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(All parts in English)

«Ad usum autem orationis incredibile est, nisi diligenter adtenderis, quanta opera machinata natura sit.»
[«Incredible, when one looks closely, is the care taken by nature to enable the use of speech.»]
[Cicero: De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)]

You will not be surprised that I give you this phrase from CICERO as an epigraph for this discussion.
That is to say: “How many marvels are concealed within the function of language—nisi diligenter—if you would but observe diligently.”
You know that this is precisely what we endeavor to do here. Consequently, it is also on this theme that we will resume this term the study of Freud’s structures of psychoses. It is indeed about what FREUD left behind in terms of the structures of psychoses. This is why we refer to them as Freudian.

The notion of “structures” already merits our attention in itself, not to revisit its common usage, but to clarify what it means to approach or address a problem from the structural point of view.
I simply wish to point out that the notion of “structure,” as we effectively employ it in analysis, entails a certain number of coordinates.

Even the very notion of coordinate is part of the notion of “structure.” A structure first presents itself as a group of elements forming a covariant set. We would not arrive at the notion of structure if it were not to identify a phenomenon, something that constitutes a covariant set. I did not say a “totality.”
Indeed, the notion of “structure” is an analytical concept. And it is always in relation to a reference point of coherence with something else, which is complementary to it, that the notion of “structure” arises. The notion of totality will intervene if we are dealing with a closed relationship with a correspondent whose structure is interdependent.
There may also be an open relationship, which we would call “supplementary.”

The ideal has always seemed, to those who in one way or another have ventured into a structural analysis,
to lie between what binds the closed and the open, opening toward circularity on the side of openness:
indisputably, this is the most satisfying notion of “structure.” I believe that you are already sufficiently oriented here to immediately understand that the notion of structure is, in itself, a manifestation of the signifier.
The little I have just indicated about its dynamics, about what it implies, already directs you toward the notion of structure.

In itself, to be interested in structure is to be unable to neglect the question of the signifier.
That is to say, as with the signifier, we essentially see in it “group relations” founded on the notion of “open or closed sets,” but which essentially involve reciprocal references. Elements such as synchrony and diachrony, on which we have learned to focus in the analysis of the relationship between signifier and signified, are found within the structure.

This is something that should not surprise us, since ultimately the notions of structure and signifier appear inseparable when examined closely. In fact, when we analyze a structure, we realize that ideally it concerns the relationship of the signifier: it is a disengagement of the signifier as radical as possible that satisfies us best. The notion [of structure] thus distinguishes, on this point, the natural sciences from the sciences in which we situate ourselves, sciences which you know are not merely referred to as the “human sciences.”

This, I believe, is precisely the only limit one can establish: in the natural sciences,
I mean as they have developed for us, the physics with which we are concerned, the physics from which we must in some way know:
– to what extent we should approach its ideas,
– and to what extent we cannot distinguish ourselves from it.
It is in relation to these definitions of the signifier and structure that we can draw the distinction and the limit.

We will say that we have imposed upon ourselves as a law in physics to start from the idea that in nature no one uses the signifier to signify. This is what distinguishes our physics from a mystical physics, or even from a physics that had nothing mystical about it—ancient physics—which did not strictly impose upon itself this meditation.
I have made enough allusions to Aristotelian physics for you to understand what I mean in this sense.
But for us, it has become the fundamental law, required of any statement in the realm of natural sciences:
that there is no one who uses this signifier, which nonetheless is indeed present in nature.

For if it were not the signifier we were seeking in it, we would find nothing at all. To uncover a natural law is to uncover a signifying formula; the less it signifies something, the more satisfied we are. That is why we are perfectly content with the completion of Einsteinian physics, because literally, you would be wrong to believe that the small formulas that relate inertial mass to a constant and a few exponents [m=E/c²] have the slightest meaning: they are pure signifiers.
And it is thanks to this that we hold the world in the palm of our hand.

