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(All parts in English)

“So they love their delusion as they love themselves. That is the secret.”
“Ils aiment ainsi leur délire comme ils s’aiment eux-mêmes. Tel est le secret.”
[Manuscript H, attached to Letter to Fliess No. 53 of June 24, 1895]

This sentence is found in the “Letters to Fliess”, where we astonishingly see the emergence of the themes that would successively appear in Freud’s work. At times, things appear there with singular prominence.
It cannot be said that we would lack Freud’s tone even if we did not have these letters.

On May 16, I will attempt to convey and represent for you this tone of Freud, which never wavered and is nothing other than the very expression of what orients and animates this research. I mean to say that even in 1939, when he wrote Moses and Monotheism, one feels that this passionate questioning, which was essentially Freud’s from beginning to end, has not waned. It is still pursued with the same relentless, almost desperate effort to define and explain how it is that man, in his reality and in the very position of his being, remains so dependent on something for which he is manifestly not made. This “something,” perfectly articulated and named in Moses…, is called truth.

I reread Moses and Monotheism for the purpose of preparing this sort of presentation that I have been tasked to deliver about the person of Freud. This work seems to once again confirm what I am attempting to convey to you: that the central problem of analysis, which is absolutely inseparable from a fundamental question about how truth enters into human life, involves truth in its mysterious, inexplicable dimension—a dimension whose urgency and necessity nothing can ultimately make comprehensible. For while man easily accommodates non-truth, he finds it peculiarly difficult to deal with truth.

You will see that I will try to show you that this remains the central question that seizes and torments Freud to the very end, especially in his considerations on Moses and Monotheism. This little book remains a living testament. One senses the gesture of renunciation and the veiled face. He truly accepts death and continues onward.
And in the very text of this renewed questioning surrounding the person of Moses and the hypothetical fear of Moses, there is no other reason apparent except the same one: how and through what path, by what entry point, does the dimension of truth make its way into human life? Freud’s answer: it is through the intermediary of something that is the essence, the ultimate significance of the idea of the father.

For this truth to enter in a living way into the economy of man, a special condition is necessary: the father must be tied to a reality sacred in itself, more spiritual than any other, since, in essence, nothing in lived reality properly indicates the function, the presence, or the dominance of the father.

How does this truth of the father as procreator, of the notion of paternity—this truth, which Freud himself calls spiritual—come to be promoted to the forefront? This is conceivable only through the intermediary of a drama that inscribes it into history, even into the flesh of men, through the intermediary of this kind of pre-prehistoric reality—which means at the origin of all history—embodied in the notion of the “death of the father”: a manifestly mythical concept, both evident and mysterious, impossible to avoid within the coherence of Freud’s thought.

Yet in this notion of the father’s death or murder, there is something veiled. All our work from last year must now converge here, to help us understand that this murder, which must be understood as something truly inscribed, cannot be dismissed from the inevitable intuition of Freud.

Ethnographic critiques miss the point. One feels that what Freud is addressing is the essential dramatization by which something enters life—a profound internal transcendence of the human being: the symbol of the father.
But on the other hand, something about the nature of the symbol itself must be clarified. It is here that we have associated the essence of the symbol—very precisely, and more precisely than anything else—with the signifying nature of the symbol when we have situated it at the same point of genesis as the intervention of the death drive.

It is one and the same thing we are expressing. We aim toward a point of convergence: the question of what the symbol essentially means in its signifying role as the original function—and initiating origin—in human life. First and foremost, this is the symbol as pure signifier.
This is the question to which this year’s study of psychoses returns us.

The sentence I have placed here is characteristic of Freud’s style in that he speaks in this letter about the different forms of defense—the forms too classical, too worn in our use of the notion of defense—as if it were something so easy to conceive that it does not even prompt us to ask:

• Who defends themselves?
• What is being defended?
• And against what is one defending oneself?

We would realize that all defense in psychoanalysis revolves around defending a mirage, a nothingness, a void, against everything that weighs and exists in life. And, of course, this final enigma is somehow veiled by the phenomenon itself, at the precise moment we grasp it, where various forms, such as those resulting in this letter, first reveal to us particularly clearly the different mechanisms of neuroses and psychoses.
Nevertheless, upon approaching psychosis, Freud is seized by a deeper enigma, which strikes him more profoundly within the phenomenon of psychosis itself. He states:

“For paranoiacs, for delusional individuals, for psychotics, they love their delusion as they love themselves.”

This echoes something that must be given its full weight and is identical to what is stated in the commandment:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This is precisely the tone carried by this sentence, with its literary echoes. This is the mystery, the meaning of the mystery.
It is something that is never absent, which is simultaneously the beginning, the middle, and the end of Freud’s thought.

