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(All parts in English)

The significance of the distinction that I am emphasizing this year, which is at the forefront of our discussions, between the signifier and the signified, must prove to be particularly justified by considerations of psychoses. I demonstrate this to you from various approaches. Today, I would like to make you grasp it through the reading of some excerpts from the testimony left to us by SCHREBER.

The fact that this subject was “exceptionally gifted,” as he himself expresses it, in observing the phenomena of which he was the locus and in seeking their truth is something we cannot overlook. This is what lends his testimony its exceptional value.

As I prepare to select one of these excerpts to share with you, I reiterate the question once again. Notice that in our practice of analytical thinking, in approaching any question of mental disturbance—whether it is manifestly evident or latent in symptoms or behaviors—we are always seeking meaning.

This is what sets us apart; this is why we are credited with being able to uncover meaning further and better than others. I would even go so far as to say that we truly hold a privilege in this regard. This is the credit attached to psychoanalysis: to not let ourselves be deceived about the true meaning.

When we identify the significance that a certain object holds for a subject, it is always a matter of meaning, in the sense that something within the subject is engaged with the register of that meaning. It is precisely here that a bifurcation occurs, if I may say so, the point where I want you to pause, to show you that there is a crossroads.

That is, from the moment we begin to investigate the order of interest that engages the subject in a given meaning, we are naturally led to the plane of desire, to the plane of instinct. Ultimately, this serves as the archetype, the mold, and the preformation of the subject’s desire, this appetite that binds the subject to this meaning and correlates them with the object, now established within a certain register of instinctual relationships, from which the entire theoretical construction of instincts emerges—the foundation upon which the analytic discovery is based.

Once this field is, even slightly, filled, we can observe that within this handling of meanings, we can raise problems. I would say that we do not raise them due to the richness of the register of meanings to which we are, almost immediately, led by this path. There exists an entire world, almost an entire relational labyrinth, which in itself already contains enough bifurcations, communications, and returns to leave us, so to speak, satisfied—that is, ultimately, to leave us, properly speaking, lost. This fact is palpable in our daily handling of these meanings.

Let us take an example that is highly relevant to our subject: the libido of homosexual attachment, insofar as it participates as an essential component in the Oedipal drama. What will we say? That in this fixation, this meaning of the homosexual relationship tends to emerge within the Oedipal relationship, within the reversed Oedipus. We will explain many things in this register. Most of the time, in cases of neurosis, we will say: the subject defends themselves against this attachment, this relationship, which always tends to appear more or less secretly, more or less latently, in their behaviors.

What will we seek as the cause of this defense? The fact that the subject has more than one way of defending themselves, but in general, there are different modes of defense, already referred to as “defenses.” To this defense, we attribute a cause, and this cause, for example, we define as the fear of castration. Do you not sense that this matter, which I take as a commonly used example, is something we handle recklessly and with the greatest simplicity?

We never lack explanations, for if we do not have this one or if it is another, is it not evident—and the slightest analytical text makes it evident—that the question of what order of coherence it might pertain to is never asked? Namely, in what way is the homosexual orientation of libidinal investment established? Why do we simply and immediately assume that it involves this causal coherence for the subject? How does capture by the homosexual image entail, even for the subject, the loss of their penis?

For this, we must determine a special experience in a given case, but a special experience: we must still ask of what order it was and, ultimately, what order of causality is implied in what is called the primary process. To what extent can we admit the causal relationship within it? What are the modes of causality apprehended by the subject in any given imaginary capture? Is it sufficient for us to view it externally for this imaginary relationship—and all its implications, moreover, as it concerns the imaginary, whose implications are themselves constructed—to be granted within the subject?

I am not saying that we are wrong to think that the fear of castration automatically comes into play, with all its consequences, in a subject poorly caught in the passive capture of the homosexual relationship. I am saying that we never pose the question. I am saying that it is probable the question would have different answers depending on the various cases and that it is not self-evident that this causal coherence—ultimately reconstructed and implied by a sort of wholly abusive extrapolation of what the imaginary entails in the real—is valid.

