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(All parts in English)

Today, I would like to remind you not only of my general intention regarding the SCHREBER case but also of the fundamental purpose of these seminars: one cannot exist without the other, and it is always good not to let one’s horizon shrink. Of course, as we proceed step by step, for a certain time, we will have walls right before our noses. But in the end, as I am taking you to difficult places, we are perhaps demonstrating slightly more demanding expectations than elsewhere in this kind of walk. It also seems necessary to remind you within which framework this journey takes place.

I would say that the purpose of this seminar needs to be expressed in various ways, which intersect and ultimately amount to the same thing. I could tell you that I am here to remind you that we must take our experience seriously, that being a psychoanalyst does not exempt you from being intelligent and sensitive. It is not enough that a certain number of keys have been handed to you for you to then cease thinking altogether, and to put it plainly, to strive—as is the general inclination of human beings—to leave everything in place, precisely with the help of those few key words that have been given to you.

It is quite certain that there is a particular way of using categories such as “the unconscious,” “drive,” or, if you will, “pre-Oedipal relations,” “defense,” and somehow deriving none of the authentic consequences they entail. This is usually considered someone else’s issue—it is always easier to approach things from that angle—it is a complication of the world of objects, but in truth, it does not touch the core of your relationship with the world. And to be a psychoanalyst, you are not—unless you shake yourselves up a little—at all obligated to keep in mind that the world is not exactly as everyone imagines it, that it is entangled in these so-called mechanisms, which are supposedly known to you.

On the other hand, do not be mistaken; I am not here to undertake a metaphysical exploration of Freud’s discovery, nor do I intend, as part of my program, to draw from it—all of which could quite rightly be done—all the consequences it carries regarding what one might call, in the broadest sense, “being.” That is not my purpose; I do not set it as my objective. It would not be useless—it might even be appropriate to do so—I believe it could also be left to others. I would say that what we are doing here will more easily indicate the path of access than other works might.

However, you must not believe that you are forbidden from flapping your wings a little in that direction. Each of your inner wingbeats, this metaphysics of the human condition as revealed to us by Freud’s discovery… You will never lose anything by questioning it, but in the end, I will say that this is not the essential point. This metaphysics—you will not forget it, will you? You will always receive it upon your head.

One can trust in things as they are structured, as we can indeed grasp them in a somewhat deeper way through Freud’s discovery, through experience. They are there; you are within them. It is not for nothing that it was in our time that Freud’s discovery was made, and that you, through a series of the most confusing coincidences, happen to be its personal custodians. But this metaphysics, which can entirely be inscribed within man’s relationship to the symbolic, immerses you to a degree that far exceeds your experience as technicians, and I sometimes indicate to you that it is not by chance that we find traces and presence of this metaphysics in all kinds of disciplines… systems or inquiries that are adjacent to psychoanalysis.

Here, we limit ourselves to something essential. You are technicians, but technicians of things that exist within this discovery. This technique develops through speech.

Let us at least try here to correctly structure the world in which you must move within your experience, insofar as it is structured, as it is curved—to use a term for which I expect a certain number of commentaries—in the perspective of speech, and insofar as speech is central to it.

It is for this reason, and in relation to this, that my small square extends from the subject to the Other, and, in a certain way here, from the symbolic to the real:
subject → self → body. [S→I→R]

Here, in the opposite direction:

• The great Other, insofar as it is the Other of intersubjectivity, the Other you can only apprehend as it is subject [S], meaning it can lie.
• The Other, on the other hand, which is always found there in its place, which I have called the Other of the stars, or, if you prefer, the stable system of the world, of the object [R].

And between the two, speech with its three stages:

• The signifier [S],
• The signification [I],
• And the discourse [R].

This is not a system of the world; it is a system for mapping our experience. That is how it is structured. It is within this that we can locate the various phenomenal manifestations we encounter. If we do not take this structure seriously, we will understand nothing.

Of course, the matter of seriousness is at the very heart of the question. The characteristics of a normal subject are that, for them, a certain number of realities exist, but precisely, their characteristic is also never to take them entirely seriously. You are surrounded by all sorts of realities you do not doubt, some of which are particularly threatening. You do not fully take them seriously. You think, with Paul CLAUDEL’s subtitle, that “The worst is not always certain,” and you maintain yourselves in a state of happy uncertainty that makes sufficiently extensive existence possible for you.

Certainty is not only the rarest thing for the normal subject but also something about which he can legitimately question himself. He will then realize that it is strictly correlated with an action; he is engaged in an action that he approaches—I am not saying that he touches it.

But what happens to this category of certainty? I will not dwell on this because we are not here specifically to engage in the psychology of the phenomenology of what is closest. Instead, as always, we attempt to approach it indirectly, and our farthest point today is the madman SCHREBER.

We must consider our madman SCHREBER in his entirety since he is the farthest. Let us keep some distance, and we will notice, upon making this observation, that he shares this with other madmen…
and you will always find this, which is why I present patients to you: so that you may grasp the most immediate data of what they provide us… the madman provides us with this…
contrary to the false problems posed by psychologists, who fail to see him with direct eyes, who do not truly interact with him…
it is that, contrary to the problem posed, namely, why he believes in the reality of his hallucination, we can clearly see that it does not quite fit. And then we wear ourselves out with this sort of genesis of belief.

