside their stomach, their lungs, or anything else. But from the moment we speak of intra-cerebral phenomena, it is clear that this has entirely specific inclinations. For here, we are forced to admit that the subject has some form of endoscopy into what happens within the system of nerve fibers.

This is the point on which all authors, in passing, insist without realizing it. Yet, at the very turn of their demonstration, one cannot fail to see that when the subject is the object of an echo of thought, we admit, with DECLÉRAMBAULT, that this results from a deviation produced by a chronaxic alteration, such that, at some point of intersection, intracerebral messages—one of two telegrams, so to speak—depart from one point, with one traveling down one path while the other, slowed, takes a different route. One of these messages arrives delayed compared to the other and is registered by a subject who must necessarily exist somewhere, perceived as arriving in echo with the other.

It must therefore be admitted that there is a privileged point from which this discrepancy can be observed. In other words, no matter how one constructs the organogenetic theory, if you will, or the automatic theory, one cannot escape the consequence that there exists a privileged point somewhere, from which the subject can note these possible delays, this discordance, this mere lack of alignment between one system and another, which manifests itself as disorder.

In short, one becomes more psychogenetic than ever since, ultimately, this privileged point is nothing less than the soul. Except that one becomes even more idolatrous than those who grant it the most crude reality by situating it in a particular point—fiber or no fiber, system or anything else—it will always lead back to what President SCHREBER himself, in a speech, referred to as the single fiber, ultimately closely tied to personality. For nothing else could grant it this privileged character except what is usually called “the function of synthesis.”

The essence of a synthesis is to have, somewhere, its point of intersection, its point of convergence. Even if it is ideal, this point exists. We are therefore in exactly the same analytical position:
– whether we adopt an organogenetic approach,
– or whether we adopt a psychogenetic approach, in the implicit sense of the term rather than its developed sense,
…there will always, somewhere, be a privileged point or a privileged entity that we are forced to assume.

Does this suffice to explain the level of psychotic phenomena? It is entirely clear that if psychoanalysis has brought anything significant, illuminating, or clarifying to the problem of psychosis, it is:
– precisely in the extent to which the sterility of such hypotheses is glaring,
– precisely in the extent to which everything psychoanalysis has revealed as most fertile, abundant, dynamic, and meaningful in psychosis disrupts these minute constructions that have been pursued for decades within psychiatry, around purely functional notions, of which the ego, as a camouflage of these notions, was inevitably the central pivot.

It is to this extent that psychoanalysis has brought something new. But how can we approach this novelty without, through a different path and another method, falling back into a multiplication of these egos, equally disguised in various ways? The only way to approach this question is to pose it precisely within the register in which the phenomenon appears to us: the register of speech.

But in order to pose it effectively in the register of speech—whose presence is so evident that we can see it creates all the richness of the phenomenology of psychosis—it is because we see all its possible aspects, all its fragmentations, all its refractions, that verbal hallucination, insofar as it is fundamental to it, is precisely one of the most problematic phenomena of what speech is.

Is there not a way to pause for a moment on the phenomenon of speech as such, asking ourselves whether, by simply considering it, we do not see a structure emerge that is so essential, so primary, so obvious, that it is within this structure that we will be able to make distinctions other than mythical ones—meaning, other than those that assume this thing called “the subject” as being located somewhere?

What is speech? Why did I ask earlier: Does the [delusional psychotic] subject speak, yes or no?
Let us pause for a moment on this fact: what distinguishes speech from a recording of language?
Speech is, above all, speaking to others.

Here, I simply want to remind you of something I have often placed at the forefront of my teaching: the characteristic of this thing, which seems simple at first glance—speaking to others. The notion has, for some time, come to the forefront of scientific concern, specifically regarding what a message is and the function of a message.

The structure of speech—which I have explained every time we have had to use this term in its proper sense—is that the subject receives their message from the other in an inverted form. Speech, essential speech, speech that exists at the level of the committed term, is a speech founded on this structure as I have just described. What does this mean: “The subject receives their message from the other in an inverted form”?

