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(All parts in English)

“It is from this that the innumerable misunderstandings must be presumed on God’s part. From these arose the almost unbearable intellectual torments that I had to endure for years. As long as God sees through me, participates in my impressions…”

In the study of a case—any case, and this one in particular—it seems to me that one can only touch upon, verify this: one does not truly find the rhythm that allows for full engagement in many cases. In this analysis of President SCHREBER, I am attempting to recreate for you, to refer back to the German text.

“As long as the delight of the soul in my heart permits enjoyment, or as long as my intellectual activity produces thoughts formulated in words, as long as these three parallel things occur. God is, so to speak, satisfied, and the tendency to withdraw from me is hardly or not at all felt, or only to the minimum degree which, as I must assume, is conditioned by a periodic risk due to arrangements made once, years ago, which contradict the order of the universe. This serves to maintain at a proper distance all that tends to rush toward Him, concentrating into a sort of central point, due to the force of attraction exerted by His own being on what remains existing in the world. … But on the other hand, man is not capable of continually enjoying and thinking. Thus, as soon as I abandon myself to not thinking, without simultaneously allowing for the cares of delight in the precise sense … … The withdrawal of the rays immediately reappears with those accessory phenomena that are more or less unpleasant for me: painful sensations, fits of screaming, accompanied by some commotion in my vicinity.”

He adds:

“On these occasions, my eyes are regularly closed, miraculously, to deprive me of my visual impressions. Otherwise, these would maintain their attractive effect on the regions…”

We could already continue this reading. Let us pause for a moment. I began here to clearly indicate what I intend to do today, namely, to lead you to a number of points that I have chosen, I believe, to the best advantage in this rather enormous reading, representing some 400 or 450 pages of SCHREBER’s book, to show you something that, you might say, truly resides at the level of the phenomenon.

In other words, we will apparently content ourselves not only with acting as the “secretaries” of the “insane,” as they say, to reproach the impotence of the “alienists,” as they are called—this was long the limit of classical psychiatry’s research—but I would say that, on the other hand, we might find ourselves almost falling under other, more severe reproaches:
– not only of being their secretaries,
– but of taking what they tell us literally, which, in truth, is precisely what has so far been considered the thing to avoid.

Ultimately, wasn’t it due to a sort of fear that stopped the so-called secretaries of the insane, namely that the first great observers who created the initial classifications of the various forms of the disease, failed, in essence, by not going far enough in their way of listening to the insane? This dried out, so to speak, the material offered to them to the point that it could only appear as something fundamentally problematic and fragmentary.

For if we refer to everyday experience, on Friday I saw a “Chronic Hallucinatory Psychosis.” I don’t know if those present were not struck by how much more vivid what we obtained was, how much more suggestive the questions posed by the nature of the delusion, if simply, instead of attempting at all costs to determine whether the hallucination was “verbal,” “sensory,” or “non-sensory,” we simply listened to the patient.

The woman in question the other day brought forth an invention in her life, a sort of imaginary reproduction of all kinds of questions, where one sensed they had been involved in a prior situation by the sequence itself, without the patient explicitly formulating them.

Do you find this a poor summary of the impression given by the patient I presented last Friday? Of course, simply standing there does not suffice for us to believe we have understood everything. It is a matter of understanding why things happen this way.

But if we do not take them in their balance, which lies at the level of the signifying-signified phenomenon, far from being exhausted by what can be called classical psychology or parapsychology, namely whether we are in “hallucination,” “interpretation,” “sensation,” “perception,” or other school categories—where it is evident that the problem is not posed at all at this level—then it seems we are already off to a very poor start, even to hold the slightest hope of correctly posing the problem of what delusion is, at what level displacement, anomaly, aberration, the subject’s shift occurs concerning phenomena of meaning.

All this is evidently linked, for most listeners—both psychologists and physicians—to both education and practice. This, after all, should not frighten them too much, as almost nothing has been done in this area. One cannot propose too strongly to them to resort to what must still be accessible to the common man’s experience. I will suggest one of these exercises to you.