I believe that by letting it dissipate, we lose the very essence of the approach upon which all analysis must be founded. If we lose it for even a moment, we fall again into a new form of mirage.
The essential point on which Freud insists is this: the grasp, the revelation that emerges in practice, of having humility, the perception, the profound sentiment seen in the relationships of the psychotic subject to their delusion.
There is something there that surpasses everything that can at that moment still be grasped in what can literally be called:

• the play of the signified,
• the play of meanings,
• the play of what we, later on, will call “the drives of the Id,”

…and which is this kind of affection, attachment, the essential presentification of something whose mystery remains almost entirely intact for us—something wherein the delusional subject, the psychotic, loves and clings to their delusion as if it were themselves.

It is here, with this movement, this tone, this vibration, that we must return to something I attempted to approach last time when I told you that we were not going to look into the phenomenology of these phenomena, which are hallucinations—so-called spoken hallucinations—but rather into this progressive structuration of a certain relationship allied with language that presents itself in an open way, attempting to discern the true economic function that this relationship with language might take in the form and evolution of psychosis.

I would like to start with some data, which are the sentences Schreber tells us he hears, and these sentences are spoken by those intermediate beings whose nature is diverse: these vestibules of the heavens, these “deceased souls” or “blessed souls,” or all these ambiguous forms of beings somehow dispossessed of their existence, “shadows of beings” rather than beings themselves, who are the carriers of the voices and intervene in his life with their continuous discourse, which he takes up again in other chapters, showing their special forms.

“I want to face the evidence that I am stupid, and the voices stop.
They must be exposed or given over to voluptuous debauchery. I want to think about it first.”

Then, a pause.

We would say that the part of the sentence that is full, where the core words are, as a linguist might express it, is not felt as hallucinatory. It is implied, and it is deliberately that the voice stops, to impose, to suggest, to force the subject into this theme, which is the word, which is the meaning in question in the sentence.

“Now it is time for him to be tamed!”

Here is a much more striking implicated word, one with significant weight. Yet, very precisely, our subject signifies to us that it is not hallucinatory. He is placed, as it were, in a precarious position, in what remains above the void of the sentence—the part that is grammatical or syntactical, composed of auxiliary words, conjunctions, or adverbs—made of empty but articulatory words.
After this, what is implicated is what must be imposed upon the subject’s thought by what is verbalized suddenly, as an external action, as a phrase from the Other, as a phrase from this subject who is simultaneously empty and full, and which I have called “the inter-I of the delusion.”
What is implicated at the end is the core word, what gives meaning, the signification. Here again, it alludes to something perfectly situated in the fundamental language.

“So now it is too much, according to the conception of the souls.”

Now, the conception of the souls is something that has its function entirely in what is verbalized by instances slightly superior, according to Schreber, to these sorts of subjects who carry refrains, bearers of the words he calls “serinated, learned by heart”—words he considers very empty. Well, the “serination” is a part he conceived as being an essential dimension of the commentary of which he is the perpetual subject.

The conception of the souls alludes to these functional notions that decompose these various thoughts into a form of style that creates a kind of delusional psychology within his delusion. These voices that address him have a certain dogmatic psychology. They explain to him how his thoughts are made. This kind of functional phenomenon is what is designated by the core word, which brings purely significant elements that I emphasize by insisting on a kind of accentuation of the signifying connection as such. I will return to this shortly.
What is expressed in the hallucinatory form is the formulation of a lack as such.

And after this, what is implicated—which is not voiced aloud in the hallucination—is “the principal thought.”
So, ultimately, I might almost say it is nothing other than this core word. The delusional experience of the subject himself gives us, in the phenomenon, its essence. He indicates through the lived phenomenon of hallucination, which we may or may not call elementary here, that:

“What I am missing is precisely the principal thought.”

Which means:

“We, the rays, are missing thought.”

That is to say, missing what signifies something.

If we take the entirety of these suffered texts, the material provided, the chain, so to speak, of the delusion—this with which the subject appears, in a very ambiguous way, both the agent and the patient—yet unquestionably as much given to him as he organizes it, which is undeniably far more suffered, more structured, the construction does not appear…
This is something essential: assuredly, if the delusion finally presents itself as a finished product, something that might to a certain extent be qualified as “reasoning madness,” it is clear that the articulation we call “reasoning”—in the sense that it is logical from certain perspectives, flawless from the viewpoint of secondary logic—nonetheless, if it achieves a synthesis of this nature, it poses no less of a problem than its very existence. It is to know that this occurs in the course of a genesis which, from elements that themselves may contain the seeds of this construction, yet present as something closed, even enigmatic in their original form.

