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(All parts in English)

We could still delve together into this text by SCHREBER, as for us as well, the SCHREBER case is fundamentally the text of SCHREBER. What am I trying to do this year? I am trying to ensure that we better understand what might be called “the economy of the case,” the way its evolution can be understood or even simply conceptualized.

You must sense that there is, in this context, a sort of gradual shift occurring in psychoanalytic conceptions. I reminded you the other day that, essentially, FREUD’s explanation focuses on the shift to the “narcissistic” register. It is evident that the patient’s transition into an economy that is fundamentally “narcissistic” is profoundly rich. If one were to dwell on it properly, all the consequences could be drawn, but it is quite clear that they are not.

On the other hand, because it is forgotten, because ultimately nothing explicitly articulates what it means to emphasize narcissism at the stage FREUD had reached in his work when he wrote about the SCHREBER case, one no longer situates what, at that moment, the novelty of the explanation represents—that is, in relation to which other explanation it is positioned.

Now, if you consider an author who takes up the same question—the question of psychoses—it is obviously the notion of “defense” that they will highlight. To take one of those who have expressed the most sophisticated views on cases of psychosis, it suffices to cite KATAN. I will return to what KATAN has written, but I do not want us to proceed by commenting on commentaries.

We must start with the case itself and see how it has been understood and commented upon, following the path of what FREUD said when commenting on the case. At the beginning of his analysis of the SCHREBER case, FREUD first recommends that we familiarize ourselves with the book.

Since we are psychiatrists, or at least people with varying degrees of initiation into psychiatry, it is only natural that we read with our psychiatric perspective, trying already to form an idea of what is happening in the case. The first approach to the economy of the case is to observe the mass of facts that emerge, which undeniably have their significance, and to consider why they hold such importance.

Where does the introduction of the notion of “narcissism” fit within FREUD’s overall thinking? We must not forget the stages: we now talk about defense at every opportunity and believe we are echoing something very old in FREUD’s work. This is true—defense is indeed very old, playing an early role, and as early as 1884-1885, FREUD proposed the term “neuro-psychosis of defense.” However, he used this term in a very specific sense: when he speaks of “Abwehrhysterie,” he distinguishes it from two other types of hysteria.

That is, in an initial attempt to construct a properly psychoanalytic nosography. If you would refer to the article I am alluding to, FREUD distinguishes hysteria insofar as it must be conceived in the Bleulerian fashion, as dependent on and a secondary production of what occurs in hypnoid states, as contingent on a certain fertile moment corresponding to a disturbance of consciousness in the hypnoid state.

He abandoned this nosology insofar as it was a psychoanalytic nosology. He did not deny hypnoid states; he simply said, “We are not interested in that; that is not what we will take as a differential characteristic.” This is what must be understood when we classify. In all classifications, what happens in all sciences happens:

• You begin with very primitive botany by counting the number of what appears to be these colored organs of a flower,
• You call them petals because it is always the same in a flower presenting a certain countable number of units. It is something entirely primitive: it is a matter of seeing and understanding whether the function of what is observed can initially be called petals by the layperson,
• And as you go deeper, you sometimes realize that these so-called petals are not petals at all; they are sepals, and their function is entirely different.

In other words, the diverse registers of anatomical, genetic—therefore embryological—analogy, as well as functional and physiological elements, can come into play and, for a time, may even overlap between different classificatory registers. For classification to mean something, it must be a natural classification. How do we find this “natural”?

For now, we are at the level of hysteria. FREUD did not dismiss the hysteria associated with hypnoid states; he said: from now on, we will disregard it because, in the domain of analytic experience, what matters is something else. This “something else” was already present in that initial clarification; it is this that constitutes the notion of “Abwehrhysterie,” strictly as a reference to the traumatic memory.

We are at the moment when, for the first time, the notion of defense appears within the register—we must call it by its name—the register of recollection. I did not even say memory; we are dealing with the disturbances of recollection, that is, with what the subject can articulate verbally, with what they remember.

What is essential is the emergence from what can be called “the little stories of the patient,” and the fact that this “little story” is something the patient is either able or unable to bring forth—and it is precisely the act of bringing it forth. Anna O., whose portrait someone here told me was on a postage stamp because she became the queen of social workers, called this the “talking cure.”

Abwehrhysterie is a form of hysteria in which it suffices to read FREUD’s text to see that it is entirely close and fully open to the formulation I am giving you:

“Things are no longer expressible because they are expressed elsewhere, in the symptoms, and the task is to liberate this discourse once again.”

We are entirely within this register. At this point, there is no trace of regression, no theory of drives, and yet already the whole of psychoanalysis is present. FREUD also distinguishes a third type of hysteria, which is characterized by the fact that it also has something to narrate, but it is narrated nowhere. Of course, at the stage we are at in the development of the theory, it would be surprising if he told us where this dynamic might be located, but it is already perfectly outlined. FREUD’s work is full of such “waiting stones,” which, if I may say so, delight me.

