ABSTRACT
The central concepts of the Freudian-Lacanian clinical structures are the subject, the Other, and the object—and their interrelations are what produces the clinical patterns of desire. Lacanian clinical diagnostics, therefore, does not rely on symptoms as objective indicators but turns to the text of the patient as a reflection of styles of reality construction. The way in which patients use language—indeed, how they position themselves in it—reveals the different modes in which desire is construed in the clinical diagnostic structures. Perverse people’s objectal attitude blocks their ability to have fantasies and hence also their capacity for sexual activity between subjects, which relies on the existence of a fantasy that creates a gap between them. For Freud, the clinical structures were like so many points on the oedipal continuum; Lacan translated these terms into a logical language of elements in a structure.