The notion that the signifier signifies something, that is to say, that there is someone who uses this signifier to signify something, is called the signatura rerum, and it is the title of a work by a certain Jakob BOEHME. It meant that it is precisely God who is there to speak to us, using all the phenomena of nature as His language. One must not believe that this [science], which we suppose to be fundamental—our physics—implies the reduction of all meaning. At the limit, if there is meaning, there is no one to signify it.

Within physics, nevertheless, the mere existence of a signifying system implies at least this meaning: that there is an umwelt, that is to say, the minimal conjunction of the following two signifiers:
– that all things are One,
– or that the One is all things.

These signifiers of science, in the most general sense, you would be mistaken to believe—even if they are reduced, as in this last formula—that they are fully given, that any kind of empiricism allows us to uncover them.
No empirical theory is capable of accounting for the mere existence of the first whole numbers.
No matter how much effort Mr. Jung has made to convince us otherwise, history, observation, and ethnography show us that at a certain level of usage of the signifier…
this could be in such and such a community, in such and such a tribe…
it is an achievement to arrive at the number “five,” for example.

One can very well distinguish, on the banks of the Orinoco, between the tribe that has learned to signify the number “four” and the one for which the number “five” opens possibilities that are quite surprising and coherent, moreover, with the entire system of signifiers in which it is embedded.
Do not take this as humor. These are matters to be taken literally. The striking effect of the number “three” when it arrived in a certain tribe in the Amazon has been noted by individuals who knew what they were saying.

It must not be believed that the enunciation of the series of whole numbers is something self-evident. It is entirely conceivable that beyond a certain limit, things blur together simply in the confusion of the multitude.
Experience shows that this is the case. Experience also shows that the number “one,” which only achieves its maximum efficacy through a return, is not the origin we could touch upon—in experience—within the acquisition of the signifier.
This may run counter to the remarks I made to you, that every system of language contains the totality of meanings.

You will see that this does not contradict what I have said, because the idea that any system of language can encompass the totality of possible meanings does not mean that every system of language has exhausted the possibilities of the signifier. These are entirely different notions.
The proof is in the example I mentioned to you, namely that the language of an Australian tribe might express a certain number with the crescent moon. This sufficiently illustrates what I wish to convey.

These remarks may seem far removed, but they are nevertheless essential to revisit at the beginning of this year’s discussion…
and each time we resume from the start, which is to say the point at which we always resume, for we will always be at the starting point…
it is thus that every true signifier, as such, is a signifier that signifies nothing. Experience proves it, for it is precisely insofar as it signifies nothing that it becomes indestructible, as experience demonstrates.

This also reveals the absurd direction taken by those who criticize or make jokes about what one might call the power of words, by demonstrating—something that is always easy—the contradictions inherent in the play of certain concepts, nominalism as it is called, and in certain philosophies.
Let us take, for example, the notion of “society,” to fix ideas and show how easily one can critique the arbitrariness or elusiveness of such a concept.
Why not? It has not been so long since the word “society” was invented.
And one can amuse oneself by observing the concrete impasse in reality created by the notion of society being held responsible for what happens to the individual—an exigency that ultimately gave rise to socialist constructions.
Indeed, this demonstrates the radically arbitrary nature of the emergence of the notion of society as such.

I am speaking of “society,” not “city,” for example. None of these things are self-evident.
At the level of our friend CICERO, and in the same work [Cicero: De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)], you will notice that:
– the nation is, so to speak, the goddess of the population,
– the nation is what presides over births.
The idea of the nation was absolutely not even on the horizon of ancient thought, and it is not merely the coincidence of a word that demonstrates this to us. None of these matters are self-evident.