We must first clarify this slightly: he does not believe in the reality of his hallucination. There are a thousand examples of this, and I would say that I do not want to dwell on it today because I am sticking to my text, that is to say, to the madman SCHREBER. But still, this is within the reach of people who are not psychiatrists.

And by chance, I recently opened Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY.
On page 386, under the theme of “The Thing and the Natural World,” you will find excellent observations on this subject.
Namely, how easy it is to realize that nothing is more accessible from the subject than to notice that he is hearing something and that he has not been heard. He says:

“Yes, alright, it’s because I heard it by myself.”

Reality is not what is at stake: the subject fully admits that these are fundamentally unreal things. He admits, through all the verbally developed explanatory detours at his disposal, that these are things of a different nature than those belonging to the real order. He even admits their unreality—to a certain extent.
It must be pointed out to him, for him to move towards control regarding reality. In truth, there is no need even to push him; he also pushes in that direction. He knows very well that this reality is at stake.

However, unlike the normal subject for whom reality fits into place, there is, on the contrary, a certainty regarding the fact that what is at stake—from hallucination to interpretation, to the finest, most subtle phenomena, the phenomena of general meaning—he is certain that it concerns him. It is not reality that is at stake for him but certainty. Even when he expresses himself by saying that what he experiences does not belong to the order of what concerns reality, this does not negate the certainty that it concerns him. This certainty is something radical.

The nature of what he is certain about may remain perfectly ambiguous, ranging across the spectrum from malevolence to benevolence. Both can even remain in total ambiguity regarding a particular phenomenon. Nevertheless, the fact that it means something unshakable to him constitutes what is, rightly or wrongly, called either the elementary phenomenon or the more developed phenomenon of delusional belief.

You can grasp an example of this simply by leafing through the admirable condensation Freud gave us of SCHREBER’s book. And finally, it remains that through FREUD, you can have contact with it, its dimension. FREUD provides it while analyzing it, which does not prevent us from resorting to certain parts of the text.

One of the most central, most “key” phenomena of the development of his delusion is what he calls the “soul murder.” This soul murder, which we will see, in its formulation alone, carries a mountain of problems. Nevertheless, this phenomenon, entirely initial for his delusion and for his conception of this retransformation of the world that constitutes his delusion, is presented by him as totally enigmatic.

I insist: it is not only Chapter III of the Memoirs that gives us the reasons for his neuropathy…
which is censored, where we are warned that the content cannot be published, and yet we know that this chapter contained remarks concerning SCHREBER’s own family…
that is to say, probably what would allow us to see much more closely how the fundamental—perhaps inaugural—relations of SCHREBER’s delusion manifested themselves in relation to his brother, his father, or someone close to him, and something that would certainly allow us to proceed more reliably in our analysis of what one might commonly call the significant, transferential elements that may have played a role at a particular moment in this delusion.

But after all, this is not something to regret too much, because once again, we must recognize that sometimes too many details, too many overloads, prevent us from seeing formal characteristics that are no less fundamental, and what is essential…
it is not that we understand through this or that affective experience concerning his relatives: we must, ourselves, understand what this so-called “soul murder” might be.
…what we see is this: that he, the subject, does not understand it, and yet he formulates it, he distinguishes it as being a decisive moment of this new experience, to which he has gained access, and which he communicates to us through his account of the development, the report of the different relational modes, whose layering, whose perspective, was progressively given to him in an effort of elaboration that was his own. Little by little, he delivered its meaning to us.

This soul murder is considered by him—however enigmatic it may be—as an absolutely certain driving force at one point, and which nevertheless, at a moment, however enigmatic it may be for him, contains this articulation.

It is a murder; there is no trace of a soul. On the other hand, speaking of a soul with certainty is also not very common: to know how to distinguish what is soul and all that attaches around it, to distinguish it with such certainty, is also something not given to just anyone, and which seems to be given precisely to this delirious individual with a certainty that gives his testimony an essential prominence.

We must dwell on these things and not lose their absolutely primordial distinctive character if we want to understand anything about what is truly happening, and not simply, with the help of a few keywords, dismiss the phenomenon of madness as now being explained by this opposition between reality and certainty.

In other words, the question of what delusional certainty is, is something you must train yourselves to recognize wherever it appears and to realize, for example, how different the phenomenon of jealousy is in what it is, or what it can be, when it manifests in a normal subject and when it manifests in a delirious subject.
There is no need for a lengthy evocation of the humorous, even comic side of normal jealousy, which is something that one can say most naturally refuses certainty, no matter what realities present themselves.

The famous story of the normal jealous man, who truly follows his wife right to the door of her room where she is locked in with another man, is still something that contrasts sharply with the fact that the delirious individual, who dispenses with any real reference, almost immediately leaps into certainty around the themes of his delusion. This should make you wary of relying on so-called normal mechanisms—like what is called, for example, “projection”—when it comes to transferring it to the genesis of delusional jealousy.

Yet, this extrapolation is commonly what you will see happening, even though it is enough to read Freud’s text itself, in this example of President SCHREBER, to see that he specifically excludes—as a question, I would almost say he does not have time to address it at that moment, but he shows all the dangers of invoking it imprudently at any point—the term “projection,” that is, the relationship of the ego to the other as such, or the ego to itself as such, in the genesis of any stage or mechanism of paranoia. This—written in black and white—will not prevent anyone from using the term “projection” indiscriminately when it comes to the genesis and explanation of delusions.

