Watering the Japanese Flower: A Structural Reading of ‘On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’

You know, Lacan himself once had this great metaphor for his work. He said his writing was like one of those Japanese paper flowers, you know, the kind that are all dried up and crumpled, but then you drop them in water and they just bloom. Well, today we’re going to add the water. We’re going to watch his incredible theory of psychosis unfold, starting with a clinical case that is so strange it unlocks everything.

So, get this. A woman is just walking down a hallway. Her neighbor’s boyfriend walks past her and in that moment she hears him shout a single vicious insult. Sow. Just that one word. But for her, this isn’t just an insult. It becomes the absolute undeniable center of her entire reality, proof that she’s being persecuted. So what in the world is happening here? Is this just a glitch, a random auditory hallucination, a simple misfiring of the brain? Or, and this is the Lacanian move, is this word actually a message, a clue sent from what he called another scene, the unconscious, that reveals a hidden, almost mathematical logic to her madness.

To figure that out, we have to do the one thing that conventional psychiatry so often just skips over. We have to actually listen. We need to get into the nitty-gritty of this clinical puzzle. Because for Lacan, the answer isn’t in some textbook definition. It’s right there in the structure of what was said and maybe more importantly what was about to be said.

All right, so here’s the key. When her analyst asks her, “Hey, what were you thinking,” right before you heard that, she kind of smiles and admits she was murmuring something to herself. Just as the man was approaching, she thought, “I’ve just come from the butchers.” Now, that seems totally random, right? Totally innocent. But trust me, that phrase, especially that word butchers in connection with sow, that is the smoking gun.

Now, the easy explanation, the one you’d get in Psych 101, is projection. She must have been thinking something aggressive and just projected it onto him. Simple. But for Lacan, that is just lazy. It explains nothing. To see why, we’ve got to understand just how deep his critique of psychology really goes. Lacan basically said that all of psychology before Freud was just this this metaphysical stew, a murky soup of old philosophical ideas about the soul and consciousness. It pretended to be a science of the mind, but it was completely blind to the real gamecher, the unconscious.

You see, the classical view just assumes there’s this stable unified me inside my head, the recipients, and it’s just looking out a window at reality. So, if that me sees something that isn’t there, it’s just an error, a mistake. But this view never even thinks to ask the most important question. What does the hallucination mean? How is it structured like a sentence? It misses the whole point.

So to solve the puzzle of the sow we have to throw out those old tools. We need Lacan’s specialized toolkit, one built entirely around language, structure, and the law. And it really comes down to three absolutely crucial concepts.

First up, the signifier. This is the atom of language for Lacan. But here’s the twist. A signifier’s power doesn’t come from its dictionary definition. No, its meaning comes from its position in a vast web of all the other signifiers. Think about the word butcher. It only means what it means because of its relationship to meat, animal, knife, and yeah, in this case, sow. This is Lacan’s radical point. We think we speak language, but really language speaks us. It builds the very house of our reality.

Second, we have the name of the father. And let’s be crystal clear, this has nothing to do with your actual dad. It’s a structural function. Think of it like the master key or a gravitational anchor point that holds that whole web of language and social rules together. Without this anchor, meaning would just drift aimlessly. It’s the fundamental law that draws a line in the sand and gives us a stable shared world.

And this right here, this is the whole ball game. This explains the difference between neurosis, which most of us have, and psychosis. In neurosis, that key anchor, the name of the father, is accepted. But difficult thoughts get pushed down, repressed. They don’t go away. They come back as symptoms. But in psychosis, that anchor was never there to begin with. It was foreclosed. It wasn’t repressed. It was rejected from the system entirely. It’s like a foundational piece of the symbolic universe is just gone.

Okay, toolkit in hand—signifier, name of the father, foreclosure—let’s go back to that hallway because now we can see what Lacan saw. This wasn’t some random biological event. This was a precise structural mechanism clicking into place. So here’s how it plays out. The patient murmurs from the butchers. It’s a floating signifier humming with all this unconscious energy about animality, about being cut up. But because the name of the father is foreclosed, there’s no anchor to tie it down. The symbolic system can’t handle it. So what happens? It gets violently ejected and it comes back from the outside, from what Lacan calls the real a place beyond language, as the hallucinated word.

So the hallucination isn’t random. It’s her own rejected thought looping back and hitting her with the force of objective reality. And this is the terrifying poetry of Lacan’s theory. What you cannot symbolize, what your symbolic reality cannot contain, doesn’t just disappear into thin air. It returns from the real with all the horror and certainty of something that is absolutely undeniably there.

Now, this same exact structure plays out on a truly epic scale in one of the most famous cases in all of psychiatry, Judge Daniel Paul Schreber. This man wrote these incredibly detailed memoirs about his own psychosis and they became a gold mine for both Freud and Lacan. He shows us what happens when the psychotic mind has to rebuild an entire universe using only the broken pieces of language.

What’s so wild about Schreber’s voices is that they weren’t just random chatter. They had two very distinct jobs. On one side, you have the phenomena of code. The voices were literally teaching him a new divine language from scratch with its own vocabulary and grammar. It was language talking about itself. But on the other side, you have the phenomena of message. These were broken, incomplete sentences designed to test him, to challenge his very existence as a subject.

Just listen to some of these interrupted messages. The voices would say things like, “Now I’m going to,” and then just stop. Or, “You must,” and then silence. Why? They always break off right after the words that position a subject in language, the I and the you. It’s a trap. It forces Schreber to fill in the blank, and he almost always does so in terms of self-accusation. It perfectly reveals that structural hole where his stable I is supposed to be.

So what’s the bottom line here? The big takeaway from both the sow and Schreber is that the psychotic symptom is never ever meaningless noise. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. We aren’t seeing a breakdown of meaning. We are seeing a different system of meaning, one with its own brutal, rigorous logic. If you just know how to listen, the symptom isn’t hiding the structure. The symptom is the structure laid bare for all to see.

And this leaves us with a really provocative, maybe even unsettling question. We love to think of reason and madness as complete opposites, right? Light and dark. But if Lacan is right, if psychosis has its own grammar, its own logic, its own terrible truth, then it forces us to turn the question back on ourselves. What exactly is reason? Is it the only game in town? Or is it just one possible structure among many? And what truths are we missing when we refuse to listen to the logic in what we’ve so easily dismissed as madness?