The notion of “society,” precisely to the extent that we can question it, has entered our social reality like a plowshare, like the blade of a plow.
The notion guiding us, orienting us here as we try to understand what is happening in psychoses, must start from this: when I speak to you of the subjective, or when we bring it into question here, the illusion always lingers in the listener’s mind that:
– the subjective is opposed to the objective,
– the subjective belongs to the one who speaks, and, because of this, is on the side of illusions, whether it distorts or contains the objective.
This is yet another way of placing the subjective on the side of the one who speaks.

What is at stake for us, what has been omitted or rather bracketed until now in the understanding of Freudianism, is this:
– the subjective is not on the side of the one who speaks,
– the subjective is something we encounter in the real.
Not that the subjective reveals itself to us in the sense in which we usually understand the word “real,” meaning it implies objectivity—the confusion is constantly made in analytical writings.
The subjective appears in the real in the sense that it presupposes we are faced with a subject capable of using the signifier as such, capable of using the signifier as we use it:
– using the play of the signifier not to signify something, but precisely to deceive us about what there is to signify,
– using the fact that the signifier is something other than meaning, to present us with a deceptive signifier.

This state is so essential that—as those of you who are not yet aware, as I hope most of you are—this is the very first step of modern physics:
in DESCARTES, the discussion of the deceiving God is the unavoidable step in any foundation of physics as we understand the term.

The subjective is thus, for us, what distinguishes the field of science on which psychoanalysis is based from the entire field of physics.
It is the instance of this subjectivity, as present in the real, that constitutes the essential spring allowing us to say something new when we describe a series of seemingly natural phenomena, such as neuroses, for example.

It concerns understanding:
– whether psychoses are also a series of natural phenomena,
– whether they belong to a different field of natural explanation,
– whether we call natural the field of science where no one uses the signifier to signify.

These definitions, I ask you to remember, because after all, I provide them to you having taken care to distill them. In particular, I believe they are the ones intended to bring the greatest clarity to the subject, for example, of the critique of “final causes.” The idea of a “final cause” is something we find deeply repugnant, yet we constantly make use of it…
I am speaking of science as it is currently constituted, though it does so in a disguised form, for instance, in the notion of a return to equilibrium.
If the “final cause” is simply a cause:
– that reacts too actively,
– that acts in anticipation,
– that acts because it is directed toward something,
– that lies ahead,
…then it is absolutely ineliminable from scientific thought.

There are just as many final causes in Einsteinian formulas as in ARISTOTLE; that is not the question.
The difference is precisely this: in that signifier, there is no one employing it to signify anything, except this: there is a universe.

The things that amuse us… I was reading in Mr. […] that he marveled at how the existence of the element water was a wondrous thing, how one could clearly see the care taken by the Creator for order and our pleasure, because if water were not this element that is at once wonderfully fluid, heavy, and solid, we would not see little boats sailing so prettily on the sea. This is written, and one would be wrong to think that Mr. […] was an imbecile.
He was simply still immersed in the atmosphere of a time when nature was seen as something made to speak.
This escapes us due to a certain purification brought about by our causal demands.

But this purification is nothing other than what could not escape people for whom everything that presented itself with a signifying nature was made to signify something. And that is all those so-called naïvetés meant.
Notice that for the moment, we are engaging in a very curious operation aimed at extricating ourselves from certain difficulties…
precisely those posed by border areas, where the question of the use of the signifier as such must necessarily be introduced…
with precisely the notion of “communication,” which we have discussed here from time to time.

If I included in this issue of the journal—one with which I believe you are all somewhat familiar—the article by TOMKINS, it was to give you the naïve way of using the notion of “communication.”
You will see that one can go very far with this, and indeed, they have not failed to do so, that is, to write natural history in terms of [messages?].
There have been people who claimed that within the organism, the various orders of internal secretion send messages to one another in the form of hormones, which come to inform the ovaries that all is well, or conversely, that something is slightly off.