We have here two absolutely exemplary forms. I have told you, the first is fides, speech in language, speech that offers itself; it is the: “You are my wife” or the “You are my master.” This is an exemplary formula on which I have often insisted. It means: You are that which still resides in my speech, and I can only affirm this by speaking in your place. This comes from you in order to find the certainty of what I am committing; this speech is a speech that commits you.

The unity of speech, as foundational for the positioning of the two subjects, is thus manifested. But if even this does not seem entirely clear to you, the counterproof—as is often the case—is even more evident.

It is the sign by which the subject-to-subject relationship is recognized. What makes you in a subject-to-subject relationship, and not in a subject-to-object relationship, is precisely this, which is merely the reverse of what I have just emphasized (fides): the ruse. You are in the presence of a subject to the extent that what they say or do—it is the same thing—can be assumed to have been done to trick you. Naturally, this includes all the dialectics implied in this, up to and including the possibility that they may speak the truth in order for you to believe the opposite. You are familiar with the story of the character who says: “I am going to Krakow,” and the other replies: “Why are you telling me you are going to Krakow since you go there every day? You are telling me this to make me believe you are going elsewhere.” A Jewish joke highlighted by FREUD.

The notion that what the subject tells me is fundamentally related to a possible ruse is exactly the same thing. Here too, they send me their message, and I receive it—that is, the message in question—in an inverted form because, quite precisely, it is of course about “I apprehend what is true,” and what is the opposite of the true is precisely what I receive from it.

Here is the structure in its two aspects:

– of foundational words,
– and of false words, of deceitful words as such.

Here is the level at which all forms of possible communication originate because we have generalized the notion of communication. At this point, we are almost ready to reconstruct the entire theory of what happens among living beings based on communication. If you read even briefly Norbert WIENER, you will see how far this leads.

Among the many paradoxes he highlights, he introduces this curious myth, a construct that would suppose a time when everything could be transmitted. With sufficiently extensive means, one could telegraph a person to New York—meaning, by transmitting the sequence of data points constituting their organism, recreated automatically—since there are no limits to what we can assume is possible in transmission, with point-by-point resynthesis of their real identity at a location just as distant.

It is obvious that such things are a curious sort of smoke and mirrors that everyone marvels at, seeing all kinds of subjective mirages. Interestingly, all it takes to collapse this illusion is to point out that the miracle would not be any greater if the transmission were done over two centimeters. After all, every day, by moving, we accomplish the same thing. This kind of extraordinary confusion of terms shows sufficiently that notions like communication must be handled with caution.

Nevertheless, within the generalized notion of communication—you know this well, since on the other hand…
it is certainly a function, as it has even been integrated into the general notions of physics…
—I specify within these communications what speech is, insofar as it means speaking to the other: it is ultimately making the Other speak as such. If you wish, let us represent this Other with a capital “O/A.”

It is undoubtedly for different reasons, as is always the case when we are forced to add supplementary signs to what language already provides us. This different reason is as follows: it is what underpins everything I have just explained to you, whether it concerns the voice, namely:

– “You are my wife”: after all, how do you know?
– “You are my master”: after all, are you so sure of that?

This fundamental uncertainty lies at the very core of speech, and it is within this uncertain structure that the essence of the psychotic subject’s speech, and its distortions, must be located.

What precisely gives these words their foundational value is that what is targeted in the message, as well as what is manifested in the ruse, is that the Other is there as an absolute Other—that is, precisely as recognized but not known. This is essential. In the same way, what the ruse signifies is that, in the end, you do not know whether it is truly a ruse, whether it is genuinely there or whether it is there precisely to deceive you. It is essentially this element, this direct unknown within the alterity of the Other, that characterizes the relationship of speech at the level where it is spoken to the other. I will keep you at this level of structural description for some time because it is only from here that we can pose the problems.