Think— for example, if you were asked questions about this—what is reading? What do you call reading? What will be the moment when it becomes visible, the optimal moment of reading? When are you sure you are reading? You will tell me there is no doubt: one has the feeling of reading. We think that if we start to grasp the characters—which must be conscious so that there is no spelling out, deciphering—something occurs that imposes itself as a sort of influence, a certain line of meaning. Indeed, that is the central problem.

It is nonetheless quite unfortunate that there are many things that go against this. Namely, that in dreams, we can have the same feeling—that is, of reading something—while it is clearly evident that we are incapable of affirming any correspondence with a single signifier. The absorption of certain toxic substances can lead us to the same feeling. And this gives us the idea that we cannot rely on the sentimental apprehension of the thing, that we must formulate something somewhat more precise, bringing into play the objectivity of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Engage in this path, and it is from that moment on that the question begins. You will see at the same time that complications arise with it. For there is no need to illustrate this with extreme cases, like the one who pretends to read. Obviously, we have all seen this.

In a distant time when I made small journeys to countries that, in a distant past, won their independence, I saw a gentleman introducing me. He was the steward of a lord in the Atlas Mountains. He took the little paper intended for him. I immediately noticed that he could not see anything because he was holding it upside down. Yet, with great seriousness, he articulated something, so as not to lose face in front of the respectful entourage. Was he reading or not? Undoubtedly, he was reading the essential: whether I was accredited.

There is the other extreme case. This is when you already know by heart what is in the text, even if you can read. This happens more often than one might think because—for heaven’s sake—for most of FREUD’s texts, which are your usual material in what we might call psychological and medical training, you can say you already know it all by heart. A significant portion of the time you spend exhausting the abundant literature, you are merely rereading what you already know by heart.

This relativizes singularly the foundation of what is called scientific literature, at least in our field, as it benefits from some privilege in what I have just called the problematic of the signified and the signifier. Ultimately, one often gets the impression that what profoundly directs the intent of scientific discourse may be nothing other than staying strictly within the limits of what has already been said.

I mean, in the end, it would seem that the ultimate temptation of this discourse is simply to prove that the signer, so to speak, is non-null from the point of view of discourse: that he is capable of writing what everyone else writes, for instance.

Under these conditions, since we attribute a certain importance to discourse, why should we give less importance to testimony, in any case more singular, and sometimes even more original, which can be provided by a subject presumed to be within the realm of the insane? After all, even in the most common and ordinary scientific life, we are confronted with the clear and manifest gap—a blatant lack of correspondence between the intellectual capacities of this or that author, which undoubtedly vary within vast limits, and the remarkable uniformity of what they present to us in their discourse.

Why should we prematurely dismiss, as if it were obsolete, what emerges from a subject whose psyche, as they say, we can indeed presume to be in a state of profound disturbance in its relations with the external world? Perhaps what he tells us still retains its value.

In fact, when we realize—not merely concerning a case as remarkable as that of President SCHREBER but also regarding the most ordinary of subjects—that if we know how to listen, what appears, primarily in the realm of delusion or chronic hallucinatory psychosis (P.H.C.), is something that manifests precisely as a highly specific relationship of the subject, which only he can testify to, but which he does testify to with the greatest energy. This testimony relates to the entire system of language in its different orders, where it manifests and presents itself in a subject.

We have no valid reason to refuse to gather such testimony under the pretext of some ineffable, incommunicable sensation of the subject… you know what I mean… all the constructions built around so-called primitive, elementary phenomena… while what the subject testifies to is indeed a certain shift in the relationship to language, something that can be called, overall, “erotization” or passivation, or a certain way of undergoing the phenomenon of language and discourse as a whole. This is a revelation of a dimension, provided we do not seek the common measure or the smallest denominator of psychisms and precisely acknowledge the distance between lived psychic experience and the usage or semi-external situation in which not only the insane but every human subject exists concerning language phenomena.