I would go further: the delirious individual, as he ascends the ladder of delusions—and in short, this is its characteristic—becomes increasingly certain of things posited as such, as increasingly unreal, and in the specific case of paranoia, this is what distinguishes it from early dementia. He articulates them with an abundance, with a richness that is precisely one of the most essential clinical characteristics, and which, while being one of the most massive, must not be overlooked. It characterizes the order and the register of paranoias during discursive productions, which, most of the time, unfold into literary productions, in the sense that “literary” simply means sheets of paper covered with writing. This is a characteristic of the development of paranoid psychosis.

To some extremes in the order of phantasmagorical delusion, where we manage to fix its limits, this is indeed what argues in favor of maintaining a certain unity between delusions that may have been somewhat prematurely isolated as strictly paranoid and formations described, in classical nosology, as “paraphrenic.”

But there is also something you need to notice: that the madman, writer though he may be—and he is, in this register—it must still be noted, even in a case like that of President SCHREBER, who provides a work so striking by its development, by its completeness, by its closed, full, finished characteristics, and certainly very engaging for us who are interested in this problem, there is something striking:
it is that this character, who ultimately came, after its development, to form for himself from this delusion the essential conception of his relationship to God, and that of being God’s feminine correspondent, of being the wife of God, of knowing, as a result, that the idea he has of himself is in the idea that, ultimately:
– everything is understandable,
– everything is arranged, and I would say more:
– everything will be arranged for everyone, since he plays here an intermediary role between a humanity threatened down to the very depths of its existence and a divine power with which he has his own, very particular ties,
– everything is arranged in this reconciliation.

This marks the turning point of his illness, which lies between:
– the moment of the unexplained symptom, of the profound disturbance of his experience, which was an extremely cruel and painful disturbance, the initial period of his psychosis,
– and the period where he begins to elevate it to comprehension, and, consequently, to a certain mastery of his psychosis.

It is the Versöhnung, this reconciliation that situates him as the wife of God and which provides all the developments that it entails:
– an extremely rich, complex, and articulated world, from which we cannot help but be struck by the fact that it contains nothing to suggest the slightest presence, the slightest effusion, the slightest real communication in any way,
– an assumption that gives us the idea that there is truly, there, a relationship between two beings, and without resorting—which would be discordant in the context of such a text—to a comparison with the text of a great mystic.

Still, if the exercise amuses you, open any page of Saint John of the Cross, who, in the experience of the ascent of the soul, does not fundamentally express something that would be absolutely impossible to evoke in this context: he also presents himself in an attitude of offering, of reception, and he even goes so far as to compare it to the “nuptials of the soul” with the divine presence.

There is absolutely nothing in common between the tone given to us on one side and the other. And I would even say that, in the face of the slightest testimony of an authentic religious experience, you will see all the difference. Let us say that behind this long discourse, through which SCHREBER testifies to something he has finally resolved to admit as a solution to his problem, we never feel, at any point, the sense of something communicated to us from an original experience, something in which the subject himself is caught and included. It is truly an objectified testimony.

We thus raise the problem of what is at stake in these sorts of testimonies from such delirious individuals. Let us not say that the madman is someone who does without recognition from the other, since SCHREBER actually wrote this enormous book so that no one would ignore what he has experienced, and even so that scientists might, on occasion, come to examine his body to find evidence of the presence of those feminine nerves by which he was progressively penetrated, and which might allow objectification of this unique relationship he had with divine reality.
All this certainly presents itself as an effort to be recognized, and since it is a discourse and something published, we must say that here a question arises about what recognition might mean—for this character so isolated by his experience, who is the madman—this need for recognition.

We clearly see that there is a question here that makes what could be hastily thrown out as a distinction more complex than it appears at first glance: either that the madman, since he is mad, is precisely the character who does not need to be recognized. This non-recognition, this self-sufficiency he has in his own world, this self-understanding that distinguishes him, which seems to distinguish him at first glance, does not come without presenting a few contradictions itself. The key to these contradictions perhaps lies entirely in what he says when he offers us the testimony of his delusion. This is something that eludes us, and it allows us to summarize the situation in relation to his discourse when we become acquainted with it.

In this, as I said earlier, if he is certainly a writer, he is not a poet. He does not introduce us to new dimensions of experience, as happens each time we are introduced, in writing, to a world that is simultaneously something we access and something other than our own, but which gives us the notion of the presence of a being, of a certain fundamental relationship that, through that very fact, also becomes ours. This is what happens in Saint John of the Cross, where we cannot doubt the authenticity of the mystical experience…
just as it happens with someone else: Proust, Gérard de Nerval, which certainly represents poetry that is called creation by a subject who, in this case, assumes a new order of symbolic relationship to the world.

Quite the contrary is our character SCHREBER. Throughout his text, at every moment, we can pinpoint the phenomenon of his transformation: by observing himself, by explaining to us how he is violated, manipulated, transformed, the seat of all kinds of phenomena, spoken through, “chattered about” in every possible way—a term not perfectly chosen, but that is precisely what it is.