Is this the only thing that differentiates, that distinguishes speech? Perhaps! We do not know. Undoubtedly, it has other characteristics. It does not only speak to the Other, it speaks of the other as an object. That is precisely what happens when a subject speaks to you about themselves.

Observe carefully that when our paranoid patient from the other day…
—the one I referred to, the one who used the word “galopiner”—
…speaks to you, there are two levels: you know that she is a subject—it is a perfectly immediate application of what I have just told you—you know that she is a subject…
that is to say, this is what you express when you say that her personality is still intact, namely that you are dealing simply with “a partial delusion”…
precisely in the sense that she is trying to deceive you, that is, you clinically recognize “a partial delusion,” and this is part of the assumptions of the situation.

– It is precisely because, the other day, it took me an hour and a half to extract her “galopiner”—that is, for an hour and a half, she held me at bay, and for an hour and a half, she presented herself as sane.
– It is to that extent that she was only a patient at the very boundary of what can be clinically perceived as delusion.
– It is to that extent that you maintain that there is, in this subject, what in our jargon you would call the healthy part of her personality, precisely because she speaks of the other, because she is capable of mocking him, because she exists as a subject.

Now she speaks about herself, and it happens that she speaks about herself a little more than she would like. That is, we realize that she is delusional. At this point, she speaks about something; she speaks about what is our common object. She speaks of the other with a small (a). It is still her speaking, but this is another structure. Moreover, it does not reveal its simplicity entirely; it is not quite as if she were speaking to me about any received object. She speaks to me about something that is very interesting and very intense, and she speaks about something where she continues to engage herself nonetheless—in short, she testifies.

This notion of testimony is something we will now attempt to delve into a little. Is testimony itself purely and simply communication? Certainly not. Yet it is very clear that everything to which we grant value as communication belongs to the order of testimony. Ultimately, disinterested communication—if such a thing is conceivable in the human order—can only be thought of as a failed testimony, if I may put it that way, something on which everyone agrees.

Everyone knows that this is the ideal of transmitting knowledge and that even the entire thought of the scientific community is founded on this: on the possibility of a communication whose final term is decided within an experience in which everyone can agree. However, we must still recognize that the starting point, even the moment when you are asked to establish it, this experience nevertheless relies on the function of testimony.

Here we are dealing—I want to draw your attention to this—with a form of alterity. I cannot revisit here everything I have said in the past—because I will have to revisit it continuously throughout my discourse this year—about what I have called “paranoid knowledge.” What I designated as such in my first communication—in the even older days of my thesis—to the group L’Évolution Psychiatrique, which at the time had a rather remarkable originality, “paranoid knowledge” means this:
– it refers to the paranoid affinities of all object knowledge as such,
– it refers to the fact that all human knowledge takes its source, its root, its origin, in what one could call the dialectic of jealousy, in the fact that we see it as a primordial manifestation of communication.

This is a generic notion, one that can be observed behaviorally: what happens between two young children confronted with […] is enough to show that it involves this fundamental transitivism, the one expressed in the fact that a child who has hit another says: “The other hit me,” not because he is lying, but because he is the other, literally.

This is the foundation on which the human world differentiates itself from the animal world. It is what distinguishes human objects by their collection, in their neutrality, in their indefinite proliferation:
– in the fact that they can be objects of entirely neutral interest from the perspective of need, yet still be human objects,
– in the fact that the human object is not dependent on instinctual preparation, nor on the subject’s adaptation to it as in a chemical valence, or in any term that fits with another.

What makes the human world a world filled with objects is founded on this: the object of human interest is the object of the desire of the Other. Why is this possible?

It is because the human ego as such is the Other:
– because it arises from its own impulse,
– because in relation to this image of the Other, it is an incoherent ensemble and collection of desires.