Every time one picks up an article by FREUD, one realizes that it is never quite what was expected, and yet it is always something very simple and admirably clear.

But there is not a single text by FREUD that is not somehow nourished by enigmas corresponding to what I call “waiting stones,” where things have been laid out in such a way that one can say it is truly only he who, during his lifetime, brought forth the original concepts to tackle and organize this new field he was uncovering for us. And how could we be surprised? He approaches each of these concepts with a world of questions.

What is remarkable about FREUD is that he does not conceal these questions from us—that is to say, every one of his texts is a problematic text, so that reading FREUD means reopening the questions.

So, “disturbances of memory”—this must always be our starting point to understand that it was the initial ground. Let us say this ground has even been surpassed: we must measure the distance traveled. In a matter like psychoanalysis, it would be surprising if we could allow ourselves to overlook history.

It is not my intention here to recount the journey from what we will call the stage of “disturbances of memory” to the stage of “regression of drives.” However, I have said enough in past years to state:

• That it is within this mechanism discovered through the exploration and mobilization of the disturbance of recollection that the mechanisms of the regression of drives are revealed, insofar as they themselves depend on the work through which psychoanalysis initially strives to fill the voids in the subject’s history.
• That we then realize these events nestle where we least expect them—that is, what I spoke to you about last time, in the form of a displacement in behavior. We realize that it is not purely and simply about recovering the mnesic localization of events, in other words, their chronological placement, or about restoring a part of lost time, but that things also occur on the topical level. That is to say, the distinction between completely different registers in regression is already implicitly present.

In other words, what is perpetually forgotten is that just because one notion comes to the forefront does not mean another loses its value. Within this topical regression—where events acquire their fundamental behavioral meaning—it is precisely there that the discovery of “narcissism” occurs.

That is to say, one realizes there are modifications in the imaginary structure of the world, and they interfere with modifications in the symbolic structure. It must indeed be called symbolic since recollection necessarily belongs to the symbolic order.

What does this mean at the point FREUD had reached? At the point where FREUD was when he spoke to us about delusion and explained it through a narcissistic regression of the libido?

It means that when it comes to restoration for the sake of understanding, something has happened—a difference in nature. The desire that sought to be recognized or manifested does indeed manifest itself. And this manifestation, no matter how clear it might seem in terms of recognition within delusion, takes place on a plane that is fundamentally altered in comparison to what was to be recognized.

There is a transfer of planes. The withdrawal of libido from objects represents a “de-objectification” of what will then present itself, more or less legitimately, in delusion as representing the delusion that must make itself known. If one does not understand this, one cannot grasp what distinguishes psychosis from neurosis, nor why it is so difficult to restore what we might call “the subject’s relationship with reality.”

At least… this is what can be read in certain passages of FREUD, in a manner far less simplistic than is often represented and translated. First of all… since the delusion is entirely there, legible.

Indeed, it is legible, and it is also transcribed into another register. How can this happen? How does something that, in neurosis, always remains within the symbolic order—that is, always maintains the duality of signifier and signified, which FREUD refers to as the “compromise of neurosis”—how does this, in the context of delusion, occur under an entirely different register, where it remains legible yet without resolution?

This is the economic problem that remains open at the point where FREUD concludes the SCHREBER case.

I am stating substantial things here, and I believe they are, in any case, meant to be received as such by you, in order to truly situate where the problem lies.

In other words:

• The repressed in the case of neuroses reappears in loco, in the very place where it was repressed—that is, within the realm of symbols insofar as humans integrate into and participate in it, both as agents and actors. In neurosis, the repressed reappears in loco under a mask.
• The repressed in psychosis, if we know how to read FREUD, reappears in altero, in the imaginary, and there, indeed, without a mask.

This is entirely clear; it is neither new nor unorthodox. Simply, one must recognize that this is the main point that prevents us from raising unnecessary problems. This essential lesson cannot be considered the final point. At the moment when FREUD puts the final point on his study of SCHREBER, it is, on the contrary, from that moment that the problems begin to arise. This transmutation can indeed occur.

Everyone has since tried to pick up where he left off, which is precisely why KATAN offers us certain theories of psychoses, with their pre-psychotic stages, etc. We will return to this in detail.
But broadly speaking, one can grasp the subject and read everything KATAN wrote about the SCHREBER case.

He attempted to provide an analytical theory of schizophrenia: Volume V, the annual collection under the title “The Psychoanalysis of the Child.” By reading KATAN, one can clearly see the progress made in analytical theory because one realizes that the complex dynamic act—which always leaves so open in FREUD the question of the center of the subject, which, for example, in the analysis of paranoia advances step by step—reveals to us the evolution:

• of a disorder that is essentially libidinal,
• of a complex interplay of an aggregate of desires that are transferable, transformable, and capable of regressing,
• of an entire dialectic whose center seems fundamentally problematic to us.