It is this original form we focus on when we attend to these properly hallucinatory elements that will structure the phenomenon of delusion in what can be called a first phase—not the absolute first phase of the illness, since one could say that, in sum:
after the few months of incubation—to which we shall return later—the pre-psychotic months, where the subject is in a profoundly confused state, these phenomena of the decline of the external world, the twilight of the world, occur, characterizing the onset around mid-March 1894.

Although it was mid-November when he entered the house of Fleschig, it is there that these hallucinatory phenomena begin—these verbalized communications that he attributes to various levels, to different tiers of this world.
These then restructure this phantasmatic world made of two layers [Cf. 1957-58: graph of desire] of divine reality, which he called “the anterior and posterior kingdom of God,” and all sorts of entities that are in varying degrees of progress toward access, integration, or absorption into this divine reality.
These are precisely the entities that, in opposition to what he calls “the order of the universe”—a notion that is entirely fundamental to the structuring of his delusion—rather than moving toward reunification or reintegration with the Absolute Other,
which then appears at the limit as this divine figure emerging from his delusional experience,
instead move in the opposite direction: they attach to himself, adhere to him.
This occurs in forms that vary throughout the evolution of the delusion, from the very transparent forms at the origin of these delusional phenomena, where, in a sense, we see clearly expressed in Schreber’s lived experience this singular phenomenon of introjection. He says at one point that Fleschig’s soul enters him there, describing it as resembling a kind of filaments, similar to those of a spider’s web, something substantial enough to him to be unassimilable.
These things, he says, emerge perfectly from his mouth.

Here we have a sort of lived schema of introjection, which is something striking and will later fade, diminish, or polish itself into a much more spiritualized form.
Indeed, he becomes increasingly subject to varying degrees of integration with this ambiguous speech, which presents itself in its essentially enigmatic, interrupted aspect, and with which he becomes one, to which he responds with his whole being. He loves it literally as himself, and it becomes the essential element: his relationship to the Other.

From this moment, he remains entirely integrated into this phenomenon that one can scarcely call “inner dialogue,” since it revolves precisely around the notion and existence of the Other.
The entire significance of this preeminence of the signifying play as such is situated here, increasingly emptied of meaning.

What is the significance of this invasion by the signifier, which increasingly empties itself of the signified as it occupies more space within the internal economy, the fundamental libidinal relationship, and the total occupation, the total investment of all the subject’s moments, capacities, and desires?

I paused briefly on a series of these repetitive texts—it would be tedious to present them all here.
What is striking is that even in the moments where the phrases may, at their limit, have meaning, one never encounters anything resembling what we would call a metaphor.
There is something that characterizes all these delusional phrases, and I urge you to consider this order of questioning, which your attention is rarely drawn to.

A metaphor is not the easiest thing in the world to discuss. Bossuet said that a metaphor is an abbreviated comparison.
Everyone knows that this is not entirely satisfactory, and I believe, in truth, that no poet would accept it.
When I say “no poet,” it is because, in sum, it would not be a bad definition of poetic style as such to say that it begins with metaphor and that where metaphor ceases, so too does poetry.
It is not so easy to grasp.

“His sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful.” – Victor Hugo.

This is a metaphor. How do we recognize that it is a metaphor?
It is certainly not a latent comparison, such as:

• Just as the sheaf scattered itself generously among the needy,
• So, our character was neither miserly nor hateful.

Indeed, there is no comparison at all, but rather identification.
I would say that the dimension of metaphor is something that, for us, must certainly be less difficult to access than for anyone else, on the sole condition that we understand how we name it.
Usually, we call this identification.

And we are even—strictly speaking, in all the uses we make of the term “symbolic”—led precisely to reduce the meaning of the term “symbolic,” in sum, to distinguish the metaphorical dimension from the use of the symbol.
That is to say, the fact that a meaning dominates, influences, and governs the use of the signifier in such a way that it abandons all forms of pre-established connection—I would say lexical.

For truly, nothing in the usage of a dictionary could for even a moment suggest that a sheaf might be “miserly,” and even less “hateful.”
It is also entirely clear that if the use of language lends itself to meaning, it is precisely from the moment, and only from the moment, that one can say, “His sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful.”
That is, from the moment meaning dominates, drives, and tears the signifier away from its lexical connections.