It is, literally. This is the true meaning of the term “fragmented body,” and the first synthesis of the ego is essentially alter. It is alter-ego, it is alienated. The center of the constitution of the desiring human subject as such is the Other, inasmuch as it gives the subject its unity. And the first encounter the subject has with objects is with the object seen as the object of the Other’s desire.

This, as you can see, defines within the relationship of paranoia something that originates from elsewhere. This is precisely the distinction between the imaginary and the real. In every object spoken of when speaking of the other, another primitive alterity is implicated in this object, insofar as:
– the object is primitively an object of rivalry and competition,
– the object is of interest in its function as the object of the desire of the Other.

Paranoid knowledge, in this initial tableau of knowledge, is a knowledge established in the rivalry of jealousy, in the primary identification that I tried to define in the mirror stage. This foundational rivalry, this competitive foundation of the object, is precisely what is overcome in speech, insofar as it involves a third party: speech is always a pact, an agreement. We agree on something concerning this rivalry and competition. We agree: this is mine, this is yours, this is this, this is that. Yet the aggressive element of this primitive competition continues to leave its mark on every kind of discourse about the small other, about the Other as a third party, about the object.

Testimony—let its resonances unfold—it is not without reason that it is called testis in Latin, and that when one testifies, one testifies upon one’s testicles, for it always involves an engagement of the subject: whatever bears the mark of testimony always keeps the organism latent. In the end, there is always a virtual struggle in everything belonging to the order of testimony. Throughout the present dialectic, throughout the dialectic of the constitution of the object, we rediscover the virtual possibility of being called upon to annul the Other for one simple reason: the origin of this dialectic being my alienation in the Other, there comes a moment when I cannot be placed in a position of being annulled myself because the Other does not agree.

The dialectic of the unconscious always implies, as one of its possibilities, the impossibility of coexistence with the Other, that is, struggle. The dialectic of master and slave reappears here with, so to speak, its psychogenetic value.

This may not be entirely decisive; the Phenomenology of Spirit probably does not exhaust everything concerning the development of the spirit. But undeniably, one cannot overlook its psychological value, namely, that it is in a fundamental rivalry, in a primary and essential “fight to the death,” that something happens which has the closest relation to the constitution of the human world as such.

Except that in its form, this is indeed what it is about—a rivalry so essential that what we see in the end is the reappearance, so to speak, of the stakes: the master has taken from the slave his enjoyment, that is, he has seized the object of desire insofar as it was the object of the slave’s desire, but in doing so, he has lost his humanity. That is to say, it was not at all the object of enjoyment that was at stake, but the rivalry itself.

And this humanity, to whom does he now owe it? Only to the recognition of the slave. But because he does not recognize the slave, this recognition has literally no value. That is to say, the master becomes, as is usually the case in the concrete evolution of things for someone who has triumphed and has conquered enjoyment, completely idiotic, meaning incapable of anything other than enjoying. Meanwhile, the one who has been deprived retains the entirety of the human relation, for he has recognized the master and thus has the possibility of being recognized by him—that is, he will wage the struggle across centuries to be recognized by the one who can effectively recognize him.

This distinction:
– between the Other with a capital O/A, that is, the Other as not known,
– and the other with a lowercase o/a, that is, the other who is me,

…is the source of all knowledge. It is within this gap, within the angle opened by these two relationships, that the entire dialectic of desire must be situated. For the question is:
– Does the subject speak to you?
– What is he speaking about?

It is absolutely clear that I will not answer the first question because it is precisely the one posed at the origin: “Is this true speech?” We cannot know at the outset. But on the other hand, he speaks to you about something. And what does he speak about? About himself!

But you can see very clearly, from the very start and origin, that he is speaking to you about an object that is not like other objects—an object that I have not yet brought into play because, in some way, it is the extension of this dual dialectic: he is speaking to you about something that spoke to him. The very foundation of the paranoid structure is this: the subject has understood something that he articulates, something I spoke about earlier concerning meaning. There is something that has taken the form of speech, something that speaks to him.