I assert that we never truly pose questions on this level; when needed, we naturally slide into invoking—

• where it concerns the pleasure principle,
• where it concerns resolution, a return to balance, or the demands of desire—

we implicitly invoke, at the moment we desire, the reality principle if it serves to explain something. If it serves no explanatory purpose, we invoke something else.

This allows us to return, as though to a question, to the bifurcation—that is, to the moment when the interrogation of meaning has introduced us to a new perspective on the interests the subject assumes in a fundamentally imaginary relationship of desire, at least one we may initially conceive as essentially imaginary.

Before delving into this catalog, into this labyrinth, into the complexities of instincts and their equivalences, and how one merges into another, this is where we must pause and ask ourselves:

“Does not every meaningful interest of the human subject necessarily involve the consideration of laws as such?”

Not only biological laws, which dictate that a certain number of meanings will be instinctively, biologically, and individually compelling for the human subject. There is also the question:

“What role in this is played by what properly pertains to the signifier?”

In other words, does the question of the intrinsic function of the signifier and its interplay with the subject’s interests—not just the surface but the deepest, most primitive, and elemental—arise for every matter of meaning in human existence?

For days and lessons, I have tried through various means to help you glimpse what we might provisionally call the “autonomy of the signifier”—that is, the existence of laws peculiar to it. These laws are undoubtedly extremely difficult to isolate because we always see and engage the signifier within meanings.

The linguistic consideration of the problem holds interest here because, in this most fundamental phenomenon of interhuman relations—language—I have shown you that it is impossible to grasp, approach, or discern its functioning without fundamentally and initially distinguishing between the signifier and the signified. This distinction reveals that the signifier operates according to its own laws, independently of the signified, such that:

• If it is true—and this is the step I ask you to take in this seminar—that the significance of psychoanalytic discovery lies not merely in having meanings but in having gone much further than ever before in interpreting meanings,
• If it is true that psychoanalytic discovery goes beyond this, then the essence of that discovery is precisely not in simply concerning itself with meanings. This fact should represent, and indeed must represent, the exact point where analytic inquiry encounters impasses, confusions, or the circularities and tautologies to which it often leads.

I argue that the essence of psychoanalytic discovery is indeed not that. Its core lies not merely in what we previously misunderstood: attaching libidinal or instinctual meanings to human behaviors. While this is valid—such meanings exist!—what matters is that these meanings, the entire domain of meanings, including the most primordial, deeply rooted, and proximate to basic needs, as animals integrate them into their environment as nourishing or captivating, are subjected, in their sequencing, formation, and even their very emergence, to the laws of the signifier.

When I spoke to you about “day” and “night,” it was to convey that beyond everything encompassed by “day,” the very concept of day—the word “day,” the notion of “coming to light”—is something fundamentally elusive in any reality. It defies definitive description or limitation, except for the opposition between “day” and “night,” which functions as a fundamental signifying opposition that vastly transcends any specific meaning it may cover. And I chose “day and night” because our subject is, naturally, man and woman.

The signifier “man,” like the signifier “woman,” represents something far beyond—

• passive or active attitudes,
• aggressive or yielding dispositions.

These are not mere behaviors; there is undoubtedly, and obviously, a concealed signifier behind them that is never entirely incarnate but is nonetheless embodied most closely in the words “man” and “woman.”

Ultimately, if these registers of being reside anywhere, it is, ultimately, in the words. They need not be verbalized; they might take the form of a sign on a wall, a painting, or a stone for the primitive. But they exist somewhere beyond any particular mode of behavior, relationship, or pattern that might be labeled feminine or masculine conduct.

The “human reality,” as I have explained, is not new. The moment I articulate this, you must recognize that we say nothing different when asserting, for example, that the Oedipus complex is absolutely essential for the human being to access a humanized structure of reality. That is what it means, and it cannot mean otherwise. For all the relational composition crystallized in the Oedipus complex, where the subject is, of course, not simply trapped in a field, becomes comprehensible only to the extent that the subject is both themselves and one of the two others in the partnership.

This is precisely what the term “identification,” which you use frequently, signifies.

