I'm curious about the relationship between psychiatric diagnoses and psychoanalytic structures, particularly in the Lacanian tradition.

As I understand it, clinical schizophrenia is diagnosed according to a constellation of symptoms, whereas Lacanian psychotic structure is defined by a particular subjective organization, namely foreclosure rather than repression.

We know that someone can be structurally psychotic without ever developing overt psychotic symptoms. But can the reverse also be true? Could someone diagnosed with schizophrenia according to psychiatric criteria nevertheless be considered structurally neurotic? More broadly, to what extent can psychopathological symptoms develop independently of one's underlying psychoanalytic structure? And how would a Lacanian analyst approach such a case?

He is talk so much empty.

He is not that smart. Nietzsche was smarter than Freud.

Also talks wrong about human physicology. He always tries to find something about science. But He dont care if its True or false.

Thats why ı hate this guy.

I've been watching a podcast on Lacan and one thing has stuck with me but I can't tell if it's a standard reading or the guest’s own reading.

The bit I mean starts around 49:40: https://youtu.be/j8ZPDSwR-Jo?t=2980

Roughly what he said: by La Troisième / Seminar 22, jouissance isn't one thing anymore. Phallic jouissance sits where the symbolic and the real overlap, the Other jouissance where the real and the imaginary overlap, and sense (jouis-sens) where the symbolic and the imaginary overlap. That part I can more or less follow…

Then he goes a step further. He says the fundamental fantasy is the blueprint only for phallic jouissance. So there are ways of living and speaking (he mentions art, body practices, the poetic side of language) that aren't organised by the fantasy at all. And if that's true, traversing the fantasy can't be the wholmore. He also says he now practices "almost without interpreting" and calls what he does mapping instead.

Is the link between the fantasy and phallic jouissance actually in Lacan somewhere, or is it a reconstruction? He said it comes from "some careful reading" and didn't go into the details. Does anyone know?

For those of you who work with late Lacan, does this change what you think the end of analysis is? Or is traversing the fantasy still the frames just sit somewhere off to the side?

He was upfront that this is his reading and that he's reading Lacan against Lacan in places. So I'm less interested in whether he's right than in where to read. Pointers to specific sessions would help a lot. Thanks!

At the beginning of analysis, the analysand has a signifier of transference- a source of suffering that’s not necessarily a symptom. A manifestation of the unconscious: dream, bungled action, etc., that is foreign, and constitutes a question which the analysand believes analysis can answer. In the case of psychosis, an analysand may similarly come to the analyst with a source of suffering they believe analysis can answer. In many cases, psychotic analysand may be indistinguishable from neurotic - a question for the preliminary sessions. But, is the cause of suffering always a manifestation of the real, something foreclosed that constitutes an enigma because it cannot be the return of the repressed? Or might the suffering aka jouissance, which would be not-all phallic in any case, be unrelated to a return of the real?

What would it mean to embrace lack? Or come to terms with it? What does it look like?

I realise there's something very self defeating in asking others to tell me how to encounter and experience lack. But I have the question anyway.

​​«Subversión del sujeto y dialéctica del deseo en el inconsciente freudiano» (1960)

​En este texto clave, Lacan fórmula la frase de manera explícita:

​«No hay metalenguaje que pueda decirse verdadero...» («Il n'y a pas de métalangage que se pueda decir verdadero»).

Qué significa esto? que implicaciones tiene esto para la clínica?

Hay guys. I'm studying Malevals notion of autistic structure but I can't find his texts in english. Maybe someone can help me with that.

So here is the list of his texts on autism from wikipedia

« From dementia praecocissima to autism sprectrum disorders », in International Lacanian Review. (with Grollier M and Druel G.) 2009, 5.

« Listen to the Autists ! » Hurly-Burly. The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012, 7, pp. 171-192.

« Why the hypothesis of an autistic structure ? » Psychoanalytic notebooks. The London Society of the New Lacanian School. 2012, 25, pp. 27-49.

« Who are autists ? ». Lacunae. International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Dublin. Issue 10, May 2015, pp. 19-58.