No one doubts, of course, that this is a fantastic being—not even he himself, for the subject is always in a position to articulate the perfectly ambiguous nature of the source of his words. It is about the structure of this being who speaks to the subject, and about whom the subject will provide his testimony, that paranoia concerns itself.

You must already see the significant difference in levels between:
– everything belonging to the term of alienation, which is an absolutely general form of the imaginary,
– and the precise question of what this alienation is in psychosis,

…since I leave open the point that it may be:
– not simply about identification,
– not merely about a backdrop that has tilted toward the alter,

…but from the moment the subject speaks, there may exist the manifestation that the subject, as speaking…
—that is, speaking not to the other with a lowercase o/a, nor about the other with a lowercase o/a, but speaking with the Other with a capital O/A—
…is truly speaking. And no one doubts this, for if they did, there would be no problem of psychosis; psychotics would merely be speech machines. It is precisely because he speaks to you that you take his testimony into consideration.

The question is to understand the structure of this being, which everyone agrees is fantastic. It is precisely the S in the sense in which analysis understands it, insofar as it is an S with a question mark.

What is this part of the subject that speaks? Psychoanalysis has said: It is the unconscious.

Naturally, for the question to even make sense, you must have first admitted that this unconscious is precisely, one might say, something that speaks within the subject. We have admitted this: there is something that speaks within the subject, beyond the subject, and even when the subject is unaware of it. It says more than he believes.

Psychoanalysis, concerning psychosis, says: this is what speaks. Is this enough? Absolutely not! Because the whole question is to understand how it speaks, to understand what is the structure of paranoid discourse.

FREUD brought us something truly striking on this subject, and today I simply want to remind you of its terms to show you how the problem opens up. FREUD told us: the fundamental tendency that might need to be recognized in a neurosis is: “I love him, the other” and “You love me.” We are not, in psychosis, at the level of “I love you” or “You love me.” Its dialectic is striking, and we remained puzzled for a good decade by what I am about to explain to you now.

He tells us: there are three ways to deny this. He does not beat around the bush; he does not explain why the unconscious of psychotics is such a good grammarian and such a poor philologist. From the philologist’s point of view, all this is extremely suspect because the function of the subject is the complement of the verb. Do not believe it works like in French grammar textbooks for sixth graders—it is the subject of all kinds of debates, and there are, depending on the language, many ways to say “I love him.”

FREUD did not dwell on all that. He says there are 3 egos, 3 functions, and 3 types of delusions, and it works. He says:

– The first way to deny it is to say: “It is not I who love him, it is she who loves him,” that is to say, my partner, my double—it is she who loves him.

– The second way is to say: “It is not him that I love, it is her.” FREUD explains this: at this level, defense is not sufficient. Precisely because the subject is paranoid and because the mechanism of projection comes into play—in other words, since it is not the subject who is excluded but rather the complement—the disguise is not sufficient; projection must intervene. That is to say, it is not enough for him to say: “It is not him that I love,” but “It is she who loves me.”

– The third possibility: “I do not love him, I hate him.” One must believe that even inversion is not sufficient here—at least, this is what FREUD tells us. Projection must also intervene here, that is: “He hates me.” And now we are in persecutory delusion.

It is certain that, for the grand synthesis it entails, this brings us some insight. But you can also see how many questions it leaves open.

Let us note that the mechanism of projection must intervene as an additional mechanism whenever it is not about the erasure of the “I” itself. This is not entirely unacceptable, yet we would still like some additional clarification. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the “not,” negation in its most formal application to each of these terms, does not have the same value. But what is interesting is to see that, broadly speaking, it approaches something—in other words, it works. In other words, it must, in some way, place things at their proper level, positioning itself on the plane of a fundamental logomachy.

We will examine this more closely. Perhaps what I have brought you this morning may allow you, from the outset, to glimpse that we can pose the problem differently: “I love him”—what is that?

