ABSTRACT
The psychosis Lacan worked on, whether paranoia of Schreber or schizophrenia of Joyce, could be called extraordinary in the sense of absence or foreclosure of the paternal metaphor as distinct from the clinic of neurosis. Psychosis in the classical sense and not so clear-cut a category in the relation to neurosis. The value of the symptom as a message addressed to the other is decreased by the fact that the symptom in psychosis has a completely different basis. In psychosis, the relation between the analyst and the analysand can become reversed and the analyst can take his guidance from heeding to the psychotic subject. Lacan found in Joyce's early novels fragments that testify to Joyce's experience of psychosis as untriggered. It had to do with the beatings and torments of the body he was subjected to by his school mates who according to Joyce tied him to a barbed wire fence and then beat him up.