…how, from the moment a certain doubt emerged in the analysis—that is, approximately around the time of FREUD’s death, since the articles I am referring to are posterior to the notion of defense—this [complex dynamic act] takes on the meaning of a defense conducted, directed from something that has been rediscovered, that familiar old center: the ego, which is there to handle the control levers.

Psychosis is very formally interpreted, no longer in the register of a drive dynamic or a complex economy, but in terms of strategies employed by the ego to cope with various demands. The ego once again becomes not only the center but also the cause of the disturbance: the ego must defend itself in a certain way against drives.

The notion of “defense” has no other meaning than that of defending oneself against temptation. And the entire dynamic of the SCHREBER case is explained to us based on his need to act, to cope with a so-called homosexual drive, which carries threats for the ego—threats that are understood, perceived, and felt as threats to the ego, specifically to its completeness.

Castration no longer has any symbolic meaning other than that of a loss of physical integrity. We are explicitly told that the ego, not being strong enough—as the expression goes—to anchor itself in the external environment and, from there, to exercise its defense against the drive in the id, finds another resource. It foments, creates—since it is a mechanism—this new entity, this neo-production called hallucination, which is another way of acting out, of transforming its drives.

This drive is transformed in hallucination in a transformed manner; it is a sublimation in its own way, one that comes with significant drawbacks. It is in this sense that the ego’s defense is conceived within this register.

Do we not see here a narrowing, a reduction of perspective? The clinical inadequacies of this view are glaring. In the end, the notion that there is a way to satisfy a need through an imaginary path is a latent notion, fundamentally articulated in Freudian doctrine, but it is never taken as anything more than one element of the phenomenon’s determinism.

FREUD never provided a definition of hallucinatory psychosis that could be purely and simply compared to the fantasy of satisfying hunger through a dream of satisfying hunger. It is all too evident—one need only look at the clinical aspect of things to see it—that a delusion corresponds in no way to such an end.

Only our own need for satisfaction offers us the reunion, which is not difficult to rediscover, with certain imaginary groups that are familiar to us from the study of human neuroses. It is always pleasant to rediscover an object. FREUD even teaches us that this is how the creation of the world of human objects comes about.

Consequently, it is no surprise that we are always pleased when we rediscover what we have already represented to ourselves, just as we feel a vivid satisfaction in finding certain symbolic themes of neurosis within psychosis. This is not at all illegitimate; however, one must clearly see that this only covers a very small part of the picture.

It is about measuring to what extent, in the SCHREBER case—if one chooses to—one can schematize, as I have already indicated, the transformation as “homosexual,” even adding “imaginary,” of this homosexual drive into a delusion in which SCHREBER becomes the wife of God, the receptacle of divine goodwill and manners.

This schema carries considerable persuasive value because one can find, in the very scope of SCHREBER’s text, all sorts of truly refined modulations that justify this conception. The same goes for the articulation of such a theory of psychosis.

We thus find an explanation that this is not something we can manipulate entirely at our will, as we might manipulate a neurosis, since we have made a fundamental distinction between the realization of repressed desire:

• on the symbolic plane in neurosis,
• and on the imaginary plane in psychosis.

This distinction alone, which I presented to you last time as a principle for differentiating these two planes, is already quite satisfying, but it does not fully satisfy us. Why?

Because psychosis is not merely that. It is not simply the development of an imaginary, phantasmatic relationship with the external world; it is something else. Today, I would like to give you a sense of the magnitude of the phenomenon.

Admitting everything I have just told you, it becomes clear that the Schreberian conception—if one may put it that way, borrowing SCHREBER’s own expression about the birth of a new Schreberian generation of men—means that humanity is to be regenerated starting from him, who has preserved a true existence.

Let us talk about the dialogue of the unique, of SCHREBER with the enigmatic partner who is his God—the Schreberian God himself. Is that all there is to the delusion? Certainly not! Not only is that not the entirety of the delusion, but it is also absolutely impossible to understand it within that register alone. One might lose interest in it, but it is nevertheless quite curious to settle for a very partial explanation of such a massive and complete phenomenon as psychosis, focusing only on what is clear in the imaginary events.

If we truly want to feel that we are advancing, that we understand something about psychosis, we must also be able to articulate a theory that justifies the mass of phenomena, of which I will give you a few samples this morning—something that will compel me to do some readings. We must grasp the dimension that we can, on the whole, call “verbal alienation,” and the enormous importance of a point that represents an advanced state of delusion. We will start from the end and work our way back in an effort to understand. I am taking this approach not merely as a presentational artifice; it corresponds to the material at hand, which is a text.

Here is a patient who was ill from 1883 to 1884 and who then had eight years of respite. It was at the end of the ninth year since the beginning of the first crisis that the pathological manifestations reappeared: in October 1893, things resumed. He entered the same clinic where he had been treated the first time, Dr. FLECHSIG’s clinic, where he remained until mid-June 1894.