It is the ambiguity of the signifier and the signified, and thus the maximum dominance of the signifier.
Moreover, it is so dominant that it precisely conceals the fact that without the signifying structure—that is, without the predicative articulation, without maintaining the distance between the subject and its attributes, which allows the sheaf to be qualified as miserly and hateful—there are predicative sentences, syntax, and a primordial order of signifier.
Thanks to this, the subject can remain distinct, separate from its qualities. Without this, there would be no use of metaphor.
In other words, it is entirely excluded that an animal might create a metaphor.
Even though we have no reason to think that it lacks intuition for what is generous, effusive, or capable of granting what it desires abundantly and easily.

But precisely because it lacks the articulation of the signifier, the discursive element—this something that is not merely signification, with all the attraction or repulsion it entails, but an alignment of signifiers—it is precisely because it lacks this aliment that metaphor is also unthinkable in the purely animal psychology of attraction, appetite, and desire.

This usage, this phase of symbolism expressed in metaphor, involves a relationship that we will call “similarity”, a similarity manifested solely by position. In other words, it is through the fact that the sheaf becomes the subject of “miserly” and “hateful” that the sheaf is identified with Booz in his lack of miserliness and his generosity. The sheaf is literally identical to the subject, to the character of Booz, to whom this pertains.

And this dimension of similarity, which is undoubtedly the most striking, the most gripping aspect of the meaningful use of language, dominates so overwhelmingly our apprehension of the play of symbolism that it obscures for us the existence of the other dimension. This other dimension concerns alignment, syntax—what ensures, for example, that this sentence would lose all meaning if we scrambled the words in their order.
This is obscured from us when we speak of symbolism. We omit the other dimension, which is precisely tied to the existence of the signifier as such and the organization of the signifier as such.

There is something that, from this point, cannot fail to strike us: certain disorders of the apparatuses known as aphasias, when reexamined in light of this dual perspective of opposition:

• between these relationships that I have called “relations of similarity”, or substitution, or choice, also of selection or competition—in short, everything within the order of the synonym;
• and the other dimension, which we might call contiguity, alignment, articulation, or coordination, as syntax, as the coordination of the signifier.

It becomes entirely clear that the classical opposition between what are called “sensory aphasias” and “motor aphasias”, long subject to criticism, aligns in a far more striking way within this dual perspective of similarity on the one hand, and contiguity on the other. The two orders of alterations, the language disorders involved in aphasia, are organized according to these two perspectives.

You are all familiar with Wernicke’s aphasia. You observe: this aphasic individual produces a sequence of sentences, extraordinarily […] from a grammatical point of view. You will see there all the conjunctions, adverbs, and hear something like this:

“Yes, I understand… Yesterday, when I was up there, already he said, and I wanted,
I told him: ‘that’s not it, the date, not exactly, not that one…’”

That is to say, you will have a subject who demonstrates mastery of all that concerns the articulation, organization, subordination, and structuring of the sentence, and yet remains precisely beside the point. It stays in front of the vocalization of something that you cannot for a single moment doubt is present, concerning a point around which the subject protests—and there is little doubt that this protest is legitimate. What the subject cannot produce, strictly speaking, is what the sentence aims at. They cannot provide its verbal incarnation.
Yet around this aim, they can develop an entire fringe of syntactic verbalization, which, in its complexity, its level of organization, and its sophistication, is far from suggesting any loss of linguistic attention. It is when, within this, you try to push the subject toward metaphor, or toward the use of what logic calls “metalanguage”—language built upon its own language—that it completely escapes them.

This is not, of course, to make the slightest comparison between a Wernicke-type disorder and what occurs in our psychotic subjects, but rather to find an analogy, to realize that when our subject hears—because it is not they who say it—when they hear “factum est” and it stops, there is a phenomenon manifesting at the level of what I have called relations of similarity, as opposed to relations of contiguity.
There is a reason why—just as in the aphasic—it is the relations of contiguity that dominate, due to the absence or failure of the function of significant equivalence, that is, equivalence through relations of similarity.

We observe that it is at the same level, likely for different reasons, but we cannot disregard this striking analogy in addressing the question. It allows us to define and also oppose, under the dual headings of similarity and contiguity, what occurs in the hallucinatory delusional subject.
In other words, the dominance, what comes to the forefront in the hallucinatory phenomenon, namely the phenomenon of continuity, cannot be better highlighted than in these instances of uninterrupted speech. This speech is precisely given, meaning invested, charged—let’s say libidinalized.

For it is this that imposes upon the subject the internal sentence as something that suddenly becomes for them a type of imposed phrase. It is the signifying part, the grammatical part, the part that remains in its most accentuated state, existing only by its signifying nature, by its articulation, by its alignment, and by its essentially signifying function. This is what takes on the greatest importance. This is what becomes a phenomenon imposed upon the external world.

