ABSTRACT
Whatever criticisms one may rightly make of this entomology of human beings and the thoughts about them offered by psychiatry, analysts continue to use the same labels, even while transforming the meaning proper to them. Do we do this out offeree of habit or as homage paid to our predecessors’ gifts of observation? Probably both. But this borrowing is not without its dangers and one may well wonder if it does not conceal an ambiguity in the relation of psychoanalysis to psychosis. I shall leave the question unanswered and simply say that the forms that psychotic discourse assumes for the observer are never the effect of mere chance and may be understood simply by analysing the mode of defence that they privilege. They derive from a time when psychical work came up against an insuperable obstacle, forcing it to abandon well trod paths, and they provide an insight into the particular nature of that obstacle. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory generally assumes the right to speak about psychosis (in the singular) or the psychotic structure and to postulate, beyond the diversity of its forms, the presence of a minimum series of features, a common background to the various clinical pictures. The elements that each author will isolate in the series, the interpretation that he will offer of them, define in turn the various psychoanalytic constructions that seek to account for the psychotic phenomenon. The homogeneity that these options often claim is illusory, though each author usually appeals to the same key concepts of fixation, regression, reality loss, foreclosure, to cite only the principal ones. Much more than in the field of neurosis one is struck, as soon as the question of psychosis arises, by the facility with which one assumes the right to
create an amalgam in which will be found a jumble of Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian concepts, and more recently ones deriving from Bateson, Bion and that other amalgam called anti-psychiatry. Now most of these authors would be the first to declare that, in our discipline, one cannot appropriate a concept, especially a key concept, without accepting its consequences and the prerequisites that depend on the theory that forged it and from which it cannot be extracted. I am not defending any sectarian dogma or orthodoxy, but the confusion that so frequently arises in analytical discourse, as soon as it is applied to psychosis, creates a smokescreen that should be denounced: in such cases, Harlequin’s costume scarcely conceals the holes and hasty patching up that are all too apparent in all our interpretative models when applied to psychosis. Yet another slide into the theories on psychosis or the psychoses seems inevitably to be taking place: to bracket out the questions that psychosis poses in favour of a question that is more approachable and which therefore can be identified as the cause; this will allow us to declare all those questions to which we have no answer to be secondary. What we have here is a reductionist tendency, two characteristic examples of which are the Kleinian concept of projective identification and the Lacanian concept of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. It seems to me that such inappropriate concepts adopt, without knowing it, a similar position of rejection concerning the specificity of a message that embarrasses and disturbs. Like the road to hell, the roads of theory are paved with good intentions: they cannot hide the extent to which a will-to-knowledge displays a lack of respect for the individual on whom one imposes an interpretation that merely repeats, in a different form, the violence and abuse of power of an earlier discourse. It seems to me that nowadays psychosis very often serves interests that have nothing to do with it; all too often when speaking in the name of the mad, one is merely denying them once again any right to make themselves heard. One uses language that one imputes to them in order to show how well founded is a particular discipline, ideology or struggle, which actually concerns the interests of the nonmad, or of those who claim to be so. The apologia of madness, the apologia of the duty not to intervene and not to cure are modern forms of rejection and exclusion that we do not even have the courage to recognise, which makes them at least as oppressive and harmful as their predecessors. If we are to approach the frontier of madness, we must agree in advance to move into that place where a drama is being played out for which the observer, without exception, pays neither with his pain nor his reason, and also to recognise that we cannot expect too much of our adopted theories. This last statement is a warning addressed to my readers: my reflections on psychosis do not avoid the danger of making the theoretical construction on which they are based, and without which they could not have been formulated, seem more complete than in fact it is.
