ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a Lacanian perspective on the psychosis of John Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose life was recounted in Sylvia Nasar’s celebrated biography A Beautiful Mind (1998), which was the basis of Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning film (2001) of the same name. I begin by offering a critical engagement with an existing psychoanalytic account of Nash’s life, namely that advanced in several papers by Donald Capps, who alleges, among other things, that Nash was a highly narcissistic personality. I take Capps’s work to be indicative of a series of questionable assumptions that an overly stylized – if not derivative – form of psychoanalytic explanation routinely engenders in its descriptions of psychosis. Conceptualizations of this sort invariably approach psychosis in ways which are, if not explicitly, then implicitly devaluing of psychotic subjects. Such accounts are, as a general rule, strongly focused on the cognitive and psychological deficits of people with psychosis. They are, in addition, powerfully juvenilizing inasmuch as they tirelessly reiterate notions of regression, fixation and primal defenses. The result of this conceptualization, I argue, is that psychotic subjects are demoted to what is effectively a second-class order of subjectivity. Both by critiquing the explanations mobilized by Capps and by advancing a Lacanian conceptualization of certain of Nash’s psychotic features, I hope to show both that a Lacanian orientation is not grounded in such a devaluing framework of ideas and that it opens up a series of enabling – indeed, emancipatory – perspectives on psychotic suffering.