Is this a legitimate use of the notion of communication? It is not at all absurd to ask whether it is legitimate to use the notion of “message” in such a context.
Why not? If the message is simply something akin to what happens when we send a beam, visible or not, onto a photocell. Indeed, why not?
This can go very far, as I have already mentioned to you one day, I believe. If we sweep the sky with the beam of a spotlight, and something appears in the middle, this can be considered as the response of the sky.
I think that as you better grasp how we use this notion, the critique makes itself apparent. But that is still an overly facile way of addressing things, indeed.

Where can we truly speak of the notion of communication? You will tell me it is obvious: there must be a response.
That can be sustained. It is a question of definition. Shall we define communication as existing from the moment a response is registered? And there is only one way to define the response: something must return to the starting point.
This is the schema of feedback.

Any kind of machine that includes self-regulation—that is, a return of something that is recorded somewhere, and as such, by virtue of this recording, triggers an operation which, in whatever way it acts, may be called a regulatory operation—constitutes an operation of response. And communication begins there.
But shall we say that this, strictly speaking, elevates us to the level of the signifier and its function? I would say no.
A thermo-electric machine supported by feedback is not something within which we can say there is a use of the signifier.

The isolation of the signifier as such requires that from the moment—it first appears paradoxical, as does any dialectical distinction—from the moment at the receiver’s level, what is important is not the effect of the content of the message, not the hormone which, by its arrival, will trigger some reaction in the organ, but rather that, at the point of arrival of the message, acknowledgment of the message is made.

Does this imply subjectivity? Let us look closely. It is not certain. What distinguishes the existence of the signifier as a system of correlative elements that take their place synchronically and diachronically with respect to one another is this:
for there to be a signifier, we must suppose this: I am at sea, captain of something, a small vessel.
I see, somewhere, things moving in the night in a way that leads me to think they might be a sign.
There are several ways to react.

If I am not yet a human being, I react with all sorts of behaviors, as they say, modeled, motor, and emotional.
I fulfill the descriptions of psychologists. I understand something; I do everything I have told you one must not do.
If I am a human being, I record in my logbook: “At such an hour, at such a degree of longitude and latitude, we observed this and that…”
And that is what is essential. I safeguard, so to speak, my responsibilities.

The distinction of the signifier lies there, in the fact that acknowledgment of the sign as such is made; the acknowledgment of receipt is the essential element of communication insofar as it is not meaningful, but signifying.

And this distinction must be strongly articulated, because if you do not articulate it strongly, you will constantly fall back into meanings, that is, into something that can only obscure for us and cause us to lose sight of the original, proper, distinctive mechanism of the signifier in its specific function. I present it here to you in illustrative, even humorous forms. This is absolutely essential. Let us then retain the following:
– even when, within an organism—whatever it may be, living or not—even when transmissions occur that are based on the effectiveness of all-or-nothing [0,1],
– even when, thanks to the existence of a threshold, for example, we have something that does not act up to a certain level and then suddenly produces a certain effect (consider the example of hormones),
…we still cannot speak of communication if, in communication, we involve the originality of the order of the signifier. This is because it is not insofar as something is all-or-nothing that it is signifying, but rather insofar as something, which constitutes a whole—the sign—is there precisely to signify nothing.
This is where the order of the signifier begins and distinguishes itself from the order of meaning.

If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, if psychoanalysis constitutes something new, it is precisely in this: that the development of the human being, the functioning of what, to the greatest extent, interests them essentially, is in no way directly deducible from the construction of the development of interferences in the composition of meanings—that is to say, instincts. Instead, their functioning with respect to these meanings and these instincts only articulates itself, only organizes itself in such a way:
– that a human world can emerge from it,
– that the world we know, in which we live, in which we orient ourselves, and in which we cannot orient ourselves at all, involves not only the existence of meanings but the order of a signifier.