We are methodologically justified in accepting the testimony of the insane about their position in relation to language as something we must consider in the overall analysis of the phenomenon of the subject’s relationship to language. This testimony is something we find. It constitutes the major interest for anyone reading the history of SCHREBER. It is the major and enduring interest of the legacy he left us in his “Memoirs,” those memorable and meditative writings.

This is not entirely lost in the air. To advance in this direction, we already have the notion, from SCHREBER himself, that something within him was, at least at some point, profoundly disturbed. A certain rupture, a certain fissure appeared, which is, strictly speaking, within the realm of relations to the Other.

What he mysteriously calls the “soul murder,” which remains in a kind of semi-obscurity, is something where our experience with analytical categories allows us to situate ourselves in something fundamentally connected to the image that lies at the origins of the self and to the very notion of what, for the subject, constitutes the ellipse of his being—this something in which he reflects himself under the name of self.

If something has occurred on this level, and if we have testimony of it from the subject, we can relate it to a certain problematic that situates itself between this image of the self and an image of the Other, elevated and exalted above the former—the great Other, which is the paternal image, insofar as it establishes the double perspective within the subject: the self and the ideal of the self—not to mention, in this instance, the superego. We also have the impression that it is to the extent that the subject has acquired—or, at some moment, lost—this Other, within which they can fully affirm themselves in their discourse, that they encounter at a certain moment this purely imaginary other, this diminished other, this fallen other, with whom they can have no other relationship than that of an other who frustrates them and fundamentally denies them, who literally kills them.

This is something essentially reduced to the most radical aspects:
– in pure imaginary alienation,
– in the pure and simple capture by this kind of alienation that very clearly and immediately results from what one might call the “permanent discourse” underlying all inscriptions in the subject’s history, something that:
– doubles all the acts of the subject,
– is simultaneously present,
– and is not at all impossible to see emerging in the normal subject.

I will provide you with examples, almost accessible through a kind of lived extrapolation, so to speak, such as the figure of the individual isolated on a deserted island—a theme of modern thought. And it is certainly not for nothing that since Robinson Crusoe was invented, one does not have to go very far to find examples.

The first, to my knowledge, in history is Balthasar Gracián’s invention: we see a character who, at a certain moment, lives on a deserted island. It is certain that this is a psychological problem accessible, if not to imagination, then at least to experience.

What happens when the human subject lives alone? What becomes of the latent discourse “I will sell wood” for someone who goes to sell wood?

If you simply question what becomes of vocalizations for a person who is lost in the mountains—that is, who, for a certain time, feels they no longer know where they are, feels isolated—and it is surely not without reason that this phenomenon is more specifically observed in mountains, perhaps because these places are less humanized than others—what occurs, in terms of a sensitive mobilization of the external world in relation to a meaning ready to emerge from every corner, is something that can give us a fairly good idea of this perpetually “ready-to-surface” aspect of a semi-alienated discourse.

And the permanent existence of this discourse within the subject, I believe, can be considered as something where the phenomena of verbalization in an alienated person, or in a delusional individual like Schreber, only amplify and accentuate what happens. From there, we must ask why—and, as I suggest in this formulation:
– on the margins of what,
– to signify what,
– mobilized by what—
…the phenomenon appears in the delusional and alienated individual.

Let me take another passage, also chosen at random. In fact, all of this is so accentuated, insistent, and repetitive in Schreber that everywhere one finds confirmation of the phenomena I am describing: “In my case, however…”

He speaks of other alienated individuals—he has read Kraepelin—for whom the phenomena are intermittent.