A lot happened there. The state in FLECHSIG’s clinic is a complex one, whose clinical aspect can be characterized as what one might call “hallucinatory confusion,” or even “a state of hallucinatory stupor.” During this time, the subject is very far from lacking—as we know happens with precocious dementia—not only orientation, recognition of normal phenomena, and memory.

Later, he would provide us with an account of everything he experienced, certainly distorted in part. This confusion serves to designate the foggy way in which he remembers certain episodes. Other elements, specifically the delusional aspects of his interactions with various people surrounding him at the time, would be preserved well enough for him to provide valid testimony. Nevertheless, this is the darkest period of the delusion and the psychosis.

For it is only through this delusion that we can gain knowledge of this testimony, since we were not there, and the medical certificates from this initial period are not particularly rich in information. In any case, this period remained clear enough in the subject’s memory at the time he gave his account that he was able to establish distinctions.

Certain events occurred, particularly a shift of the center of interest toward relationships that we might call—borrowing a chapter heading directly from SCHREBER’s text—relationships dominated by personal interactions with what he calls “souls.”

These “souls” are not human beings. They are far from being the shadows of human beings he is dealing with at that time. They are dead human beings with particular properties, with whom he has specific relationships, about which he provides all kinds of details. These details are closely tied to a variety of sensations of bodily transformation, bodily exchange, bodily intrusion, and bodily inclusion.

It is a delusion in which the painful note plays a very important role. At this point, I am not yet speaking of hypochondria; the term is still too vague for our vocabulary. I am simply outlining the broad strokes.

What can be said from a phenomenological point of view—and while remaining cautious—is that at this point, there is certainly something noted as characteristic, something that could be called “twilight of the world.”

That is to say, he is no longer with real beings—“not being with” is quite a characteristic element—but he is with other elements that are perhaps far more burdensome than real beings. They are so much more burdensome that the mode of painful relationship is what dominates, and this mode of painful relationship involves a true loss of autonomy, given the feeling he has of invasion, inclusion, and intrusion.

This is something he experiences as a profound disruption of his existence and as having a properly intolerable character, which also motivates all sorts of behaviors he can only indicate to us in a necessarily shaded way. However, we can infer enough from the way he was treated: he was under close observation.

At night, he was placed in a cell, deprived of any kind of instrument that might remain within his reach. It is clear that he appeared at that point in a very severe acute state, as a gravely ill patient.

There is a moment of transformation, approximately around February-March 1884—he tells us this himself—a transformation in the focus on the souls, these kinds of beings with whom he has exchanges on the register of somatic intrusion or somatic fragmentation.

We see something else appear: it is the moment when these so-called souls—for reasons he later refers to as “examined souls”—are replaced by properly divine realms, which he calls the “later divine realms,” ORMUZD and AHRIMAN, since they appear in a split form.

There is also the appearance of what he calls “pure rays,” which behave in a completely different manner from the so-called “examined souls,” which he refers to as “impure rays.”

This means:

• The former have impure intentions, manifested by fears of rape, poisoning, bodily transformations, and already emasculations that appeared in the first period.
• The latter have another mode of relationship with him, although these are not relationships free of ambiguity.

SCHREBER will continue his entire confession to tell us about the deep perplexity left in him by the effects of this supposed purity, which can only be attributed to a divine intention. Yet, even in his text, we perceive peculiar complicities, a strange way for this so-called purity to be troubled, to be affected by all sorts of elements:

• which first stem from the “examined souls,”
• which play all sorts of tricks on these “divine rays,” on these “pure rays,”
• which attempt, by various means, to capture all their power for their own benefit,
• and which also interpose themselves between SCHREBER and their beneficial action.

There is here a very precise description of an entire tactic employed by most of these so-called examined souls, who are essentially souls driven by very malevolent intentions, namely the one who leads them, FLECHSIG. It is the tactic by which FLECHSIG fragments his soul to distribute its pieces within that hyperspace described by SCHREBER, the space that interposes itself between him and the distant God in question.

This notion of distance: “I am the one who is distant,” is found in a note that recounts what God confides to him, echoing a sort of biblical resonance, “I am who I am.” For SCHREBER, God is not the God who is, but the one who is far away, and this notion of distance will play its role. Nevertheless, the entry of the “pure rays” is marked by very specific characteristics: these “pure rays” speak.

That they speak, that they are essentially speaking…
that there is an equivalence between rays, speaking rays, God’s nerves, and all the particular forms they can take, including the various miraculous forms we will return to shortly, notably the birds…
this is something absolutely essential.

And this corresponds to a period dominated by what he calls the Grundsprache, that is to say, this language, which is a sort of very flavorful High German, with a strong tendency to express itself through euphemisms and antitheses. For example, punishment is called “a reward.”