If the Oedipus complex, which is something whose order and degree of elaboration are essential for sexual normativity…
and it is insofar as it introduces, as such and by name, the functioning of the signifier as such, into the conquest of what is called “man” or “woman”…
if the Oedipus complex is not the introduction of the signifier, I ask that one provides me with any other conception of it.
It is not because the Oedipus complex is contemporaneous with the dimension or tendency of genitality that one can, for even a moment, conceive that it is essential to a realized human world, a completed world, a human world that has its structure of human reality.

Because in reality, it suffices to think about it for a moment:
– if there is something that is assuredly not made to introduce articulation and differentiation into the world, it is precisely the genital function,
– if there is something that, in its very essence, is the most paradoxical in relation to any real structuration of the world, it is indeed that which, in its essence, moves toward the most mysterious effusions.

It is not the instinctual dimension that is operative in the step to be taken regarding Oedipus.
In this respect, it is quite clear that it is precisely the pregenital stages that show us all the diversity, all the material that allows us, with certainty and more ease, to conceive how, by analogy of meaning, the material world—let us call it by its name—is connected to all sorts of things that man immediately encounters in the field of managing his own exchanges: his bodily, excremental, pregenital exchanges are quite sufficient to structure a world of objects, to structure a world of complete human reality, that is, one where subjectivities exist.

There is no other truly scientific definition of subjectivities than this: the ability to handle the signifier for purely signifying purposes and not for meaningful ones—that is to say, not expressing any direct relation to the order of appetite, but instead playing with the order of the signifier, not merely in its established state as a signifier.

At that point, things are simple. But the order of the signifier, insofar as the subject must conquer and acquire it, must place itself in relation to the signifier in a relationship of implication that touches upon its being—in other words, something must occur that results in the formation of what we call, in our language—which aligns well with the definition of the signifier, whose definition is precisely to signify nothing—that it is capable, at any moment, of giving various meanings, including the most absurd ones, which is what the superego signifies.
One does not need to go far in analytical literature to see the use made of it.

The superego is something—it is precisely something that poses the question of what the schema of the superego is, what the entry, introduction, or presence of the instance of the signifier is, which is indispensable for a human organism to function as such. That is to say, a human organism that is not only situated in a natural environment but also must manage, function, and relate in accordance with a signifying universe.
This brings us back to the crossroads where I left you last time regarding neuroses.
As for symptoms, they are always precisely an implication of the human organism in something structured like a language—that is, where some element of its functioning will come into play as a signifier.
Last time, I went further. I took the example of hysteria to explain the structure of a hysterical neurosis.
It is a question—that is to say, it is something centered around a signifier whose meaning remains enigmatic. The question of death or the question of birth are the two ultimate ones, precisely because they have no solution within the signifier. This is what gives neuroses their existential value in relation to this definition.

What do psychoses mean? What is the function of these relationships between the subject and the signifier in psychoses?
This is what we have already tried to pinpoint several times. That we are thus forced to approach things in a way that is always peripheral must have its reason in the question itself, as it arises. It is something that, for now, we are forced to observe as an obstacle, a resistance, in the proper sense of the term. It is this that will finally yield its meaning as we push things far enough to understand why this is so.

Once again, we are revisiting the problem, this time with the intent of taking, as we have done each time, one step further. I pointed out in psychosis this sort of schema to which we have arrived: that there must be, at some moment, something that did not materialize in the realm of the signifier, something that was verworfen, something that was the subject of a Verwerfung, and that it is this which reappears in the real.
This notion, this essential difference, distinguishes itself from any other mechanism observable in what we know from experience concerning the relationships between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. In psychoses, there is something entirely distinct from what happens elsewhere.

In analytic theory, FREUD was the first, and powerfully so, to articulate this. He clearly emphasized—and even in the texts we are working on, such as The Schreber Case—the distinction between:
– an intentional projection, a jealousy where I am jealous of my own feelings in the other, where it is I who signify that within myself it is my own impulses of infidelity that I impute to the other;
– and the radical distinction between this passionate conviction and a delusional conviction, about which FREUD attempts to give us the formula: “what has been rejected from within reappears from without,” or, as some attempt to express it in amplified language, “what has been suppressed in the idea reappears in the real.”

