Introduction

In Seminar III, according to J. Lacan, the psychotic subject does have an unconscious. This contrasts sharply with the usual psychoanalytic notion that for the psychotic subject there is no repression and the unconscious is all manifest or predominates. The unconscious in psychosis involves a failure in the program/knot that articulates the relationship between language and perception. To explain psychosis Lacan proposes the premise that behind the process of verbalisation there is a primordial Bejahung, an admission of the Symbolic, which itself can be missing in psychoses. The foreclosure of the Name of the Father leaves a hole or scotoma in the field of psychotic perception. In Seminar XXIII this hole has to be repaired through the supplementation and nomination associated with the sinthome. Lacan uses the distinction between a fundamental unconscious language as it appears in delusion and so called-normal language, a beginning of a differentiation between lalangue and language.