“In my case, however, these phenomena of voice conversation have not been absent since the beginning of my contact with the Unique God, except for the first few weeks, when apart from the sacred periods, there were still non-sacred periods. Thus, for almost seven years, there has not been a single moment, except during sleep, when I have not heard voices. They accompany me everywhere and on every occasion. They continue to be heard even when I am in conversation with other people. They freely pursue their course, even if I am occupied as attentively as possible with other matters. For example, when I read a book or a newspaper or play the piano, they are only drowned out when I speak aloud, whether alone or with others, by the louder sound of spoken words, and thus they are not heard by me during those moments. But the immediate resumption of sentences, picked up mid-phrase with extreme precision, lets me know in any case that the thread of the conversation has not been interrupted—that is, that the sensory stimulations or nerve oscillations, through which the weaker auditory phenomena corresponding to the voices manifest, have continued even while I was speaking aloud.”

After this, there are some considerations on the slowing of cadence, which is indeed one of the essential phenomena. This is what we must analyze further: to what extent the progress, advancement, or evolution of phenomena fundamentally relates to the structure of the signifier as such. Namely, the possibility—which is absolutely essential to the phenomena of meanings as such—that the signifier is indivisible.

I mean that one cannot cut a piece of the signifier like one cuts a strip of magnetic tape. If you cut a strip of magnetic tape, the phrase—as far as its effect is concerned—does not stop at the point where you interrupted it, even if mid-sentence. In other words, the signifier inherently contains all sorts of implications, making it impossible for just any listener or decipherer, regardless of their expertise, to complete the phrase in certain cases. In other limited cases, within a small range of possibilities, the way the sentence must be completed ultimately reveals what needs to be introduced into the signifier. The unit of meaning is something that permanently demonstrates the functioning of the signifier according to certain laws that are its essential elements.

The fact that, within delusion, voices play on this property is not something we can consider indifferent. It raises the question of why the subject enters a particular relationship with the signifier as such. If, indeed, all phenomena—when highlighted in delusion—manifest this as a conspicuous phenomenon in all its externalizations, we cannot exclude the hypothesis that the fundamental motive is precisely a more radical, and in some ways more comprehensive, relationship with the phenomenon of the signifier as such, which is at stake in psychosis.

The first step of the mind, from which we will ask why, indeed, at a certain stage in a subject’s life, this relationship—considered essential and fundamental—to the signifier becomes the subject’s entire occupation, the sole investment of their capacities for interest.

Approaching the problem at this level:
– does not at all limit us,
– does not at all change the orientation of the energetics or dynamics of analysis,
– and does not, in any way, reject the notion of libido or its economy as such.
It is precisely about seeing:
– what might be involved in this relationship—whether global, articulated differently, or elective—to the signifier,
– what this interest means in and of itself within the phenomenon of psychosis, and how psychosis has been analyzed from this perspective.

A brief note on divine intelligence and human intelligence:

“I believe I can say that divine intelligence is at least equal to the sum of all human intelligences that have existed throughout past generations. For God assimilates all human nerves after death. He thus unites within Himself the totality of intelligences, gradually elevating all memories that held interest only for respective individuals and that, consequently, are not considered integral parts of a generally valuable intelligence. There is no doubt for me, for instance, that God knows what railways are, their essence, and their precise purpose. Where did God acquire this knowledge? Under conditions conforming to the order of the universe, God has only an external impression of a moving train, just as He does of any other event on Earth. He could have gained insight through the force of an assumption exerted on someone… through inquiries into railway matters and state information about the purpose and function of these phenomena. But He had little reason to take such a measure. Over time, entire generations, fully familiar with the significance of railways, returned to God. Thus, even the knowledge of railways was acquired by God Himself.”

This serves as a reminder of a notion that we must take as such, however elaborated it may seem in the subject’s account. It is founded on primitive experience: the equivalence between the notion of “nerves” and the utterances that personify them. “Nerves” represent the sum of that universe of verbiage, of refrains or verbal insistences, which, from a certain point onward, became the subject’s universe.

From a certain point, all contingent presences, all accessories of what surrounds the subject, if one may say so, were struck with unreality, becoming those “hastily and sloppily created men.” For this subject, presences essentially became verbal presences, and the sum of these verbal presences became identical to the total divine presence—that is, the sole and unique presence that, for him, became his counterpart and responder.