But precisely, what does this mean? Because we see this interplay of the drive in neurosis as well, and we see its consequences. Is there not:
– something essentially confused, directly unthinkable,
– something that leaves us wanting,
– something whose handling is entirely defective and senseless within this simple formula?

If we limit ourselves to that formula, we would be doing what all the authors do. When I presented it to you in this form, I was not attempting to present something original. I hoped to find someone who might help examine it more closely in the works of KATAN, with cases analogous to that of President SCHREBER, where he attempted to closely analyze this mechanism of psychotic neo-formation.

You will see—this is where it will be highly illustrative—the conceptual difficulties, the kind of extravagant impasses one encounters, from which one escapes only at the cost of contradictory formulas into which one is forced to engage, if one delves into this problem of a distinct realization of the test of the real, or a reality, in the sense of the real. Consider the difficulties one encounters when confusing, even slightly, the notion of reality with that of objectivity, or even with that of meaning.

Because a whole phenomenological pretension—which, for the moment, far exceeds the field of psychoanalysis and dominates it only insofar as it dominates elsewhere—is based on something that conflates the domain of signifiance with the domain of meaning. Originating from works of great rigor, which are precisely elaborations concerning the function of the signifier, it has slipped—and here lies the fundamental confusion present in what we call so-called psychological phenomenology—into the domain of meaning. In doing so, it is like a dog on a scent trail, and like the dog, it will never lead to any kind of scientific result.

The supposed opposition between Erklären and Verstehen. Here we must maintain that there is a scientific structure only where there is Erklären, and Verstehen is an opening to all confusions. Erklären does not at all imply mechanical meaning, nor in any way things of that order. The nature of Erklären lies in the essential pursuit and reliance on the signifier as the sole foundation for all conceivable and possible scientific structuration.

Let us now address the problem of our psychoses. For example, in the case of SCHREBER, we see at the outset a period of turmoil—a fertile period or moment—in which there is a whole symptomatic ensemble which, truthfully, is generally overlooked, exactly as it slips through our fingers, and which could not be elucidated analytically. It is most often only reconstructed. By reconstructing this period, we can find, with very little deviation, all the appearances of meanings and mechanisms whose interplay we follow in neurosis. Nothing resembles a neurotic symptomatology as much as a pre-psychotic symptomatology.

When we turn our attention to psychosis as such, at the moment when the diagnosis is made, we are dealing with a moment when we are told:
– everything unconscious is there, laid out externally;
– everything that is of the “Id” has passed into the external world.

This is so clear that the meanings present there have the truly paradoxical effect that we cannot—this is the classic position, and it retains its value—intervene analytically.

The paradox of this has never escaped anyone, and the reasons given to explain this paradox simply all bear the character of…
I believe that is why it would be interesting to analyze texts such as those we referenced earlier…
to examine how they lead us into tautologies, contradictions, and utterly senseless superstructurations of hypotheses. A cursory interest in analytical literature as a symptom suffices to reveal this.

Where is the mechanism? Is it, indeed, that the world of the object is affected, captured, or induced in some way by a meaning tied to the drives that characterize psychoses?
Is it, if you will, “the construction of the external world” that characterizes psychoses, according to the definitions we are given? Because indeed, if there is something that could equally serve to define neurosis, it is this: neurosis is still something…
At what moment do we decide: “The subject has crossed the boundary,” crossed this boundary, and entered into delusion?

Let us take the case of our President SCHREBER. During the pre-psychotic period, President SCHREBER experienced something he conveys in vivid detail: it is that question which, I told you, lies at the heart of all neurotic forms. It is during this period—retrospectively, in fragments—that he shows us he was prey to strange premonitions, suddenly overtaken by this image which, truly, seems to have been the least likely to enter the mind of a man of his kind and style:

“That, after all, it must be quite beautiful to be a woman undergoing copulation.”

