ABSTRACT
During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.' Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis.
Freud's famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber is central to Lacan's analysis. In demonstrating the many ways that the psychotic is `inhabited, possessed by language', Lacan draws upon Schreber's own account of his psychosis and upon Freud's notes on this 'case of paranoia'. The analysis of language is both fascinating and enlightening.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |56 pages
Introduction to the Question of the Psychoses
chapter |13 pages
Introduction to the question of the psychoses
chapter |13 pages
The meaning of delusion
chapter |15 pages
The Other and psychosis
chapter |13 pages
“I've just been to the butcher's”
part |101 pages
Thematics and Structure of the Psychotic Phenomenon
chapter |14 pages
On a god who does not deceive and one who does
chapter |16 pages
The psychotic phenomenon and its mechanism
chapter |13 pages
The imaginary dissolution
chapter |15 pages
The symbolic sentence
chapter |13 pages
On nonsense and the structure of God
chapter |13 pages
On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle
chapter |15 pages
On the rejection of a primordial signifier
part |86 pages
On the Signifier and the Signified
chapter |12 pages
The hysteric's question
chapter |10 pages
The hysteric's question (II): What is a woman?
chapter |13 pages
The signifier, as such, signifies nothing
chapter |10 pages
On primordial signifiers and the lack of one
chapter |8 pages
Secretaries to the insane
chapter |8 pages
Metaphor and metonymy (I): “His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful”1
chapter |9 pages
Metaphor and metonymy (II): Signifying articulation and transference of the signified
part |79 pages
The Environs of the Hole