This notion I present to you in passing—the one that considers divine intelligence as the sum of human intelligences—is articulated by him with a rigor and elegance such that it gives the impression of being a small piece of philosophical systematization. It would take very little—if I asked you, “Who said this?”—to speculate whether it might not have been Spinoza. The question is what value this testimony of the subject holds within a remarkably coherent set of testimonies. He offers us his experience as one that imposes itself as having become, from that moment, the very structure of reality.

The fifth chapter, among others, specifically concerns what is called “the fundamental language.” This “fundamental language,” as testified by the subject, is composed of a type of High German, particularly flavorful and lightly infused with archaic expressions drawn from the etymological substrata of that language.

“In addition to the usual language, there is also a sort of nerve language, of which the normally healthy person is generally unaware. To best understand this phenomenon, one must, in my view, recall the processes involved when a person seeks to memorize certain words in a specific order. For example, a child learning a poem by heart to recite at school or a priest memorizing a sermon to deliver in church. These words are silently repeated.”

We are getting closer. One senses that there is something proving that the subject has undoubtedly meditated more on the nature of the emergence of speech than perhaps we have up until now.

“It is the same with mental prayer, to which the congregation is invited from the pulpit—that is, man urges his nerves into privations conforming to the usage of the respective words, while the actual vocal organs do not engage or do so only involuntarily.”

He realizes that the phenomenon—the exceptional status of speech—exists on an entirely different level than the functioning of the organs that might, at that moment, bring it into materialization.

“The application of this nerve language depends, under normal conditions conforming to the order of the universe, solely on the will of the man whose nerves are involved. No man can force another to use the nerve language. However, in my case, since the critical turning point of my nervous illness, my nerves have been acted upon externally, incessantly, and relentlessly. The quality of acting in this manner on a man’s nerves is particularly characteristic of divine rays. It is from this that the fact derives that God has always been able to inspire dreams in men.”

This sudden introduction of dreams as inherently belonging to the world of language does not seem futile to note, for it represents a surprising illogicality from an alienated individual who, by definition, is not supposed to know the highly significant character we attribute to dreams since Freud. It is certain that Schreber had no knowledge of this notion.

“I felt a certain influence, as if from an action originating with Professor Fleschig. I can only explain this fact by supposing that Professor Fleschig attempted to subject divine rays. Apart from Professor Fleschig’s nerves, other divine rays contacted my nerves to act alongside me, leading to forms opposed to the order of the universe and the natural rights of man, to manipulate the use of these nerves, in increasingly grotesque ways, so that this action was soon noticeable in the form of a compulsion to think—a term used by the inner voices themselves, which cannot be known by others, for this phenomenon lies outside all human experience. The nature of this compulsion to think consists in forcing a man to think incessantly.

In other words, the natural right of a man to occasionally grant his intellectual nerves the necessary rest through a state of non-thinking was denied to me by rays entering my being and constantly desiring to know what I was thinking. I was even asked the question: What are you thinking? At that moment, since this question already represents in its form a complete nonsense—everyone knows that a person can, at certain moments, think of nothing or of a thousand things at once—my nerves did not react to such an inherently contradictory question. I was therefore compelled to resort to a system of falsified thought, responding, for example, to the question posed: ‘It is the order of the universe that such a desire tries to think of.’ This meant that my nerves were forced by the action of the nerve language to align with the vibrations corresponding to the use of those words. Over time, the number of sources from which nerve additions originated increased. Apart from Professor Fleschig, the only one I knew for certain to have been, at least for a time, among the living, it was primarily deceased souls who began to take an increasing interest in me.”