This is its mode of speaking: punishment is, in its own way, indeed a reward. The style of this “fundamental language,” which we will return to, will allow us to reconsider the problem of the antinomic meaning of primitive words—words about which there remains, of course, a great misunderstanding concerning what FREUD said, with the simple mistake of referencing a linguist considered somewhat advanced, but who nonetheless touched upon something accurate, namely ABEL.

On this subject, Mr. BENVENISTE brought us something last year of significant value from a signifying point of view: namely, that in a signifying system, it is out of the question for words to designate two opposite things simultaneously, precisely because they are made to distinguish things. Where words exist, they necessarily come in pairs of opposition; words cannot in themselves combine two extremes as signifiers. However, when we shift to signification, it is something else. For example, he explained to us that there is no reason to be surprised that altus can refer to both a deep well and height because, he tells us, in perspective, the mental starting point of Latin begins from the bottom of the well.

But this goes very far, and it suffices for us to reflect on the fact that in German, “Jüngstes Gericht” means “the Last Judgment,” literally “the youngest judgment.” One can be struck by this—youth is not an image commonly associated with “the Last Judgment” in French usage. In France, one might say “your youngest child” to refer to the youngest, but it is not the image that comes to mind when speaking of “the Last Judgment.” Everything immediately suggests something belonging more to the register of old age than to youth. Therefore, this is a question we must pause on, and this Grundsprache will provide us with fine examples.

In 1894, he was transferred to the private sanatorium of Dr. PIERSON in Koswitz. He stayed there for fifteen days. It was a “private sanatorium,” and the description he gives indicates that it was—if I may say so—quite striking: from the patient’s point of view, one recognizes all sorts of traits that will undoubtedly amuse those with some sense of humor. It’s not that it was terrible: it had a certain charm, with the polished presentation typical of a private sanatorium, but also that deep negligence from which nothing was spared. He did not stay there long and was sent to the oldest asylum, in the venerable sense of the word, in Pirna.

He had initially been in Chemnitz. Before his first illness, he was appointed in Leipzig. Then, just before his relapse, he was appointed President of the Court of Appeal in Dresden. From Dresden, he went to Leipzig for treatment. Koswitz is located somewhere across the Elbe from Leipzig, but the important point, where he would spend ten years of his life, upstream along the Elbe, is Pirna.

When he returned to Pirna, he was still very ill and would not begin writing his memoirs until 1897–1898. During this period—being in a public asylum, where decisions could face some delay—between 1896 and 1898, he was still placed at night in what was called a “cell for the demented.” During this time, in this cell, he carried in a small tin box a pencil and scraps of paper hidden under various forms of pretexts. It was then that he began taking small notes—what he called his “small studies.”

For among what he left us, alongside the Memoirs, there are reportedly about fifty small studies he occasionally references. These were notes taken at that time and served him as materials.

So it is quite legitimate…
for a text which, in essence, was not written earlier than 1898 and whose drafting extends up to the time of his release, since it includes the procedure of this release—in other words, in 1903…
to view this as a text that provides a much more solid and reliable testimony of the final state of the illness, as far as we know its resolution. We do not even know when he died; we only know that he relapsed in 1907 and was readmitted to a sanatorium, which is highly significant.

We will therefore start from this perspective, which corresponds to the date when he wrote his memoirs.

There are things he can naturally testify to from that date onwards, but they are already sufficiently problematic to hold our interest, even if we do not resolve the problem of the economic function of what I earlier called “phenomena of verbal alienation,” or, to name them provisionally, “verbal hallucinations.”

What interests us is what distinguishes the analytical perspective in the analysis of a psychosis from what I would call the conventional psychiatric viewpoint—a point at which we are all “no wiser than before.”

For it is absolutely clear that when it comes to truly understanding the economy of psychoses, a report written on catatonia in 1903 is something we can still read with great relevance today.

Make the experiment, naturally choose a solid piece of work: it can now be said that not a single step has been taken in analyzing these phenomena. So, if there is something that must distinguish “the analyst’s point of view,” I see absolutely nothing of it. Except for certain distinctive elements in structural analysis, I fail to see what other originality could be brought forth. Except, perhaps, this one: that when faced with a verbal hallucination, instead of asking ourselves:

• whether the subject hears a little or a lot,
• or whether it is very loud,
• or whether it bursts forth,
• or whether he hears it properly with his ear,
• or whether it comes from within,
• or whether it comes from the heart or the stomach,

…things that are obviously very interesting but which ultimately stem from a rather childish idea: that we are quite astonished that a subject hears things we do not hear, as if, in some way, it never happens to us, at every moment, to have what are called visions—that is, phrases that descend into our minds, carrying a certain gripping, orienting, even sometimes striking or illuminating value, warning us.

This perspective is, of course, not used by us in the same way as by a psychotic, but still, certain things happen in the verbal order that are perceived by the subject as something received. This becomes truly gripping from the moment we start with the fundamental idea that what is interesting is to know, as we were taught in school, whether it is a sensation or a perception, or an apperception, or an interpretation. In short, if we remain within an academic or scholastic register concerning this elementary relationship with reality, as we construct it within a theory of knowledge that is evidently incomplete.