In other words, this kind of dominance of the phenomenon of contiguity within spoken phenomena, over the phenomenon of similarity, arises from a deficiency in the aphasic, linked to this term that is the subject.
There is something preventing them from accessing it, because something in the function of language is as it is.
Let us not attempt to materialize this further.

The subject cannot come to the point, come to the word itself, of what they mean, of what they intend to say.
And what dominates in them is this kind of apparently empty discourse which—curiously—even among the most experienced subjects, neurologists encountering it during examination often react with an awkward laugh. This figure, delivering immense and extraordinarily articulated blather, sometimes rich with inflections, yet never reaching the core of what they are attempting to communicate at that moment.

That there is something analogous in the decompensation, the imbalance, the intensification, and the apparent phenomenon that I alternately call alignment, syntax, or contiguity of signifiers… In the end, whether this is what comes to the forefront in the hallucinatory phenomenon, whether this is what the entire delusion organizes itself around, is a primary fact. Around this, we must center all our questions about the meaning of psychosis.

From the moment we introduce ourselves to the idea of the equal importance in any semantic phenomenon of the signifier and the signified, in the fact that it is always the signified that we prioritize in our analysis—because it is undoubtedly the most alluring and immediately apparent dimension in the field of analytic and symbolic investigation—we risk overlooking the essential, mediating, and primordial role of the signifier.
Failing to recognize that it is the signifier which is, in reality, the guiding element not only distorts our foundational understanding of phenomena, such as:

• neuroses themselves,
• the interpretation of dreams itself,

…but also renders us completely incapable of understanding what occurs in psychoses.

I emphasize this:

• If a portion of analytic investigation—a portion that is late and secondary, concerning identification and symbolism, which we use constantly, though we do not realize how partial and biased this use is—leans toward the dimension of metaphor,
• You must also consider that on the other side lies articulation as a phenomenon of alignment, of contiguity, of contact with what is sketched out as primordial, structuring, original, and initial within the notion of causality.
  The other typical, extreme, exemplary rhetorical figure opposing metaphor has a name: it is called metonymy.

This refers to substitution, whereby something is named through an association. Here, we are dealing with naming.
This involves something that is the container or a part, or something connected to it.
This can be seen clearly in the usage of associated words. For example, in the technique of verbal association commonly employed in laboratories, if you present the subject with a word like hut.

There is more than one way to respond.
Some responses belong to the register of contiguity. The subject might respond with “Burn it.” They begin forming a sentence. The subject might also provide synonymous substitutions for the word hut, such as “hovel” or “cabin.”
In this case, equivalence at the level of synonymy is at play.
A little further, we approach metaphor. The subject might, for instance, call it “a burrow.”

However, there is yet another register—for example, the word thatch. This is not quite the same. It refers to a part of the hut. One might, at a stretch, speak of a thatch or a village composed of three thatches to mean three small houses. You can sense that something else is at work here.
It involves evocation. The subject might instead produce words like dirt or poverty, revealing that we are no longer in the realm of metaphor but rather in the realm of metonymy.

This fundamental opposition between metaphor and metonymy is significant to highlight here. Why? Because consider this: in everything Freud originally emphasized about the mechanisms of neurosis or the mechanisms of marginal phenomena of normal life, such as dreams, it is not metaphorical dimensions or identification that dominate.

Quite the contrary:

• What Freud calls condensation is what rhetoric refers to as metaphor,
• And what Freud calls displacement is what I have just explained as metonymy.

That is to say, apart from the existence and structuring of the signifier as such, apart from the lexical existence of the entire apparatus of the signifier, these phenomena:

• as they exist in neurosis,
• as they are the instruments through which the absent signified expresses itself,

…the existence of the signifier as such is absolutely decisive.

And this is why, in defending and bringing to the forefront the interest and attention on the signifier, we do nothing other than return to the starting point of Freud’s discovery.
We will revisit the question to understand why this clarification of the issue—these games of the signifier, which come to occupy and invest the subject entirely in psychosis—suggests specific mechanisms to us, given that this is not about the mechanisms of aphasia in this case.

Clearly, it is a matter of a certain relationship to the Other as lacking or deficient.
It revolves around the relationship of the signifier as such with the different levels of otherness:

• the imaginary Other,
• and the symbolic Other,

…which we established at the start of our discussion this year as the essential structure of the relationship to the Other.
It is around this that we can observe the articulation of this dominance, this foregrounding, this invasion, this true psychological intrusion of the signifier as such, which we call psychosis.