On this point, considerations and clarifications are provided in a note:

“In this response, the word ‘thinking’ was omitted. Souls were accustomed, even before situations contradictory to the order of the universe began to manifest, to express their thoughts in their exchanges in a grammatically incomplete manner, that is, to omit certain words that could be dispensed with without changing the meaning. Over time, this habit degenerated into an abuse. This happens because the intellectual nerves of humans are strongly engaged with the fundamental language; they are always stimulated by such fragmented phrases, as they automatically seek to find the missing word. Thus, I have heard—for example, to mention just one of countless examples—for years, always the same question repeated a hundred times: ‘Why don’t you say it?’ where the words necessary to complete the sentence are omitted. The rays themselves provide the answer, something like: ‘Because I am stupid.’ For years, my nerves have had to endure such dreadful and monotonous nonsense, which, so to speak, arises from themselves. I will later explain in detail the decisive reason for the choice of these respective phrases and the intended effects they aimed to achieve.”

This phenomenology, characterized by an ambiguous relationship, is alternately highly significant. The remainder of the chapter is richly layered with meanings tied to a particular cultural context. It is not by chance that this delusion flourished in a subject from a bourgeois lineage with a long tradition. The Schrebers, in fact, were people whose history we can trace back to the 16th century, as having been involved quite brilliantly in the intellectual life of their country.

I will later return to the particular personality of Schreber’s father. But the kind of delusion…
which emerges in a sort of second initial phase of the delusion…
is so closely tied to what might be called “the complex of cultural encirclement.” Sadly, we have seen too much of this flourish in our era with the infamous party that plunged all of Europe into war—namely, the “encirclement” by Slavs, by Jews. All of this is fully present in this decent man, who otherwise did not seem to have participated in any passionate political tendency, except for his unquestionable and affirmed membership during his student years in those student corporations.

On the other hand, we have a whole series of much deeper, singular, and problematic phenomena. I will now point out something we will revisit later: the correlative existence of these representations of […] which, for him, become meaningful, namely, those of all these fragments of phrases that perpetually include him in their tumult.

These souls that he designates, locates, and around which he disorganizes an entire universe, gradually diminish into the infamous “little men” that have attracted much attention from analysts, particularly Katan, who devoted an article to these “little men.” These have perhaps been the source of various more or less ingenious interpretations, due to certain elements of meaning associated with the fate of these “little men,” who come to inhabit his head…
who, over time, through successive reductions, subtractions, or additions of nerves—a process of absorption he perceives as their integration into himself, ultimately destroying him—
become, in turn, the other characters of these other fantasies. These “little men,” assimilated by analysts in their interpretative frameworks, are equated with spermatozoa, as the subject, from a certain point in his illness, refuses to lose them, so to speak, by abstaining—as is indicated in the history of his illness—from masturbation.

There is no reason to reject such an interpretation. However, the truth is that if we accept it, it does not completely resolve the problem. The fact that these figures are, in a sense, regressive characters returning to their procreative cellular origin is precisely the issue. And it is striking to see how Katan, in his interpretation of these “little men,” seems to forget the much older works of Silberer, who was the first to speak of dreams involving certain images clearly related to:
– either spermatozoa,
– or indeed the primitive female cell, the ovum.

And at that time—which might be considered archaic in the history of analysis—Silberer clearly understood that the question was not to determine what function these small images played in dreams, whether fantastical or oneiric. It is curious to note that as early as 1908, Silberer introduced the notion of what their appearance signifies. And if it does not have precisely the meaning of the emergence of a mortal signification—namely, that it involves a return to origins, marking the end of prior processes, equivalent to a manifestation of the death instinct. In this case, we cannot fail to recognize this, since these significations concerning the “little men” occur within the context of this sort of “twilight of the world,” which, at the onset of his delusion, and during a truly constitutive phase of its progression, translates into this “twilight,” this total and complete realization of all the human beings surrounding him—one of the most characteristic elements.

Be that as it may, it is certain that we cannot, on this occasion, fail to observe—if not the incompleteness—then a particular realization of the paternal function as it pertains to Schreber. For this is the focal point of the authors’ discussions. They attempt to explain the eruption, the blossoming of Schreber’s delusion, not by suggesting that Schreber was, at that moment, in conflict with his father—because his father had long since disappeared from the scene—but rather by noting that, far from experiencing a failure in his life or his assumption of fully paternal functions, it is precisely at the moment when he brilliantly crosses a threshold in his career, achieving a position of authority and autonomy, that he seems compelled to truly assume and refer to this paternal position.