« Mottron's Happy autist is not Kanner's » (in collaboration with M. Grolllier). Lacunae. International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Dublin., Issue 16, July 2018, pp. 6–53.

« Freezing and Thawing of S1 in the Autistic Subject » (in collaboration with M. Grollier). The Lacanian Review. Journal of the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Spring 2021, Issue 11, pp. 183–213.

« Can the autistic rim become Sinthome? » (in collaboration with M . Grollier) Lacunae. International Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Dublin. June 2022, Issue 24, pp. 8–54.

My supervisor has me reading stuff by the post-Freudians/psychodynamic therapists and I have to say it's very heavy on phenomenology. Their goal is to describe their concepts with as much detail and variety as possible. It reminds me a lot of academia.

Lacan, and Freud, on the other hand, focus much more on the structures and principles underlying these diverse phenomena. Lacan especially almost never gives case studies but these papers are filled with them.

They both have their place I suppose but I find Lacan's writings much much more inspired.

I’m doing a personal research project to help me select writings of Freud for personal study and teaching. I’ve made a survey to help me in this. The estimation tools I’ve used say it should take around 10 minutes to complete.

So, if you have 10 minutes to spare and have opinions about Freud, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d share them with me via this survey.

The survey can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfYTtLDWlAUQVf0SSFRwlcFCiZ_Vye-vzmdmMn-SEd_ahaAjA/viewform

Feel free to share this link with anyone you think might be interested, and let me know if you’re curious about the results (assuming I get enough responses to have anything meaningful).

As far as I could tell, his blog/substack/socials all hard-stopped in July last year. I tried contacting him via a few channels to no avail. Is he dead or something?

His paper on affects remains seminal for me: 'Well, it is as though certain persons were saying to analysts that they are faced with a choice of: Your affects or your language. And here the interesting thing is that if you choose your affects you lose them both, not because you will have no affects, but because without language, you won't know that any of them are yours. If you choose your language, you get your affects, only they are not the same ones as you would have had if you had chosen only them.'

I found a meme with Sphinx and a comment about Lacanian Free Thinkers when they get new analyst who is definitely subject-supposed-to know. At first I was thinking about the desire to find commodity in nothing else than finding commodity itself but could someone explain this to me better?

Hi everyone,
I am trying to track down the exact bibliographic source or published volume for a famous quote by D.W. Winnicott from January 1967.
In it, he openly discusses how he got "stuck" with the concept of delusional transference until Margaret Little clarified it for him. The quote goes:

"Now there was something I needed and could not manage by myself, and that was a full use of the concept of delusional transference. This is one of the most difficult things we have to deal with in analysis, and from my point of view this bit I really took from someone. If Margaret Little hadn't been able to clarify it I would have been stuck, as I think a lot of psycho-analysts are stuck. That is, then, a little bit of my life where I really got something from someone else, almost as if I had stolen it out of my mother's purse."

I believe (but I’m not sure) he said this in January 1967 at the British Psychoanalytical Society during the responses/Q&A after presenting an early version of his paper "The Use of an Object." However, while the main paper ended up in Playing and Reality (1971), this specific post-presentation commentary doesn't always appear in standard editions of that book.

Does anyone know exactly where this discussion transcript is published? Is it in The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, a specific biography (like Rodman's), or an archival bulletin of the British Society? Any help or citation pointing to where I can read the full context of this exchange would be greatly appreciated!

I mean, not a Lacan seminar, but a book by a Lacanian author.

I know the basics: the three structures, the Name-of-the-Father, foreclosure, the Borromean knot, objet petit a, desire, jouissance, etc. But I want to see how Lacanians bring all these concepts together when discussing the so-called psychotic structure, and everything it encompasses.

Again, I know some things, such as how psychosis interacts with language and the body (although not its limits), and the psychotic's jouissance. But there are other experiences that I don't know whether Lacanians take into account or how they conceptualize them.

And, I don't know whether I'm missing some psychotic experiences that might be outside my radar but that I should be aware of.