Because, if you look in detail at these things, there is a kind of chirping of what he calls “the birds of the sky.” That is indeed what it is: the seat of an entire aviary of phenomena. He is not all of this, and yet it is all of this that is most important to him, since it is for all of this that he undertakes this enormous communication of his, in this five-hundred-page book, in which he communicates these phenomena. This is not at all a fruit of chance but the result of a long construction, which became, for him, the solution to his inner adventure.

So, what are we to say, in the end, about the delirious subject? Is he alone?
That is not the impression we have either. He is inhabited by all sorts of existences, improbable certainly, “identity-based,” but whose significant nature is certain as a primary datum, and whose articulated nature is increasingly elaborated as his delusion advances. Doubt, initially, and at specific moments, focuses precisely on what it refers to, but it certainly refers to something—of this, he has no doubt.

In a subject like SCHREBER, things go so far that the entire world is caught up in this delusion of meaning, and one can say that far from being alone, there is almost nothing around him that he is not, in a certain way.

However, everything he brings into being in his significations is, in some way, empty of himself, and this is explained and articulated in a thousand ways, particularly, for example, when he observes and says that God, that is to say, his imaginary interlocutor, understands nothing of everything internal, of everything concerning living beings. God only ever deals with shadows or corpses, and indeed, his entire world has been transformed into a phantasmagoria of what has been more or less properly translated into French as “shadows of slapdash men.”

Today, I will tell you what our demonstration will focus on: that such a construction, such a transformation, such a creation, occurs in a subject. In light of analytical perspectives, several paths open to us for understanding it. The always-easy paths are the already-known ones.

We have a category that was introduced very early in analysis, which you know is absolutely at the forefront, present in everything currently said about it: it is the notion of defense. Everything here is done for something, and the something in question is something against which the subject wants to defend himself.

– You know that neuroses are explained in this way.
– You also know how much I insist on the incomplete nature of this reference, on its precarious nature, in the sense that it lends itself to all sorts of hasty interventions, and as such, harmful ones.
– You also know how difficult it is to rid ourselves of it since it indeed touches on something objectifiable.

It is precisely for this reason that the category and the concept are simultaneously so insistent, so tempting, and offer you such an inclination to guide our interventions according to them: the subject is defending himself; let us help him understand that he is merely defending himself, that is, let us show him what he is defending himself against.

This is a framework and a point where, as soon as you enter, you find yourself facing multiple dangers.
The first danger is that you might miss, quite precisely, the plane on which your intervention must take place, which must always merely distinguish the order in which this defense manifests itself. If this defense is clearly in the symbolic order, that is where the entire difference lies between what I teach you and what you might find elsewhere.
That is to say, it is something you can elucidate in the sense of speech in its full meaning, something that concerns, in the subject, signifier and signified, and of which you have, in the actuality of what the subject presents to you, both signifier and signified.

So indeed, there, you can intervene by showing him the conjunction of this signifier and this signified, provided that he holds both present in his discourse. If you do not have both, if you have the impression that the subject is defending himself against something that you see, but he does not, that is to say, if you see, in the clearest and most manifest way, that the subject is erring regarding reality, then the notion of defense is insufficient to allow you to confront the subject with reality.

Remember what I told you some time ago about a very elegant observation by Kris:
the character who was haunted by the notion that he was a plagiarist and by the guilt of his plagiarism.
Kris’s intervention is considered brilliant in the name of defense because, for some time now, since we have been left only with this notion of defense, it is quite clear that the ego indeed has to fight on three fronts, that is:
– on the side of the id,
– on the side of the superego,
– and on the side of the external world.

…so we feel authorized to intervene on any one of these three planes and to point out to the character in question—because suddenly it falls within our reach—that we allow ourselves to read the work to which the subject alluded, namely the work of one of his colleagues from whom he supposedly borrowed once again. And we realize that there is nothing at all in the colleague’s work that deserves to be considered an original idea the subject might have borrowed. We point this out to him, considering that this is part of the analysis. Fortunately, we are both honest enough and blind enough.

As proof of the validity of our interpretation, the subject brings us, in the next session, the delightful little story: upon leaving the session, he went to some restaurant to enjoy his favorite dish, fresh brains. We are delighted: it has elicited a response. But what does this mean? First, it means that the subject has understood absolutely nothing of the matter and that he does not understand anything about what he is bringing to you either, so we cannot quite see where the progress lies in having pressed the right button.

This is an acting-out in the sense that I validate acting-out as being something entirely equivalent to a hallucinatory phenomenon of a delusional type. It is precisely about this in the following sense:
– where you have prematurely symbolized something that belongs to the order of reality,
– where you have not approached the question within the symbolic register.

To approach it within the symbolic register, for an analyst, on an occasion like that of the plagiarist, must focus on the idea:
– that plagiarism does not exist,
– that there is no symbolic property,
– that the symbol belongs to everyone.

It is from here that the analyst must ask himself the question: why have matters of the order and register of the symbol taken on, for the subject, this tone, this weight of appearance or non-appearance?
That is where the problem lies. That is where the analyst must wait for what the subject will provide him to enable him to bring his interpretation into play. Indeed, you are very likely to find that this plagiarism is phantasmatic because this was a severe neurotic who was already resisting a not insignificant attempt at analysis, since he had previously undergone a quite effective analysis before coming to Kris.