If this intersubjectivity, with what it typically entails at a certain stage of experience, with this crisis referred to as a “decline,” which marks the introduction into the subject of a certain new dimension that we more or less properly—and with all the accompanying debates—call symbolic, if, in short, a crisis whose scope we have defined and localized under the name of the Oedipus complex does not inherently possess this structure, then it is undeniably, evidently symbolic. The Oedipus complex cannot be conceived otherwise. If there is no dialectical organization within the Oedipus complex, we lose the very meaning of words unless we articulate them as a symbolic structure.

However, if we add that the subject’s passage through this symbolic or dialectical experience is essential for their access to reality—
and through all our approaches, through all that permeates the literature, through the way we explain things and agree upon a certain number of fundamental principles—
this implies that for reality to exist,

• for there to be sufficient access to reality,
• for reality to have its weight,
• for the sense of reality to serve as a proper guide for us,
• for there to be no “psychotic reality,” that is, a breach of reality in psychosis,

the Oedipus complex must have been experienced. I do not think there is even any doubt about this question.
The fact that it might not be universally accepted changes nothing about the matter. It suffices for some to hold it as certain for the question to be raised.

Thus, it is on a certain purely symbolic experience—on at least one level involving the conquest of the symbolic relationship as such—that the equilibrium, the proper positioning of the human subject within reality as a whole depends. And after all, upon reflection, do we even need psychoanalysis to understand this? How is it that we are not surprised that philosophers have not long since emphasized the fact that human reality is irreducibly structured as signifying? This is where I once again began last time: from the idea that the very arches are built, the lines of force constructed, from the signifier as such.

There are certain elements—earlier, I mentioned day and night, man and woman, peace and war. I could list more, which are things:

• that do not emerge from the real world,
• that give it its framework, its axes, its structure,
• that organize it,
• that allow humans to orient themselves within it,
• that create for them a reality, in the sense that we invoke it in analysis, which presupposes within itself this web, these fibers of the signifier as such.

The importance of drawing attention to this is not to present it as something new. I mean to say that I bring it to you as something perpetually implied in our discourse, though never isolated as such. This omission might, to some extent, have no serious consequences, but in fact, it does—especially, for example, when reading everything written about psychoses. You will notice that the same mechanisms of attraction, repulsion, conflict, and defense are invoked in discussions of psychoses as in discussions of neuroses.

Yet, phenomenologically and psychopathologically, the results are nevertheless distinct—not opposed, if the word “opposed” has any real meaning in our context. Still, we offer no other explanation in the end: we settle for the same effects of meaning.

• This is where the error lies.
• This is where something inevitably appears insufficient to us.
• This is where I urge you to pause for a moment and consider the existence of the structure of the signifier as such, which, to put it simply, exists within psychosis.

Indeed, if meanings appear—and I would even say, if they proliferate, more so than elsewhere—

• this is not due to some origin, some essential relationship through which psychosis radically distinguishes itself from neurosis.
• It is not about some loss of the subject in the labyrinth of meanings or some dead-end that we term fixation within the order of significant relationships.
• Rather, it concerns something that emerges at a given moment, manifesting itself in the subject’s relationship with the signifier.

What does this imply, and what can it mean? Try to conceive of the appearance of a pure signifier—of a signifier that we can initially understand as utterly distinct in itself from meaning. We must think of the signifier as being truly distinct—that is, as existing in itself without intrinsic meaning. The appearance of a pure signifier is, of course, something we cannot even imagine, by definition. And yet, as soon as we pose questions about origins, we must nonetheless approach what it might represent. Do you not see that these foundational signifiers—without which the order of human meanings, the order of these interests (as our experience constantly demonstrates)—could not be established? Is this not precisely what all mythologies explain to us?

Do you believe the term “magical thinking”—
a term used by modern scientific idiocy whenever confronted with something that seems to surpass the shriveled minds of people whose primary condition for entering the realm of culture appears to be the absence of any humanizing desire—
is sufficient to explain that these people, who likely had the same insights into birth as we do, interpreted the birth of the world as day and night, as earth and sky, as entities that conjoin and copulate within a family mingled with murders, incest, extraordinary eclipses, disappearances, metamorphoses, mutilations of various terms?
And do you believe these people took these things literally?

To imagine that they explained something in this way is to reduce them mentally to the level of modern-day evolutionism, which also believes it explains something. I think that in the realm of intellectual insufficiency, we would have absolutely nothing to envy from the Ancients in such a case.