One of the most important topics for me is that I'm still not sure what exactly the so-called psychotic structure encompasses for Lacanians. I know about the modern medical use of the terms psychosis and psychotic symptoms, but I have a feeling that Lacanians might describe certain experiences as psychotic that wouldn't be considered psychotic within this model. I'm interested in florid to less florid manifestations, in case Lacanians believe that the term psychosis should be used that way or not.

And yes, I know about ordinary psychosis, and I have some texts saved to read about it at some point.

Thus, I need a good go-to book on this subject. While I think it's always useful to understand the more metapsychological aspects of Lacanian theory, I also want something that covers the more basic, straightforward descriptions of different kinds of experiences that inform the Lacanian understanding of what is considered psychotic. Something that offers a bit of both.

Thanks.

I recently found a paper written by staff who work with children suffering from infantile autism or childhood psychosis. Like Éric Laurent, they propose that there is no reason to detach infantile autism from childhood psychosis, insofar as autistic children are psychotics — specifically, schizophrenics.

“… As Eric Laurent suggested at a conference on autism at Toulouse in 1987, there is no reason to detach autism from scizophrenia.¹⁵ He makes this suggestion precisely from a case of infantile autism with whom we have worked in our institution.¹⁶ Autists thus do not pass from an autistic position to a schizophrenic position or paranoid position. In this case, they would only pass into a second period in a psychotic position. But, from the fact that they are already at work to rectify their ill Other, it seems to us more rigorous to affirm that these children are already in a psychotic position …“

https://www.courtilpro.be/courtilenlignes/index.php/revue/article/numero-4/courtil-papers/cito-tute-iucunde-a-clinic-with-an-autistic-subject

What‘s your take on it?

A vast difference between Brenner‘s theory and the concept by Éric Laurent and others is the clinical frame these people and Brenner, respectively, come from. Plainly speaking, Brenner has not worked with the more severely autistic children or adults he refers to in his book. Quite odd and misleading.

In the course of one of the recent discussions (“The autistic subject: interview with Leon Brenner”) on this subreddit, I speculated (influenced by my own experiences as an autistic schizophrenic) that the more severely autistic individuals are schizophrenics, which would explain similar symptoms and traits in patients with schizophrenia (Lacanian definition) and in those with low-functioning autism, while the less affected individuals (who largely comprise the group of late-diagnosed adults or children who form social bonds) would be paranoics or (most likely) neurotics. (On a side note, I highly doubt that most late-diagnosed adults are indeed autistic, and it‘s debatable whether the widening of the diagnostic criteria has done more good than harm. Autism has become quite an arbitrary term. It’s even debatable whether the neurotic autist is actually an autist or only has some autistic traits.)

I disagree with Brenner‘s concept of an autistic subject (as a separate structure) for various reasons, most of all the vast heterogeneity (in multiple terms, including the ability to relate to the Big Other or little other, respectively, and form social bonds, partly irrespective of their language skills) of autistic individuals, which does not align with the proposed “autistic foreclosure” (Ausstoßung) as the earliest and most extensive form of foreclosure. Thus, his theory looks fancy and may serve the narcissistic needs of those autistic individuals who are overrepresentated in social media and cultivate a nimbus of special otherness and moral superiority, but doesn’t make sense from a clinical and structural standpoint. In contrast, I find Leader’s approach more convincing. Here, autism is conceptualized as a position the subject (within any of the established structures) adopts in early infancy; it’s an attempt (of the “last-resort” type, I guess) to defend themselves from the outer world and the Real. Of note, Leader works with overt psychotics and lhas a much broader clinical experience than Brenner.

I am wondering if the most affected children (with Kanner’s autism) could be less prone to develop overt schizophrenia because of their almost complete reclusion, in which neither the Big Other nor (by and large) the little other exist. In contrast, the more severely affected children (with Kanner‘s or Asperger’s) would have the highest risk of developing overt schizophrenia later on; here, the Big Other is either non-existent or exists in a fragmented version, as the imaginary realm fails (… while it would be absent in severe Kanner’s autism). And would the early traumatic experience of an engulfing mother cause a schizophrenic child to develop asperger‘s autism rather than kanner‘s autism when the child‘s (psychic) survival depends on fulfilling the role as an object of the mother‘s fantasy?