Is it a message? I mean, is it something about which we leave the question open?

Is it testimony? Is it the raw acknowledgment of a fact—in other words, the fact in its neutralized state?

The question is worth asking. On the other hand, if we simply leave things in terms of message, it is clear that in the first case, “It is she who loves him,” we can say that the message is carried by another here. This is the difference, and this alienation certainly situates us on the plane of the small other. It is the ego speaking through the alter ego, which, in the process, has changed sex.

We will limit ourselves to this observation: inverted alienation. And we will ask ourselves why we know that in the foreground of jealous delusion, this element of identification with the other as such, with this sign of sexualization—which is not given in the initial directive of identification with the other—is an element we will question.

On the other hand, I want to emphasize to you, as we analyze this structure, that you can see it is not, in any case, about projection. Otherwise, it would be entirely impossible to apply the same term of projection to what FREUD applies it to when he speaks of delusional jealousy, projection more or less integrated into a neurotic mechanism. This mechanism consists of imputing one’s own infidelities to the other, namely…
FREUD distinguishes this perfectly because it can be perfectly distinguished clinically…
namely, when one is jealous of one’s wife, it is because one has a few peccadilloes of one’s own to reproach oneself.

This is not necessarily, and certainly not absolutely, the same mechanism. One cannot invoke the same mechanism in delusional jealousy, which is probably psychotic, whether we follow FREUD’s framework or the framework I have just attempted to insert it into. It is the subject himself, identified through inverted alienation, who makes his wife the messenger of his vows—not even to another man, because the clinic shows it is not about that, but to an almost indefinite number of men. Everyone knows that properly paranoid jealousy is infinitely repeatable, that it resurfaces at every turn of experience, and that it can implicate nearly every subject who enters the horizon—or even those who do not.

In the second case, we approach the matter in the form of the message: “It is not him that I love, it is her who loves me.” In some way, we might say that erotomania is indeed something where a certain message is delivered. But this is another type of alienation—not inverted but diverted, for it is no longer the person to whom I had addressed myself to whom I am now addressing myself. When I believe I am bound by a mystical, ineffable, and singular bond, it has posed all kinds of problems, and we have spoken of Platonic love.

This link with the Other, a very particular object, is a link without any concrete relation. Often, it involves an object that is very distant, with which the subject is content to communicate through correspondence—correspondence whose delivery he cannot even be sure of—and which has a very singular structure.

At the very least, we can say that if there is diverted alienation of the message, it is accompanied by something where the term depersonalization of the other becomes even more evident than what it might appear to involve. One could even say, in some way, that the heroic element—the kind of resistance to all trials, as they themselves express it—characterizes erotomaniac delusion, which addresses an Other so neutralized that one might say it has been magnified to the very dimensions of the world. The universal interest attached to the adventure, as DE CLÉRAMBAULT expressed it, is an essential feature of this erotomaniac delusion.

In the third case, we are dealing with something much closer to denial, and as such, we probably hold the key that will allow us, next time, to truly center—under its authentic form—the point where the problem genuinely lies.

It is a converted alienation, in the sense that love has become hate, that denial is essential to it, and that the profound alteration of the entire system of the Other—namely, its multiplication, the extensive network-like character of interpretations about the world—reveals to you here an imaginary disturbance brought to its maximum expression.

The fundamental characteristic of the relations in all delusions is something that, as you can see, is now what presents itself for our investigation. We will be all the better equipped to undertake this investigation because of the distinction between the subject—the one who speaks, whether he knows it or not—and the small other, the other insofar as the subject is in an imaginary relationship with him. This other is the root, the foundation, the center of gravity of his individual ego, which is none other than the one in which there is absolutely no speech, regardless of the presence of language: the big Other with a capital A.

It is around these terms that we will attempt to orient ourselves, to make the essential distinction between what happens in psychosis and in neurosis.