circulation within my skull

Aug 13

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Like Freud, Lacan views the delusional system of the psychotic as a spontaneous attempt at recovery. And, in emphasizing the archaic ontogenetic status of those mechanisms/processes determining whether a subject will have a neurotic or a psychotic structure (i.e., whether Bejahung or Verwerfung takes place early on), Lacan hints that a temporal-genetic window of opportunity remains open for a brief period of time during childhood—if primordial affirmation (of the Symbolic Third) doesn’t occur during this period, then it really never will thereafter. Once the opportunity is missed, it’s forever gone.

So, in treating psychosis, it cannot, for a Lacanian, be an issue of somehow getting the patient to ratify the consensus reality of the socio-linguistic symbolic order, to give up his/her private fiction for public fact. Not only would such an approach crudely and cruelly ignore the positive role that the delusional system plays in holding the psychotic together (however tenuously)—it would quickly be brought to a frustrating halt in front of the almost impregnable fortress of certainty protecting the core axioms of the psychotic’s idiosyncratic world. Lacan’s twenty-third seminar (1975-1976) develops his notion of the “sinthome,” the symptom without which the subject itself would collapse.The sinthome, like a symptom, causes discomfort and pain. But, if the analysand were to be relieved of the sinthome, the very structure of his/her subjectivity would catastrophically fall to pieces. Simply put, Lacan here forges a concept to account for those instances where the cure would be more traumatizing than the illness.His comments concerning the function of the psychotic’s delusion indicate that it should be viewed as just such a sinthome.

Psychosis and Lacan - A. Johnston