On the other hand, by placing the intervention on the plane of reality, that is to say, ultimately, by reverting, through analytical categories, to the most primary psychotherapy, you began telling him about reality, and it does not fit, namely, that he is not actually a plagiarist.

What does the subject do? The subject responds in the clearest way, that is, by renewing, at a deeper level of reality, to show that this is where the question lies. Namely, that something emerges from reality, something obstinate, and whatever you say will not change the core of the problem. That is to say, something imposes itself on him. Since you demonstrate that he is not a plagiarist, he will show you what it is about by making you eat fresh brains, that is to say, he renews his symptom at a more distant point, which has no more foundation or existence than the point where he first showed it.

Does he even show something? I would go further; I would say:
– that he shows nothing at all,
– that something shows itself.

And this is where we arrive at the heart of what I will attempt to demonstrate to you this year regarding President SCHREBER, concerning this entire observation, which reveals, in a somewhat magnified way—allowing us to see microscopic things on an enormous scale—this observation of President SCHREBER and the fundamental role of what I have to demonstrate to you concerning this observation and the very way in which FREUD, while not formulating it to the extreme, because the problem had not reached a state of acuity, of urgency, in his time concerning analytic practice as it has in ours, formulates this most clearly: that something that has disappeared, that has been ejected from the inside, reappears on the outside.

This is a phrase I have already cited many times, and it is an absolutely essential phrase. I comment on it and return to it.
It concerns this: that prior—and it is an anteriority that is logical, not chronological—prior to all symbolization, there exists—and psychoses are proof of this—the possibility that a part of symbolization does not occur. In other words, there is a stage prior to everything that properly belongs to the “dialectic of neurosis,” insofar as the dialectic of neurosis is entirely linked to this: that repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same thing. In other words, that the entirety of neurosis is an articulated speech.

But there is also something else, namely that something absolutely primordial in the being of the subject does not enter into symbolization—it is not repressed but rejected. I propose this to you, let us say, to establish the points that must be demonstrated. This is not a hypothesis either; it is an articulation of the problem.
There is a first stage, which is not a stage that you have to situate somewhere in the genesis, although, of course, the questions concerning the location of this stage in the genesis—what happens at the level of the subject’s first symbolic articulations, the essential appearance of the subject, who begins to play with an object he makes disappear—all of this will pose questions for us.

But do not let yourselves be fascinated by the existence of this genetic moment, which inevitably only reveals to you a phenomenon in development at the level of a limited object, which is this young child you see playing, and who is indeed beginning to exercise himself in the first apprehension of the symbol. But if you allow yourselves to be fascinated by him, he will simply obscure this fact:
– that the symbol is already there, enormous, surrounding him on all sides,
– that language already exists,
– that it fills libraries, dictionaries.

But not simply this: that it overflows through all your actions, that it surrounds them, that it makes them do what you do, that you are engaged [Cf. Pascal] and that it can at any moment require you to move, to lead you somewhere. You will forget all of this in front of this child who is inventing the elements, introducing himself into the essential dimension of the symbol.

Where he is, that is to say, wherever we are as human beings immersed in the symbol, there exists the possibility of a primitive Verwerfung, of something that is not symbolized.
This something that is not symbolized is what will manifest itself in the real.

This is why this category of the real is essential to introduce. It is everywhere; it is impossible to neglect it in Freudian texts. I give it this name insofar as it defines, in relation to the act of speech, a field different from it, from the symbolic, because from there, it becomes possible to shed light on the evolution of the psychotic phenomenon as such.

Let us therefore pause for a moment on this first distinction, on this something that occurs at the level of a possibility of non-possibility, of a primitive Bejahung, from which a first dichotomy is established in which:
– on one side, everything that has been subjected to pure Bejahung may have various destinies,
– and everything that, on the other side, has fallen under the blow of this primitive Verwerfung will have another destiny, which is constituted by this: that there is a much deeper gap between everything that is and everything that has been admitted into primitive symbolization.

I am advancing today, but within this framework, I illuminate my lantern, simply so that you know, at least, where I am going, what I want you to grasp, what I want to demonstrate before you.
In other words, do not take this as a construction, neither arbitrary nor merely as the fruit of a more or less literal commentary on FREUD, or of submission to his text, because what I am saying here is very precisely what we have read in this extraordinary text of Verneinung.

It was Mr. HYPPOLITE who, two years ago, was kind enough to read it for us. It is neither about submission to the text nor about a construction that is, in some way, arbitrary. It is now about telling you that if I pose this, it is because it is the only way to introduce rigor, coherence, and rationality into what happens in psychosis, and very precisely in the one at issue here, namely, that of President SCHREBER.
Thus, what I will say subsequently will, as we encounter it, always be oriented toward demonstrating the difficulties posed by any other understanding of the case—in other words, what makes it necessary to understand it based on this primitive hypothesis.

At the origin, there is thus Bejahung, that is to say, “affirmation of what is,” or Verwerfung. The subsequent evolution of this Bejahung is, occasionally—and ultimately always—everything we are going to observe: it is not enough for the subject to have chosen, from the text of what there is to say, a part and only a part, for it to at least align with that part.
Within this, there are things that do not align. This is too obvious if we do not start from the idea that, contrary to the inspiration of all classical and academic psychology, everything must align—that is, that human beings are beings, as they say, “adapted,” since they live.