It is thus a kind of vertigo of success, rather than a sense of failure, upon which the delusion of President Schreber would depend. This is the central focus of all authors, regardless of the diversity they attempt to introduce concerning Freud’s initial interpretation. This remains the core of their understanding of the determining mechanism—at least on the psychic level—of psychosis.

Can we not, precisely at this point, make a few remarks? If we indeed pose the question of the various ways in which a subject in a critical phase, both normal and pathological, might bear this […], we would give, so to speak, three responses regarding the function of the father.

Normally, that is, through the Oedipal complex, we will have the path—I do not say it is essential—of the conquest of Oedipal realization, of the integration and introjection of the Oedipal image. But the means, the path, the medium Freud unequivocally points out to us is the aggressive relationship, the relationship of rivalry. In other words, Freud teaches us that, normally, it is through the path of an imaginary conflict that symbolic integration occurs.

There is another path that manifests itself as being of a different nature. It is present in a number of phenomena that we know. Ethnological experience shows us the importance—however residual it may be in the majority of critiques—of the phenomenon of “couvade,” which is where imaginary realization is characteristically achieved through the symbolic enactment of behavior.

Isn’t this something of the same nature that we have been able to identify in neurosis?
On the other hand, when I spoke to you about the case of that hysteric described by Elssler, who, following a certain traumatic disruption of their balance, began to apprehend all the symptoms of a sort of symbolic pregnancy—because it is not a case of imaginary pregnancy—in this phenomenon of the subject, which I discussed with you a few weeks ago.
Isn’t there a third path that is, in a sense, embodied in delusion? And I believe there is something quite striking here. Look at what these beings are. They have a manifest correlative in the delusion of President Schreber.

They are forms of absorption, but they are also—and here analysts touch upon something accurate—the representation of what will happen in the future. Schreber states it: the world will be repopulated by what he calls “Schreber-men,” by men of Schreberian spirit, that is, tiny fantastical beings who will engender a kind of post-diluvian procreation, which is the perspective, the vanishing point toward the future.
Are you not struck that, just as we have seen the two previous forms, the normal form and the neurotic or paraneurotic form:
– the emphasis in one case is placed on the symbolic realization of the father, through the path of imaginary conflict,
– and in the other case, on the imaginary realization of the father, through the path of symbolic enactment of behavior…

Here, what do we see? We see something quite singular being realized in the imaginary realm—something, in essence, that interests no one: neither the neurotics nor primitive civilizations.
I am not saying they are unaware of it. I believe it is erroneous to claim that primitives do not understand the real aspect of generation by the father. Simply, it does not interest them. What interests them is the engendering of the soul. It is the engendering of the father’s spirit. It is the father precisely in his symbolic or imaginary aspect.

Yet, we curiously see emerging in delusion, in the form of these “little men,” an imaginary function.
This is, curiously, nothing other than the real function of generation—at least if we accept the identification that analysts make between these “little men” and spermatozoa. This sort of circular movement among the three functions, simultaneously defining how the paternal function is utilized within different frameworks, is something I ask you to retain for its application and use within the realm of psychosis.

In any case, since we are now engaged in the reading of this text and in a sort of undertaking to truly actualize this reading to the fullest extent within the dialectical register of signifier-signified, we can use it as a method for locating psychosis.

I would say to all, and to each of those here: if you approach—legitimately, assuredly—the fundamental questions of being in the problematics of analysis, I would say: do not take them too loftily.
You have no need to do so, because in what I have provided to you on the phenomenology of neuroses and psychoses, it is at the level of a fully articulated phenomenal dialectic—and whether one wishes to name it or not—it is still speech that, as the central point of reference, holds the principal emphasis.