Is it not clear that these mythologies signify precisely this: they aim at what is essential to the position, the establishment, the upright stance of man in the world:

• understanding, in fact, what the primordial signifiers are,
• how their relationships and genealogy can be conceived?

There is no need to delve into Greek or Egyptian mythologies. Mr. Griaule has explained to us mythology in Africa: they imagined it involved an actual placenta divided into four parts, with one being torn away before the others, taking a piece of the placenta with it and introducing the first asymmetry. This gave rise to a dialectic between these four primitive elements, which continually serves to explain everything from the division of fields to the way clothing is worn, the meaning of clothing, weaving, various arts, and so on.

This is precisely the genealogy of signifiers insofar as it is essential to a human being:

• to find oneself in it,
• to orient oneself,
• to discover within it not merely guideposts imposed like some kind of external, stereotypical mold on these behaviors. It does not simply provide patterns; it allows for free circulation in a world now organized.

Is this not precisely the issue at stake when, in this psychology, the “modern man” may be far less equipped—we have suspected this for some time—than a primitive person to navigate this order of significations? The modern individual is reduced, in many respects—unlike the primitive, who, thanks to myths, has certain keys—to dealing with extraordinary situations. There are keys for moments of complete rupture. Even in such moments, the primitive can still find the possibility of signifiers to support him, which might, for example, dictate the exact form of punishment for his transgression, a transgression that may cause disorder on multiple levels and impose upon him a fundamental rhythm of rule.

We, on the other hand, seem rather reduced to a fearful conformity, afraid of becoming slightly unhinged the moment we do not say exactly what everyone else says. This, it seems to me, is the situation of “modern man.”

From the moment we embody, even slightly, the presence of the signifier in the real, we might imagine that when we sense the emergence of a signifier, this emergence—along with all its potential reverberations, down to the most intimate of behaviors and thoughts—would indeed not be something easily manipulated. Experience confirms this.

When we approach such issues in terms of:

• shifts in meaning,
• changes in feelings,
• changes in socially conditioned relationships,

we tend to overlook the element of a new symbol, the creation of a new signifier, its literal emergence into the world, often accompanied by phenomena termed “revelatory.” These phenomena, in their bearers, may appear in a mode so unsettling that the terms we use for psychoses seem entirely inappropriate to describe their reactions.

The devastating character of the emergence of something constituting a new structure in the relationships between fundamental signifiers is something we might perceive as needing to be studied. We should aim to understand what the appearance of a new term within the order of the signifier might entail.

This is not our primary concern. In fact, what we deal with are instances in which we observe, in a residual state, an irreducible core within certain phenomena accessible to us. These phenomena involve subjects for whom we palpably observe the intervention of something occurring at the level of the so-called Oedipal relationship.

The additional question I invite you to consider is this: if we cannot concern ourselves with what constitutes the emergence of a signifier—a phenomenon we have never professionally addressed as such—might it not be conceivable, and indeed more so than in any other domain, to consider among psychotic subjects the consequences of a fundamental lack of a signifier?

Here again, I say nothing new. I merely articulate clearly what is perpetually implied in our discourse. When we speak of the Oedipus complex, we sometimes speculate—more or less accurately—about a “neurosis without Oedipus.” Occasionally, we are led to think such a thing might exist. It is not true, but the idea has been raised.

In psychosis, however, we readily admit that something has failed to function, that something has remained incomplete in the Oedipus complex. We attempt to understand this, for instance, through the case of a paranoiac, comparable in certain respects to the case of President Schreber, which an analyst had the opportunity to study in vivo.

This is precisely the conclusion reached: nothing within the progression from the prepsychotic phase to the development of the psychotic structure Schreber presents—framed as an attempt at restitution—can be understood without acknowledging this. He clearly recognizes that his experience is no ordinary restitution. He describes it in terms that ultimately align closely with what I propose to articulate here.

The difference is that Schreber becomes tangled and perpetually lost because he cannot formulate these matters as I present them to you: that psychosis consists of a lack somewhere, a gap, a deficiency at the level of the signifier as such. This may seem insufficient or imprecise to you, but it is still adequate as a formulation—even if we cannot say, for obvious reasons, what this signifier is or will be.