You are not a psychoanalyst if you accept this, because being a psychoanalyst is simply opening your eyes to this obvious fact: there is nothing more muddled than “human reality.” In other words, contrary to what is said, insofar as you believe you have an ego, as they say, “well adapted,” reasonable, one that knows how to navigate, knows how to recognize what to do, what not to do, and to take into account the realities that psychoanalysis shows you, and if you believe that psychoanalysis is this, then you might as well be sent far away from here.

Psychoanalysis shows you—and here it converges with experience—that there is nothing more foolish than a human destiny, namely, that we are always deceived, even when we do something that succeeds. It is precisely not what we wanted, and there is nothing more disappointed than a man who supposedly reaches the peak of his desires. It is enough to talk with him frankly for three minutes—as perhaps only the artifice of the psychoanalytic couch makes possible—to know that, in the end, this very thing is precisely what he mocks, and that he is particularly annoyed by I don’t know what, by all sorts of things.

Analysis is precisely this: becoming aware of it and taking it into account:
– that it is not like this by accident, that it could not be otherwise,
– that ultimately, by some strange fact, we only go through life encountering nothing but unhappy people. But this is a destiny that is peculiar to us; happy people must be somewhere.

If you do not get this out of your head, then you have understood nothing about psychoanalysis. And this is what I call “taking things seriously.” When I told you that you must “take things seriously,” it was so that you would take seriously precisely this fact—that you never take them seriously.

So within this Bejahung, all sorts of accidents will occur, primarily because nothing indicates to us that the initial exclusion was done in a proper manner. I would say that there is a strong chance that for a long time, we will know nothing about its motives, precisely because here we are beyond any mechanism of symbolization, such that if anyone ever knows anything about it, it is unlikely to be the analyst.
But with what remains, and with which he must construct a world, and above all with which he must situate himself in this world—that is, he must arrange himself to be approximately what he has admitted, namely, to be a man when he happens to be male, or a woman, conversely.

This raises problems. It is not without reason that I place this entirely at the forefront, since analysis emphasizes that this is one of the essential problems. It is within this framework that a certain number of phenomena will occur, in which—since this is precisely the field of analysis—it is essential that you never forget that nothing concerning:
– the behavior of the human being as a subject,
– something in which he fulfills himself, in which he “is” simply,
…can in any way escape being subjected to the laws of speech.

If there is something else in experience, it is what Freud’s discovery shows us: that natural adequacies are profoundly disrupted in man. It is not simply because he is a mammal for whom bisexuality plays an essential role. This fundamental bisexuality is, in fact, not very surprising from a biological point of view, given that it is subjected to modes of access, normalization, and regulation, which, in man, are more complex and different from what they are subjected to in mammals and vertebrates in general. It is more complex because symbolization plays a role there—in other words, the law plays a primordial role there.

This is also what Freud’s experience and discovery mean: the Oedipus complex is there “ab origine”, that is to say, in the existence of this primordial law. This is the meaning that must be given to the fact that FREUD insisted so much on Oedipus that he even went so far as to construct a sociology of totems and taboos.

Clearly, it was already present in advance, since it is only observable where the law exists. Therefore, there is no question of posing the question of origins, since precisely, it has been there since the beginning and from the origins, and there is no question of articulating anything about human sexuality if there is not this: that it must be realized by and through a certain fundamental law, which is simply a law of symbolization. That is what it means.

So within this, everything you can imagine will occur, under these three registers:
– Verdichtung,
– Verdrängung,
– and Verneinung.

Verdichtung is simply the law of misunderstanding, thanks to which we survive, or thanks to which we can do several things at once, or thanks to which we can, for example, satisfy, when we are a man, our feminine tendencies in a symbolic relationship where we precisely occupy the feminine position, while remaining perfectly, on the imaginary and real planes, a man endowed with his virility.

This function, which may well remain—with more or less intensity, perhaps—of femininity, is something that will find satisfaction in this essential receptivity, which is one of the fundamental existing roles, which is not metaphorical: we receive something when we receive speech.

At the very moment something manifests in our behavior, there may be a way of participating in the relation of speech that simultaneously holds multiple meanings, and one of these interested meanings may be precisely that of finding satisfaction on this occasion—I take this as an example—in this feminine position, as something essential to our being.

Verdrängung is not the law of misunderstanding; it is what happens when things do not align, namely, when two different symbolic chains…
because in every symbolic chain, we are bound to an internal coherence within that chain, which forces us, at a given moment, to return what we gave at another.
…there are times when things do not align, when we cannot return on all levels at once—in other words, when a law becomes intolerable to us, not because it is intolerable in itself, but because we have placed ourselves in such a position that, for us, settling the score on this subject seems, quite literally, to involve a sacrifice that cannot be made on the plane of meanings.

But the chain always continues, meaning that when we repress it from our actions, our speech, our behavior, the chain continues to run underneath. That is to say, it continues to express its demands, to assert its claim through the intermediary of the neurotic symptom, and this is why repression is what lies at the core of neurosis.