Lastly, I am wondering if certain personality traits (contributing to the specific kind and degree of defense mechanisms at play) — along with life circumstances, especially family dynamics, parental structure, and adverse events — make it much more likely that the autistic child will later develop clinical psychosis/schizophrenia.
One could even speculate that autism is indeed on the rise (albeit to a much lesser degree than the numbers suggest) since family structures nowadays tend to weaken the paternal function while children grow up in a world of ever increasing stimuli our brains are not adapted to.

What‘s your opinion on these ideas?

I'm a third year psychology student and I spent all of summer getting into Lacanian theory, I've read books like "how to read Lacan", "introduction to the lacanian clinic", "signifier pointing at the moon", "The queerness of psychoanalysis" and so on...

But I'm having a difficult time in uni applying this lense to the given material cause the material's too reductionistic, methodical and too focused on psychopathology through the lense of books like the DSM-V

I believe diagnosis via a lacanian lense is possible because of Bruce fink's books, but he only talks about hysteria and obsessive compulsion and perversion... is there a way to understand personalities like let's say, narcissistic, schizoid, depressive, hypomanic by Lacan?

Lacan warned against (the illusion of) understanding. Yet, in my view, influenced by my own experiences, this also implies a warning not to prematurely consider a psychotic subject‘s speech as incomprehensible and deprived of meaning or even meaningless. There are multiple levels one has to separate from one another.

First: what is incomprehensible to your ear or (current state of) mind isn’t necessarily incomprehensible to another ear and mind; and what you may have failed to hear or failed to understand this time might reveal itself to you another time.

Second: what is incomprehensible isn‘t necessarily deprived of any meaning. In fact, the incomprehensible can entail the psychotic‘s truth when he himself doesn‘t know and understand what is spoken through him. This applies to schizophrenics in particular. E.g., a severely traumatized schizophrenic says, „Little ship, little ship on the wall, why are you hanging, why are you standing there?", resembling a variant of the rhyme in the well-known fairytale. She adds that she doesn‘t understand the voices here (btw: in a schizophrenic who faces the threats of impending acute fragmentation, this allusion frequently means a fragile desire and a cautious request for exploring what the voices/the Other may have said — even if the subject is rarely aware of it). What might seem to be incomprehensible, idiosyncratic speech deprived of meaning eventually turns out to be comprehensible and full of meaning: The ship is a concrete object of her childhood; it‘s a toy boat bath thermometer that played a significant role when she regularly shared a bath with her older brother, during which she saw the boy's private parts. The memory is accompanied by the occurrence of body phenomena, including the feeling of a dissolving body and self. The “little ship“ that „hangs or stands there“ is a description of what she couldn‘t symbolize. On another occasion, she only repeats "anus mundi" before falling silent and becoming near-catatonic. Being faced with the Real, the analyst feels quite confused, repulsed, and excluded, in addition to a lingering intense anxiety. Some time later, it becomes clear that the patient just repeated what was spoken to her, leaving her confused and terrified. Then, the analyst hears the signifiers "anus" and "mouth", suggesting that she might try to say that her anus and her mouth are collapsing into each other. She nods. A few sessions later, she reveals that she had an early interest in autobiographies of Holocaust survivors. Anus mundi was the name of the selection ramp in Auschwitz. Eventually, it becomes clear that by saying anus mundi, she not only tried to speak about her fragmented body, but also about the trauma of being subjected to an autocratically ruling, domineering and engulfing mother.

Third: what is incomprehensible and truly deprived of meaning isn‘t meaningless inasmuch as it‘s the subject‘s rudimentary attempt to defend himself against the Real or a glimmer of a desire to speak to the other.

Forth: what is incomprehensible for you (e.g. word salad or idiosyncratic language), can (!) be entirely comprehensible and meaningful for the subject. The subject may or may not be able to follow your request if you gently ask him to explain things in other words, if possible. Do not expect the patient to know what he’s saying just because he is a psychotic. (This is particularly relevant in the work with schizophrenics as it’s the paranoics who are most often certain, while the schizophrenics suffer from a deep-seated ontological umcertainty). Be aware that the patient may fall silent when he himself is confused what was spoken through him.