Because the element that extends from sensation, passing through perception, to reach the domain of causality and the organization of the real—and, in any case, philosophy has been trying for some time, loudly, to remind us, since KANT, that there must be different dimensions and registers of reality about which these problems are expressed, organized, and posed in equally different registers of inquiry—and perhaps the most interesting thing is not whether a word was heard or not.

We are still “left hanging,” meaning that three-quarters of the time, what do subjects bring us? Nothing more than what we are already asking of them, that is, what we are suggesting they answer us—that is, introducing into what they experience distinctions and categories that interest only us, not them.

What interests them, evidently, is something else entirely: the relationship of strangeness, the imposed and external character of the verbal hallucination—something extremely interesting, but which must be considered precisely in the relationship itself.

Because we clearly see how patients react: it is not where they hear best—as we tend to think, believing that hearing means hearing with the ears—
…it is not where they hear best that they are the most struck.

There are patients affected by certain forms of hallucinations that seem extremely vivid but remain merely hallucinations. And there are others in whom these hallucinations, on the contrary, have little vividness, are extremely endophasic, and yet have, paradoxically, the most decisive character for the subject, namely that they possess the full force of certainty.

As I introduced this distinction at the outset of our discussion concerning psychoses—the distinction between certainties and realities—this is what is important. This is what introduces us to structural differences within these phenomena. And we are in a better position than anyone else to realize that these are differences which, for us, are in no way superficial.

It is curious that this should be the case only for us, but it is a fact that among clinicians, it can only be for us that speech carries such extreme weight and importance. Because, unlike other clinicians, we know that this speech is always there, articulated or not. It is present and recorded in its articulated state—that is, already historicized, already embedded in the network of symbolic pairs and oppositions.

The entire undifferentiated experience of the subject—by which I mean this sequence that we might describe as an image projected onto a screen, the subject’s experience whose complete restoration, according to BERGSON, would be essential to grasp and understand the subject in their duration—it is perfectly clear that what we encounter clinically is never something like that. Through interminable analysis, we might conclude that it would be something inscribed at the foundation of phenomena, but unfortunately, this does not interest us at all. It never tends to emerge: the continuity of everything a subject has experienced since birth.

What are decisive points are those from the perspective of symbolic articulation, from the perspective of history, in the sense that you call history, the history of France. That is to say, one day Mademoiselle de MONTPENSIER was on the barricades. And she may have been there by chance, and perhaps it was not important from a certain perspective, but what is certain is that this is what remains in history. She was there, and a meaning was given to it.

And whether this meaning is true or false—it is always somewhat true at the moment—and it is what becomes true in history that counts and functions. But still, it must originate somewhere, either from a later restructuring or because it already begins to have an embryonic articulation at that very moment.

This is something important to see. But equally important is the fact that what we call the feeling of reality in the restoration of memories is this ambiguous thing that essentially consists of whether or not a reminiscence—that is, a resurgence of an impression—can or cannot be organized into historical continuity.

It is not one or the other that provides the emphasis of reality; it is both. It is a certain mode of conjunction between the two registers that also creates the feeling of unreality. Because from the sentimental register’s perspective, the feeling of reality is the feeling of unreality, or, just by a hair’s breadth, the feeling of unreality truly serves only as a signal that one is about to grasp reality, and that something is still missing.

In other words, the feeling of déjà vu, which has caused so many problems for psychologists, is something we might describe as a homonymy.

It is always in the symbolic key that the mechanism springs open. It is because something is experienced with a full symbolic meaning, something reproducing a homologous symbolic situation already experienced but forgotten, that it comes back to life without the subject understanding its reasons and causes. It gives the subject the impression that the current context, the tableau of the present moment, is something they have already seen.

The déjà vu is something exceedingly close to what analysis brings us under the register of “already recounted,” except that it is the reverse: it is not situated in the “already recounted” order because it actually belongs to the order of the never recounted, though it belongs to the same register.

In other words, what we must assume, if we admit the existence of the unconscious as articulated by FREUD, is that this symbolic sentence, this permanent symbolic construction that covers the entire fabric of human experience, is something that is always there, more or less latent, and is, in a way, one of the necessary elements of human adaptation—it passes without one thinking about it.

This could have long been considered an enormity, but it cannot be for us, because the very idea of “unconscious thought,” which is indeed the great concrete, practical paradox introduced by FREUD, means precisely this and nothing else.

When FREUD formulates the term “unconscious thought”…
by adding in his Traumdeutung “sit venia verbo”—so that the excuse itself contradicts the word—
…he formulates nothing other than this: “thought” means “something articulated in language.” There is no other inquiry at the level of the Traumdeutung concerning this term than that one, and this language, which we might call “interior”…
do not make me say what I am not saying; I use this term only to help you understand how I mean it, because precisely the term “interior” already distorts everything…
this “interior monologue” is in perfect continuity with exterior dialogue, and this is precisely why we can say that the unconscious is also the discourse of the Other.