There is something else called Verneinung, which is probably something of the order of discourse—that is, all that we are capable of bringing to light through an articulated path, something that has the greatest connection with the emergence of what, in analysis, is called the “reality principle,” and which intervenes strictly at this level. That is, at the level where FREUD articulates it in the clearest manner, in three or four places in his work, which we have reviewed at different moments of our commentary, which is this:
it is a matter not of what we affirm (Bejahung) but of what we attribute value of existence to.
To attribute value of existence to something, in Freud’s vocabulary—by which I mean what he calls “judgment of existence”—is something he characterized, with a depth a thousand times ahead of what was said in his time, as follows: it is always about finding an object.

What does this imply, and what does it mean? It means that every apprehension of reality in man is subject to a primordial condition, namely, that the human world consists in this:
that the subject is in search of the object of his desire, but nothing leads him there.

Reality, insofar as it is sustained by desire, is initially hallucinated. In the theory of the birth of the object-world, reality, as we see it expressed at the end of the Traumdeutung, for example, and as it is revisited every time it is essentially addressed, the subject remains suspended at the point of what constitutes his fundamental object: the object of his satisfaction.

And I will say that this part of Freud’s intellectual work is extensively revisited in all the so-called developments on the current interrogation into the pre-Oedipal relationship. Ultimately, this consists in saying that the subject is always trying to rediscover the satisfaction of the primitive maternal relationship.
But, in other words, where FREUD introduced the dialectic of two principles that are never separable, that can never be thought of independently—the pleasure principle and the reality principle—one of them is chosen, the pleasure principle, and all emphasis is given to it by showing that it dominates and encompasses the reality principle.

Its essence is misunderstood, and in its essence, it is exactly this: the subject must not find the object, that is, he must not be led to it by the natural channels, the natural tracks of a vital adaptation, more or less pre-established and more or less stumbling, as we see in the animal kingdom. On the contrary, he must rediscover the fundamentally hallucinated emergence of the object of his desire. He must rediscover this object, which, of course, he never actually rediscovers.

And this is precisely where the reality principle lies, in which FREUD writes: the subject never rediscovers anything but another object, which may be found to respond, more or less satisfactorily, to the needs in question. But he never finds anything other than an object, since he must, by definition, rediscover something that is repeated, and as an object, something that is equally distinct. This is the essential point around which the entire game of the introduction of the reality principle into Freud’s dialectic revolves.

What must be understood—because this is given to us by clinical experience—is that there is something else that appears in the real…
something that is thus put to the test, sought by the subject, something towards which the subject is led by the apparatus of reflection or by the apparatus of mastery, which is his ego…
there is something else that lies outside the framework of this search, outside the apparatus of search that is the ego…
that is to say, with all that the ego involves in terms of fundamental alienations…
there is something else that, at a given moment in his existence, can emerge:
– either in a sporadic form, namely the small type of sporadic hallucination mentioned in the case of The Wolf Man,
– or in a much more threatening, extensive, elastic form, as occurs in the case of President SCHREBER.

There is something else that can emerge in reality, namely an enormous meaning that seems insignificant, especially since it cannot be connected to anything, since it has never entered the system of symbolization. However, under certain conditions, it can threaten the entire structure, and this is properly called “the psychotic phenomenon.”

In other words: in the case of President SCHREBER, what is manifestly rejected, and the resurgence of which, at a certain moment in his existence—and already the question of this “certain moment” will pose for us the question of what determines the psychotic invasion—and by taking it in this way, you will see how different what determines it is from what determines the neurotic invasion. These are strictly opposing conditions.

Something causes a meaning concerning the subject, which only faintly appears on his horizon, on his ethics, to reappear—something which, in the case of President SCHREBER, is most closely related to the primitive bisexuality I mentioned earlier.
President SCHREBER never integrated in any way—and this is something we will also try to examine in the text—any kind of feminine form, and this is precisely something that, in his case, carries extreme importance.

It is difficult to see how it would be purely and simply for the rejection or repression of more or less vaguely transferential drives, which he might have felt towards Dr. Flechsig, or even to repress this or that tendency, that President SCHREBER would have constructed this enormous delusion. There must be something that constitutes an instance at least somewhat more proportionate to the result in question. It concerns this: the feminine function in its essential symbolic significance, which I already point out to you can only be found at the level of the term “procreation.” You will see why we will be led to place it at that level. We will neither say emasculation nor feminization, nor pregnancy fantasy—it goes as far as “procreation.”

It is something that, not at all at a deficient point in his existence, but rather at a peak moment of his existence, manifests itself to him in the form of this irruption into the real, of something he had never known, which emerges with total strangeness, and which will gradually lead, for him, to an absolutely radical submersion of all his categories and force him into a genuine rearrangement of his world. The question is whether or not we can speak, in this regard, of a process of reconciliation, or compensation, or healing, as some would not hesitate to assert, indicating that at the moment of stabilization of his delusion, there is a calmer state than at the moment of the irruption of the delusion. Is it healing or not? It is still a question worth asking. I believe that it is only abusively that one could use this term in such a sense.

So what happens at the moment when what is not symbolized reappears in the real?
Something certainly happens, and it is not pointless to bring in the term defense in this context.
In other words, if coordinates appear in the real in relation to all symbolization, it is clear that this appears under the register of meaning, a meaning that comes from nowhere and refers to nothing, but an essential meaning, and even a certainty of this meaning: the subject is concerned.