We can at least approximate it within a certain sector, within a certain field. We can designate, I would say, the set of meanings with which it appears, connoted in its approach—if one can even speak of the approach to a void. But why not? There is nothing more dangerous than approaching an emptiness. And there is another form of defense, perhaps distinct from that provoked by a tendency or a forbidden meaning: the defense that consists of not approaching the place where, for example, there is no answer to the question. Naturally, in such a case, one remains undisturbed. And ultimately—it must be said—this is characteristic of “normal people”: “Let’s not ask questions.”

We learned this, and that is why we are here. But since we are psychoanalysts, we must make a small return to this primitive consequence of the education we received. We must tell ourselves that we are, perhaps, meant to delve into such matters—at least insofar as it might help illuminate the plight of those who did ask questions.

In the end, we are now certain that, with neurotics, there is a question—without a doubt, they have asked it. With psychotics, this is less certain: the answer may have come to them before the question was posed. This is a hypothesis. Or perhaps the question arose by itself—it is not inconceivable.

We have nonetheless learned enough about handling such matters to know that a question is not the subject’s own question; there is no question without another to whom it is posed. Someone recently told me in an analysis: “Ultimately, I have nothing to ask of anyone.” It was a sad admission. I pointed out that, in any case, if he had something to ask, he would necessarily have to ask it of someone. This is the flip side of the same issue. If we firmly grasp this relational dynamic, it would not seem extravagant to propose that the question could have arisen first—that it may not have been the subject who posed it.

This touches on everything that occurs at the onset of psychosis! Consider what I showed you in the presentations of patients—remember those who arrive in this state: a small subject who, to us, seemed quite lucid. It was clear that for some time, given how he had grown and thrived amidst the anarchy—slightly more apparent than in others—of his family situation, he had attached himself, without fully understanding what was happening, to a friend. Then, all of a sudden, something occurred, and he was unable to explain what.

We could discern that something had indeed happened when his partner’s daughter—through the existence of the person who had become his true anchor in life—appeared to him. Something inexplicable was happening. In such cases, we naturally fill in the gaps ourselves. We say: he perceived it as incestuous, leading to defense mechanisms, and so forth. This, of course, seems plausible. Yet we remain unsure about the precise articulation of these events.

Thanks to Freud, we learned that the principle of contradiction does not operate in the unconscious. This is a suggestive and intriguing notion, but if left there, it falls short. However, it helps us, in our discourse, to disregard the principle of contradiction to some extent. When something doesn’t work in one direction, it is explained by its opposite. This is why things are so admirably explained in analysis. Voilà!

We return to this “extremely lucid” young man. He had understood much less than we had about how striking these manifestations were because he was, quite literally, stumbling upon something. Why not admit that he entirely lacked the key to make sense of it? Something happened—something so perplexing that he literally spent three months lying on his bed trying to understand it.

He was in a state of perplexity.

• If we do not directly perceive this phenomenon,
• if we do not examine it closely, moment by moment—this state called prepsychosis, which is the subject’s experience of arriving, for them, at the edge of the void—
• if we can observe and acknowledge this with the minimum sensitivity our profession might afford us,

we can take what we see quite literally. If we know how to seek and observe it, we may begin to comprehend what happens in places we are not present.

This is not about phenomenology. It is about knowing that we can conceive—not imagine but conceive—what results if we begin with this idea: what happens to a subject

• when the question arises from the void,
• when the starting point emerges where there is no signifier,
• when it is precisely the lack that is felt as such,
• when it is the lack itself that is at issue?

Again, I repeat, this is not about phenomenology. It is not about being whimsical. We do that often enough in our usual internal dialogues—believe me. This is not what is at stake. Rather, it is about literally approaching certain conceivable consequences of such a situation. For the subject, the implicit network of signifiers suffices to construct his small world as a solitary individual within the crowd of the modern world. This is perfectly clear.

Not all stools have four legs. Some stand firm with three. I assure you, for most people in our modern world, the points of support are exceedingly limited. Once stools rest on three legs, there can be no question of one being missing because the situation quickly spirals out of control.