For us, of course, who follow the entire development of the psychosis, none of this seems very surprising.
So, why do we draw a boundary between:
– the moment when he was still in this phase of panicked confusion,
– and the moment when his delusion finally constructed itself into the belief that he was a woman—and not just any woman, but the divine woman, or more precisely, “God’s Bride,” which became the construction of his delusion?

Does this suffice to define his case, the crossing, the entry into psychosis? Certainly not. KATAN recounts a case he observed that declared itself at a much earlier stage than that of SCHREBER. It was the case of a young man, and he was able to have a very direct understanding of it. He arrived barely at the moment when the case was turning: it concerned a young boy in puberty, whose entire pre-psychotic phase he analyzed very well, in that we understand that in this subject, nothing in the realm of his accession to something that could realize him as a man, nothing was present, everything was missing.

And it was through a sort of imitation, a clinging to one of his comrades…
to summarize the analytic notion we can take from the case of his symptoms…
that, in short, he tried to conquer the typification of a masculine attitude as such.

It was to the extent that, like his friend and following him, he engaged in the first sexual maneuvers of puberty, namely masturbation, and then renounced it upon the friend’s injunction, that he began to identify with him in a whole series of exercises described as a conquest of self-control. That is to say, he behaved as if he were in the grip of a strict father, which was indeed the case for his friend. Like his friend, he was interested in a girl who, as chance would have it, was the same girl his friend was interested in. And when he had gone far enough in this identification with his friend, the girl fell entirely prepared into his arms.

This is clearly the “as if” mechanism that Madame Hélène DEUTSCH highlighted in an article—whose meaning I am presenting to you—as a highly significant dimension in the symptomatology of schizophrenias: a mechanism of compensation, properly speaking, imaginary. Here, you must recognize the utility of the distinction between these registers—a sort of imaginary compensation for the absent Oedipus, the Oedipus in the sense that it would have provided him with the signifier, masculinity, not in the form of the paternal image but in the form of the Name of the Father.

Here we encounter the substitute, the attempt at equivalence, an equivalence. In the case in question […] through repeated failures […] the psychosis, when it breaks out, does so in a way that does not fundamentally differ in meaning from the pre-psychotic phase. The subject will always behave as an unconscious homosexual.

He was already behaving that way beforehand. His entire behavior concerning the friend, who was the leading element in his attempt to structure himself at the level of puberty, will reappear in his delusion. From what moment does he begin to delude?
He begins to delude from the moment he says that his father is pursuing him to kill him, to rob him as well, and to castrate him as well. The subject, as it is said, is there with all the contents implicated in neurotic meanings.

But what is not highlighted, yet is the essential point, is this: the delusion begins at the moment when the initiative comes from an Other—with a capital O—when the initiative is based on a subjective activity: “The Other wants this.”
And, furthermore, reservations must be made: he wants this, and he especially wants it to be known; he wants to signify it.

As soon as there is delusion, we sail full speed into the domain of an intersubjectivity whose entire problem is to understand why it is phantasmatic. Yet, in the name of the fantasy—whose omnipresence in neurosis we recognize—so attached are we to the meaning of the fantasy that we forget the structure. Namely, that we are dealing with signifiers, signifiers as such, manipulated by a subject for signifying purposes, so purely signifying that meaning often remains highly problematic—especially since what we encounter in this symptomatology always involves what I am bringing today into the game of our dialectic.

Because, as I promised, each theme must enter at its moment. A theme I introduced last year regarding the dream of “Irma’s injection”—the mechanism referred to as “the intermingling of subjects.”
The essence of the intersubjective dimension—that is to say, when you have in the real a subject capable of using the signifier as such, not to inform you, as they say, but very specifically to deceive you.