However, there is still something of that order, that is, something continuous, but not at every moment…
here too, one must begin to clarify what one means, to proceed in the direction one intends to go while also knowing how to correct oneself…
that is to say, it is precisely not at every moment. There are laws of interval, suspension, scansion, and properly symbolic resolution, belonging to the order of suspensions and scansions that mark the structure of any calculation, which means that it is not in a continuous way that this “interior sentence,” let us say, is inscribed.

This happens due to a structure already entirely tied to ordinary possibilities, which is the very structure or inertia of language. Therefore, what concerns man is precisely how to manage this continuous modulation in such a way that it does not occupy him excessively. This is why things arrange themselves so that his consciousness turns away from it. But let us admit the existence of the unconscious: this means that even if his consciousness turns away from it, the modulation I am referring to, the “interior sentence” with all its complexity, nonetheless continues. There is no other possible meaning to be given to the unconscious than this one.

If it is not this, it is absolutely a six-legged monster, something utterly incomprehensible, and in any case incomprehensible within the perspective of analysis. Naturally, this refers to the Freudian unconscious.

One of the ego’s tasks, since we search for the ego’s functions as such, is precisely not to be poisoned by this “sentence” that continues to circulate and occupy us, and which asks only to respond and to resurface in a thousand forms, more or less camouflaged and disruptive. In other words, the evangelical sentence: “They have ears but do not hear…” must be taken literally.

It is a function of the ego that we are not perpetually compelled to hear this articulated something that organizes our actions as spoken actions. This is not derived from the analysis of psychosis; it is merely a renewed highlighting of the assumptions of the Freudian notion of the unconscious.

But it becomes very interesting if we consider these phenomena—let us call them provisionally teratological phenomena—of psychoses, where we see it operating openly, and where indeed something occurs that I must not, in turn, make the essential phenomenon, any more than earlier I would admit making the imaginary element the central and essential phenomenon.

However, we must still see that there is a forgotten phenomenon here, namely the importance of the revelation, the emergence of what I just called “monologue,” “sentence,” “interior discourse” in cases of psychosis. I am not trying to introduce new words—it would be better to let you sketch out the direction of this inquiry. The important thing is that we see in psychosis, in the most formulated, articulated manner, exactly what I have just said: we are the first to be able to see this, precisely because, to a certain extent, we are already prepared to hear it. But then we have no reason to refuse to recognize it at the moment when the subject testifies to it as something that is part of the very text of his lived experience.

[Reading from Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, p. 248: The voices manifest in me […] an entirely different origin.]

This is what he tells us in an appendix to what he writes—that is to say, it is not in the text itself but is something that carries the value of a very important retrospective testimony. It concerns a very significant phenomenon: the slowing down of this “sentence” over the years—we will see what this slowing down means—which then took on a meaning for him, introduced metaphorically under the form of distance: it is a very great distance where God’s rays have withdrawn, and for him, this is a sufficient explanation for the slowing down, or more precisely, the delay in the postponement in which he feels himself concerning the way these sentences reach him.

There is not only slowing down but, as I mentioned, delay, suspension, as a means of highlighting this delay, which SCHREBER emphasizes. Do you not see that very interesting questions already arise here?

The phenomenology through which this discourse continues, presents itself, and evolves over the years—the passage from a very full meaning at the beginning to elements of an imperceptible character, emptied of their meaning, with, moreover, extremely curious commentaries from the voices themselves, such as this: for example, while one translates as “all nonsense cancels itself out,” this is not a bad translation, but it is certain that nonsense here takes on its full significance.

The character, therefore, of the suspension of these words—to speak only of these words—that is, of the discourse, the continuous thread that accompanies the perpetuation of our subject’s illness, originates in a period corresponding to the first months of his entry into the Sonnenstein asylum in Pirna.

The structure of what is happening is not something we should neglect. I will give you an example: the beginning of one of these sentences, “We are now missing…”—and then it stops there; he hears nothing more. This is his testimony.

But such an interrupted sentence carries for him the implicit meaning:

“We are missing”—it is the voices speaking—“the main thought…”

In an interrupted sentence, always finely articulated grammatically, meaning is present in two ways: as anticipated, since it involves a suspension, and as repeated, since it always refers to a feeling of having already been heard. You might say to me:

“Yes, that’s all well and good, but do you think it’s something a little stronger, immediately established, than a sentence—even if we assume it to be complete—expressing itself as follows: ‘I am missing the main thought…’?”

It is evident that once we enter into the analysis of language, it would also be appropriate to take an interest in the history of language, to consider that language is not something as natural as it seems: expressions that appear self-evident to us must be seen as a continuum of more or less grounded expressions.