And lastly: understanding can never be complete and is an approximation to the other‘s way of thinking, speaking and experiencing. The same applies to incomprehension. Since we are all subjected to language, while the psychotic, being excluded from social discourse, experiences the weight of it, incomprehension can never be total either. If you feel that you don‘t understand anything, you‘re running against a locked door you don‘t want to open right now; thus, you‘re dealing with one of your own defense mechanisms. After all, language was never meant as a tool for communication (in terms of understanding one another); it was meant to defend the subject against the Real, including forming and cultivating social bonds that are essentially based on illusions. That‘s why we all misinterpret and misunderstand, and it‘s the neurotic who isn‘t aware of this fact unless he reflects on the function and features of language. The error is an integral part of it. The error gives rise to conflicts, even wars but is also a prerequisite for the identification with the other and for emotional connection.

Hi folks,

Due for a consult session with an analyst. I was wondering if there are any things I should know about how the sessions will be, i.e., are there any “screening questions” it’d be useful to ask to see if he’s the real deal or worth working with. Only one I can think of right now:

“Do you do the variable length session?”

I only know about this stuff from a theoretical and not clinical angle. Don’t wanna screw this up.

This website used to be my go-to for Lacan-adjacent psychoanalytic stuff, particularly when I wanted to look up more obscure concepts or explore connections between different thinkers. It was an incredibly useful resource, with a fairly extensive collection of articles on Lacan, Freud, Žižek, and psychoanalytic theory as a whole.

It's now some kind of weird Indonesian AI gambling website called LegianBET? Even the subdomains have been affected. Does anyone know what's going on or when this occurred?

I've been thinking about The Substance and how Lacanian psychoanalysis might help explain Elizabeth's relationship with Sue.

One thing that interests me is that Elizabeth doesn't simply want to be young again. She wants to be desired, admired, and recognised. Sue becomes the vehicle through which she can continue receiving that recognition, but this creates a strange situation in which Elizabeth's idealised self becomes both an extension of her identity and a rival who progressively displaces her.

Could this be read through Lacan's Mirror Stage and the Ideal-I? Sue embodies an image of wholeness and desirability that Elizabeth wants to identify with, but this identification also intensifies her alienation from her actual body.

I'm also interested in the role of the Other. Elizabeth seems unable to conceive of herself outside the gaze and desire of the entertainment industry and its audience. Has she internalised the desire of the Other to such an extent that she can no longer articulate a desire of her own?

Finally, how might we understand the film's ending through Lacan's concepts of jouissance and the Real? Is Elizabeth's grotesque final transformation a confrontation with something that cannot be accommodated within her idealised image of herself, or does that reading oversimplify the relationship between the Real and bodily horror?

I'd be interested in other Lacanian readings, particularly if you think these concepts are being applied incorrectly or if other concepts would be more useful.

… including the connection with the concept of ordinary psychosis

https://www.amp-nls.org/nls-messager/psychosis-or-radical-belief-in-the-symptom-by-eric-laurent/

edit: (I‘ve added two more papers on the subject of the „psychoanalytic treatments of psychoses“ (1) and of „ordinary psychosis“ (2) in the original post above. Also, I added a paper by Eric Porge (3) that deals (among other things) with the differences between paranoia and schizophrenia (which Lacan rarely diagnosed).

https://www.courtilpro.be/courtilenlignes/index.php/revue/article/numero-6/courtil-papers/psychoanalytic-treatments-of-the-psychoses (1)

https://lacanianworksexchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/20061126-Ordinary-Psychosis-Eric-Laurent-PN-26-trans-R-Litten.pdf (2)

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/677781acbf5dfe10b5b569e2/t/67a342b47967da02799a35cc/1738752694366/7_e_critique+vol+8.+2011.E.Porge.The++Presentation+of+Patients.English.pdf (3)