Perhaps, this is simply what it is all about. It concerns understanding what happens when the subject is confronted, at a certain crossroads in their biographical history, with something that has always existed—a thing we have so far, in tracing its path, been content to define using the concept of Verwerfung: that, at the outset, there might not be enough legs for the stool, and yet it still manages to hold up for a certain time.

It is therefore about understanding what occurs when the subject faces not a conflict—
though, naturally, this may lead to all kinds of conflicts, and more than one.
It is precisely here that we perceive the particular structure of the conflict—
but without letting ourselves be stalled by this constellation of conflicts. Instead, by observing whether the structure of these conflicts is different, we can see that their constellation only becomes meaningful and explicable if we address the problem, the question posed, in a way entirely distinct from the kind of significant decompensation characteristic of neurosis.

When we observe that what happens is infinitely more manifest, more structuring, in this “something” we can conceive as taking place—because all of a sudden, since the signifier is always interconnected…
I mean that all the fundamental elements of the signifier never form—
because the very essence of the signifier is coherence—
anything other than something coherent…
the subject, confronted with the lack of the signifier, is necessarily driven to question the entire system of signifiers.

I say: this is the fundamental key to the problem:

• concerning the onset of psychosis,
• concerning the succession of its stages,
• concerning the meaning of psychosis.

At every moment, the questions posed in psychosis are framed in terms that imply precisely what I am explaining to you. For example, what does Katan say when he tries to find the meaning of hallucination? How does he formulate it? He states: “Hallucination is a defense mechanism like any other.” Moreover, he observes that there are different phenomena, closely related to each other. There is what can simply be called interpretation, that certainty of interpretation without content, which I have already illustrated for you.

Then, there is hallucination, which is distinct in its nature. For both, Katan assumes the same mechanisms designed, in a sense, to protect the subject in a way different from what occurs in neuroses. In neuroses, we would say it is the meaning that disappears, becomes hidden somewhere, eclipsed for a time. Meanwhile, reality itself remains intact.

In psychosis, these defense mechanisms are insufficient. To protect the subject, something emerges within a profoundly disturbed reality. The subject perceives an external source of the threat—that is, something that would provoke within them an instinctual drive that must, at all costs, be faced.

In essence, we are not going far enough here. The vague term reality we often employ seems wholly inadequate. Why not dare to say—since we are peculiarly cautious in our language—that we admit the mechanism of the Id? Here, the Id essentially has the power to alter, modify, and disturb what we might call the truth of the thing. After all, it concerns something that interests the subject or is supposed to, by definition, interest them. This is exactly the case with Schreber.

For instance, in Schreber’s case, it was about protecting him from homosexual temptations. This does not mean merely that he failed to perceive the actual person. In fact, no one—not even Schreber himself—ever claimed that, all of a sudden, the very faces of his male peers were cloaked by the hand of the Eternal. He could still see them perfectly well. We simply admit that he did not truly see them—that is, not as they were for him: as actual objects of romantic attraction.

Once we dare to speak not vaguely of reality—
as though it were the same as the hard, physical reality of walls we bump into—
but rather of significance, that is, something presenting itself to us not simply as barriers, blockages, or obstacles, but as something verifiable, as something that establishes itself as orienting the world, introducing beings into it, and calling them by name…

Why not also admit—since we already accept mysterious things—that, above all, the Id is capable of masking the truth of things? We can also pose the question in reverse: what happens—

• when the truth of the thing is absent,
• when nothing exists to represent it in its truth?

When, for example, the register of the father, in its essential function, in what makes it conceived as “father” with all the connotations that this term implies:

• because the father is not only the generator,
• because he is many other things as well:
• he is the one who possesses the mother,
• he is the one who possesses her by right,
• he is the one who, in principle, possesses her in peace,
  and because the registers and functions of this requirement, particularly the way it intervenes in the formation of conflict and the realization of the Oedipus complex, where the son—who is also a function, correlative to this function of the father—takes shape with everything that entails, seems, if our experience is valid, to be essential for the accession to the type of virility.

So, what happens, if this is conceivable? A certain gap, a certain lack, arises somewhere. We can identify how this “somewhere” is conceivable and at what point this “something” occurred—a lack in the formative function of the father, in his presence. For example, suppose the father had a mode of relation or effective connection such that it was not characterized by conflict, not an effect of conflict—such as the fear of castration—that caused the son to take on the feminine position.