What happens? At that moment, something is certainly set in motion, something that intervenes every time there is a conflict of order in the subject, namely repression. Why does repression not work here, that is to say, why does it not lead to what happens when there is neurosis?

Before understanding why, we must first study how carefully, and precisely emphasize what constitutes the structural difference between neurosis and psychosis.

When a drive—let us say feminine or passivating—appears in a subject for whom this drive has already been activated at different points in his prior symbolization, for example, in his infantile neurosis, it finds expression in a certain number of symptoms. In other words, what is repressed still expresses itself. That is, since repression and the return of the repressed are one and the same thing, there is within repression the possibility for desire to negotiate a compromise with what reappears anew.

In other words—and this is what characterizes neurosis—the madman shows that it is simultaneously the most obvious thing in the world and, at the same time, the thing one does not want to see, because Verneinung (denial) is not on the same level as Verwerfung (rejection). There will be responses on the side of the mechanism of Verneinung that will be inadequate to address what reappears in the real at the onset of psychosis.

And on this question of the onset, we will also have to return, namely: what is the onset of psychosis? Does psychosis have, like neurosis, a prehistory, that is to say, an infantile psychosis?
I am not saying that we will answer this question, but at least we will pose it. On the contrary, everything suggests that it does not, namely, that for reasons which at least deserve to be investigated, under special conditions, something appears from what was not primitively symbolized in the external world. And when what was Verwerfung (rejected) makes its appearance, emerges into the external world, the subject is absolutely helpless in successfully performing Verneinung with regard to what is happening.

The question then is to understand why everything that will happen at that moment, which has the characteristic of being absolutely excluded from the symbolic compromise of neurosis, will manifest in another register—namely, in what can be called a true chain reaction that occurs at the level of the imaginary. That is to say, on the counter-diagonal of our little magic square.

At the moment when the subject becomes completely absorbed in a sort of proliferation of the imaginary, in the absence of any way to restore the pact of the subject with the Other, to create any mediation between what is new, what appears, and himself, he will enter into another mode of mediation, but one that is completely different from the first. It substitutes symbolic mediation with what can be called a kind of swarming, an imaginary proliferation, into which, in a distorted, deeply asymbolic manner, enters the central point, the sign, of a possible mediation. In this, the signifier itself will undergo those profound rearrangements that give such a particular weight to the most significant intuitions for the subject—those on which I have already insisted—the weight that certain words take on, and which you will observe in what is called the “fundamental language” of President SCHREBER.

But this marks the sign of the persistence of the requirement of the signifier within an imaginary world, or, in other words, a complete relativization of the subject’s relationship to the world in a mirror-like relationship.
That is to say, the world of the subject—namely that of President SCHREBER, the one which, for him at that moment, becomes the significant word—will essentially be composed of the relationship between this being, who for him is the Other, that is to say, God Himself, in whom something is supposedly realized, which is called the relationship between man and woman, or something is supposedly realized that allows him to assume this position.

You will see it when we study this delusion in detail. You will see that, on the contrary, the two characters:
– that is to say, God, or in other words, everything that He encompasses—for with God there is the universe, it is the idea of the celestial sphere that is included,
– and himself, as he is literally decomposed into a multitude of imaginary beings who carry on within themselves their to-and-fro movements, their ascents and descents, their various transfictions,
…both—the world and what he conceives henceforth as himself—are two structures that strictly alternate, and which bear, in a way that is particularly engaging for us and fully developed, what in the life of a normal man is only ever elided, veiled, and, strictly speaking, domesticated.

Namely, that this entire dialectic of the fragmented body in relation to the imaginary universe, which underlies the normal structure, is one of the values of the examination of this delusion. It allows us to see, in a fully developed and all-encompassing manner, the imaginary dialectic as such. That is, to see how it distinguishes itself from everything we might presume about an instinctual relationship—if we can call it that—natural, by virtue of a generic structure that is precisely the one we already marked at the origin, at the foundation of the mirror stage:
it is this structure that, in advance, makes the imaginary world of man something decomposed.

Here, we find it in its developed state. This is one of the interests of analyzing delusion as such. This is what analysts have always emphasized, that is, they show us what is called “the play of fantasies” in its fully developed character of duplicity. That is to say, these two “others” into which the world is reduced for President SCHREBER are made one in relation to the other, for at most one offers to the other its inverted image.

But the important point is the interest in seeing how and why this responds to the demand, that is, to the requirement that is certainly made only obliquely and unsuccessfully—the demand to integrate what has emerged in the real, and which represents for the subject that something of himself that he has never symbolized. In other words, to understand how a requirement of the symbolic order, being in no way capable of being integrated into what has already been played out in the past—the dialectical movement on which the subject has lived—leads to this entire kind of chain disintegration, this unraveling of the fabric in the tapestry that is called a delusion.

And it is a delusion in relation to a normal discourse. You will see that it is not necessarily absolutely disconnected, if only because of this: that the subject is perfectly capable, on his own, of finding satisfaction in it, and within a world of communication where not everything is entirely broken.

These are the questions—namely, precisely at the joint between this Verwerfung (rejection) and the Verneinung (denial)—which will be the first answer we will pursue next time in our examination.