That the continuous discourse of the voices occupying him is psychological—that is to say, a large part of what he recounts concerns what he calls the “conception of souls,” meaning they have an entire psychological theory. I must say one can find there almost everything one might commonly project onto human psychology: these voices present catalogs of registers of thought, the thoughts of all thoughts, of affirmation, of reflection, of fear.

• They indicate them as such,
• They articulate them as such,
• And, above all, they state which among them are, in a way, regular.

In a sense, they have their own psychology, their own conceptions of souls, and they go even further: they have their own conceptions of patterns. They are at the farthest reaches of behavioral theory, the kind that, on the other side of the Atlantic, seeks to explain to everyone:

• The proper way to offer a bouquet of flowers to a young woman,
• The correct way to do it.

They too have precise ideas about how men and women should approach each other, and even how they should lie in bed together, and SCHREBER is somewhat taken aback: “That’s how it is,” he says, “but I had not noticed.”

The text itself is reduced to these purely formal phrases, I mean to refrains or ditties, which sometimes even seem somewhat embarrassing to us.

And it is to allow us to ask such questions that, for example, I recall something that struck me when reading Mr. SAUMAIZE, who wrote, around 1660-70, the Dictionary of the Precieuses. Naturally, the précieuses are ridiculous, but the movement known as “les précieuses” is at least as significant for the history of language, thought, and customs as our beloved surrealism, which everyone knows is no trivial matter, and which certainly gave us a very particular type of poster art after the movement of people who, around 1920, manipulated symbols and signs in a curious way.

The “précieuses” movement is probably far more important, from the perspective of language, than one might think. Of course, there is everything recounted by that brilliant figure MOLIÈRE, who, on the subject of the “précieuses,” likely said more than he originally intended.

But there is one thing you learn from reading this little dictionary: you cannot imagine the number of expressions that now seem perfectly natural. There is one particularly striking phrase that seems self-evident today but was, at the time, bewildering—it simply did not register well in people’s minds. Mr. SAUMAIZE notes it and tells us who invented it. He says it was the poet SAINT-AMAND who was the first to say: “The word escapes me.”

Naturally, if we no longer call an armchair “the conveniences of conversation” today, it is purely by chance. Some expressions succeed, while others do not. One might just as easily say “the conveniences of conversation” for an armchair, just as we say “the word escapes me.” This simply comes from a conversational turn originating in salons where people tried to cultivate a more refined language. The state of a language is characterized as much by its absences as by its presences.

Similarly, when you find in dialogue things such as these famous “miraculous birds,” oddities like these, which can be spoken to in almost any manner—one might say something like “I need air,” and they interpret it as “twilight.”

This is still quite interesting because, after all, how many among you have never heard—
in speech that is not particularly popular—
someone casually confuse “amnesty” with “armistice”?

But if I were to ask each of you, one by one, what you understand by “superstition,” I am sure we would arrive at a fairly amusing idea of the confused character this word might have in your minds, despite its common usage. After some time, the term “superstructure” would likely emerge!

Similarly, epiphenomena have a rather specific meaning in medicine. Common epiphenomena across all diseases—fever, for instance—are what LAENNEC calls “epiphenomena.”

The origin of the word “superstition” is given to us by CICERO, whom you would do well to read, as he teaches many things. You will see, for example, the distance and also the closeness between the problems the ancients posed concerning the nature of the gods, and how this provokes the problem of expression, even in a case like this, where it indeed concerns the gods.

In De Natura Deorum, CICERO tells us what superstition means: superstitious people, superstitiosi, were those who prayed all day and made sacrifices so that their descendants might outlive them. In other words, it was the monopolization of devotion for a goal that must have appeared to them as absolutely fundamental.

This teaches us a great deal about the conception the ancients might have had of this notion, so important in every primitive culture, of the continuity of lineage. This reference is quite significant to understand and might perhaps offer us the best grasp of the true definition of the notion of superstition:

• that is to say, precisely an emphasis, an extraction, a part of an entire text,
  a behavior at the expense of others,
• that is to say, its relationship with everything that constitutes fragmentary formation, with everything that is, properly speaking, methodical displacement within the mechanism of neurosis.

What is important is to understand what one is saying, and to understand what one is saying, it is essential to perceive, in a way, the underlying layers, the resonances, the meaningful superimpositions, whatever these superimpositions may be. We can accept all misinterpretations; they are never random misinterpretations.

But what matters, for anyone reflecting on the structure of language, is to know as much as possible about it—that is, to compile, whether concerning a word, a phrase, or an expression, the most comprehensive record possible. Because it is clear that language operates entirely within ambiguity:

• that is to say, most of the time, you have absolutely no idea what you are saying.
• that is to say, in your most ordinary conversation, language holds a purely fictitious value; you give the other person the impression that you are, indeed, still present.
• that is to say, you are capable of giving the expected response, one that bears no relationship to anything that could possibly be explored in depth.

Nine-tenths of language and of the discourses actually spoken are, in this sense, entirely fictitious discourses.