ABSTRACT
Just as Freud reveals the fundamental kinship between the purportedly normal subject and the neurotic, Lacan indicates this subject’s kinship with the psychotic. Psychosis, for Lacan, involves the foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the master signifier. Whereas for most subjects, the signifier of law is authoritative and legitimate, but for the psychotic it is not. This rejection causes the subject to completely misinterpret the law. For the psychotic, the law exists, but it does not emanate from a social authority. Instead, it represents an arbitrary restriction that an illegitimate external authority imposes on the subject. Though Lacan is careful to distinguish the structure of psychosis from that of neurosis (and thus from normalcy), his investigation of psychosis nonetheless shows that all subjects of modernity share a delusion that mirrors that of the psychotic. In his seminar on the psychoses, he notes that considering oneself an autonomous individual is requisite for the modern subject. And yet, he claims, “the discourse of freedom … is personal and yet common, and always, whether imperceptibly or not, delusional.” Freedom is delusional insofar as the subject envisions itself in an external relation with the law. This delusion places the modern subject in the same boat as the psychotic and thoroughly derails the project of freedom. But an exploration of what Lacan says about psychosis points toward another conception of freedom—a freedom that conceives the law not as an external prohibition but as the subject’s internal obstacle, as a nonsensical signifier that provides the basis for the subject’s symbolic universe. The investigation of psychosis not only reveals the psychotic dimension of the normal but also points toward an alternative.