Suppose, for instance—let us call things by their names—that the father himself, for reasons stemming from multiple causes (which are not necessarily conflictual elements in themselves or even modes of presentation of the subject in question), played a role. We all know the outcomes, at a certain level, of what might be called the proliferation of “monsters” in the social sphere—what results for a son from having such a figure as a father. I do not use the term “monsters” lightly: social monsters, “sacred monsters,” as they are sometimes called, are figures often marked by a certain radiance or success but in such a unilateral way—so completely within the register of unbridled ambition, domination, authoritarianism, talent, or genius.

Not all of these characteristics necessarily involve genius, talent, mediocrity, or failure. They are simply characterized by the unilateral and the monstrous because of what they entail in interpersonal relationships. We are well aware of, and familiar with, the type of psychotics or delinquents who proliferate in the shadow of a paternal figure of exceptional character. It is certainly not by chance that this type of delinquent or psychotic personality subversion emerges especially in such unique circumstances.

Let us suppose that this impossibility of assuming the realization of the symbolic signifier “father” is precisely what creates a fundamental challenge for the subject. What remains?

What remains, evidently, is the imaginary relationship. That is, it remains as an image—something that does not inscribe itself at all in any triangular dialectic but, rather, remains tied to the real person as an image. The relationship is thus reduced to that image: its essential function as a specular alienation, a model, something to which the subject can cling and apprehend on the imaginary plane, will still exist.

It will exist precisely in the exaggerated relationship of a figure or a type that manifests purely and simply within the order of power, not within the order of a pact. What we see emerge is something familiar: the relationship of rivalry, aggressiveness, fear, and anything else you might imagine. But what must be seen is that what can occur and does occur goes much further. Insofar as it remains confined to the imaginary relationship, and this imaginary relationship is taken in a purely dual and disproportionate rapport, it assumes a completely different significance than the reciprocal exclusion that characterizes the specular confrontation. Instead, it assumes the other function of imaginary capture—biologically speaking—and from the outset takes on a sexualized function without requiring any intermediary or identification with the mother or anyone else.

The subject assumes, as we see in animals, the intimidated position, as in fish or lizards. The imaginary relationship establishes itself autonomously, immediately, on a plane that has nothing typical about it but rather something dehumanizing. It leaves no room for reciprocal exclusion or aggressiveness as a foundation for the self-image orbiting another, more accomplished model.

At this point, we can already conceive of something introducing a more radical form of alienation into relationships between subjects—a relationship of alienation, undoubtedly:

• but not the kind tied to a negating signified, as occurs in a certain mode of rivalrous relationships with the father,
• rather, one involving the annihilation of the signifier itself, the burden of which the subject must bear and compensate for, over time, through a series of purely conformist identifications with individuals who provide him with the sense of what it means to be a man.

This is how the situation persists for a long time, allowing us to see that psychotics have lived compensated lives, seemingly exhibiting all the ordinary behaviors considered “normally” masculine. Then, mysteriously—and only God knows why—all of a sudden, this compensation collapses.

Can we not conceive of this occurring at the moment when something makes the imaginary crutches, which have allowed the subject to compensate for the absence of the signifier, necessary once again?

How, as such, does the signifier reassert its demands?
How does the lack intervene, questioning as such?
And how do the responses—if they are given—necessarily involve a series of phenomena characterized as phenomena of signifiers? This involves that profound disruption of internal discourse, phenomenologically speaking, that arises in the subject. How does the emergence of the question posed by the lack of the signifier manifest itself?

First, it appears as a phenomenon that must be considered marginal—a phenomenon that activates the signifier as such, affecting the subject’s relationship to discourse, to internal discourse, and to the concealed discourse of the Other always within us. This suddenly becomes illuminated, revealing its proper function. For, in a sense, it is the only thing at that moment that can anchor the subject within the level of discourse. The discourse is entirely threatened, entirely at risk of being lost, poised to disappear, and constitutes for the subject the true threat—the true, looming twilight of reality that characterizes the onset of psychosis.

This is the point we will attempt to explore further next time.