That this possibility exists is essential; it is what distinguishes the existence of the signifier. But that is not all: as soon as there is a subject and the use of the signifier, there is the possible use of the “inter-I,” that is, the interposed subject. This intermingling of subjects, which you know is one of the most evident elements in the dream of “Irma’s injection”—namely, the three practitioners called in succession by FREUD, who wishes to know what is in Irma’s throat.

And these three buffoonish characters, who operate, who speak, who support theses, who say only nonsense—these “inter-I” play an essential role. They are on the margins of FREUD’s inquiry, which is this: what is at play in what, at that moment, is his essential concern, his primary concern, the one he himself, in a letter to FLIESS, relates to what I am telling you when he speaks of defense—this concern that I speak of and which he expresses to FLIESS as follows:

“I am in the midst of something that is beyond nature, regarding defense.”

Defense is indeed this—it is something so essentially tied to the signifier, so linked not to the prevalence of meaning but to the idolatry of the signifier as such, that it cannot be conceived otherwise. This is merely an indication.

Is not the intermingling of subjects precisely that which appears so clearly within reach in delusion?
The intermingling of subjects—this thing so essential to every intersubjective relation that one might say I believe there is no language that does not have entirely specific grammatical constructions to indicate it. To illustrate what I mean, I will take an example:
It is the entire difference between:
“The chief physician who had this patient operated on by his intern,”
and
“The chief physician, who was supposed to operate on this patient, had him operated on by his intern.”

You must sense, even though it leads to the same action, that it means two completely different things. In delusion, this is what it is always about: “they make them do” this or that. This is the issue, far from allowing us to simply say that the “Id” is crudely present and reappearing in the real.

Everything happens as if, in a kind of impasse or perplexity concerning the signifier at the heart of psychosis, the subject were reacting through this attempt at restitution, a compensation for the crisis, fundamentally unleashed, here too, likely by some question: What is it? I do not know!

I suppose the subject reacts to the absence of the signifier by asserting even more strongly the presence of an Other who, as an Other, is essentially enigmatic. The Other, with a capital “O,” as I have told you, is excluded—excluded as the bearer of the signifier. The more powerfully it is affirmed, the more, between the Other and the subject—at the level of the little other, at the level of the imaginary—all these phenomena of “inter-I” occur, which constitute what is apparent in the symptomatology of psychosis. The question is precisely illuminated by the nature of the phenomena occurring at the level of the “inter-I,” at the level of:
– the other of the subject,
– the one who takes the initiative in the delusion,
– Professor FLESCHIG in the case of SCHREBER,
– the God who is so capable of seduction that He endangers the order of the world through attraction.

The important, revealing, and, indeed, significant point—one might say—is to see what appears at the level of the “inter-I,” that is, at the level of the little other, the double of the subject, something that is both his ego and not his ego: words that serve as a kind of continuous commentary on existence. This is what we observe in mental automatism, the commentary on actions, the echo of thoughts. But this is even more pronounced here, as there is a sort of teasing use of the signifier as such.

These are sentences that are begun, then interrupted, simply […] as if they were necessary.
That is, as they organize—and cannot fail, at this level of the signifier—what constitutes a sentence, including a middle, a beginning, and an end, which must necessarily conclude. On the contrary, it plays on expectation, temporal relations, and delays.

A whole interplay takes place here, at the imaginary level of the signifier as such, as if the enigma, unable to be fully expressed in an entirely open form, other than first through the assertion of the Other’s initiative, were offering its solution by showing what is at stake: it is about a relationship of the signifier as such; it is about the signifier itself.

What appears, at the core of the “dream of Irma’s injection,” as the formula in bold type—something placed there to reveal the solution to the desire at the heart of FREUD’s dream—is the realization that there is nothing more important than a formula of organic chemistry. Similarly, in delusion, we find indications in these phenomena of commentary, in the humming of discourse in its pure state, which occurs around the phenomenon itself. These phenomena indicate that what is at stake is the question of the signifier.