The solidity of a clinical concept is measured by the effectiveness of its use, especially when it accounts for a field of phenomena for which there did not exist before an established map*. From this perspective, we can doubtlessly say that the concept of “ordinary psychoses”, coined by Jacques-Alain Miller at the end of the 90’s, has come to be an already established clinical concept, a concept of enormous effectiveness given its widely extended use since then in the Freudian Field… and beyond. The ordinary psychoses account for a series of phenomena that at times go unnoticed for their apparent normality, but that when listened to from the perspective of Lacan’s teaching indicate the structural conditions that we have learnt to locate in the field of psychosis. Discreet body events, subtle plumb lines of meaning in the sliding of signification, veiled and allusive phenomena, minimalist substitutes in which the subject sustains the fragile stability of its reality. These phenomena were there, for all to see, but in their frequency they were confused with the landscape of normality. As Jacques-Alain Miller himself indicated in the today well-known “Antibes Convention”: “we have passed from surprise to rarity, from rarity to frequency”.[1] That is, we have passed from the surprise at the encounter with the exceptional and the extraordinary to the registering of phenomena that by their frequency had already become familiar to us.
But precisely where the prejudice of normality
operates, that fantasy that acquires in our days the category of statistical
truth, what is stake is always the encountering of the strangeness of the
clinical trait in its most singular detail. In this way, the ordinary psychoses
reveal themselves to us now as a kind of purloined letter of our clinic: they
were so open to the view of all that were hidden to that of each. A slight
displacement of the clinical focus was enough to make apparent in these phenomena
the structure of the psychoses in their diverse forms of knotting, and to
reveal with this change of perspective that, in the clinic, the strangest was
inhabiting the most familiar. The ordinary psychoses are also in this way the Unheimlich (the strangely familiar) of
our clinic. And it is not infrequent to obtain in the practicing psychoanalyst
this affect linked to the Unheimlich
when the strangely familiar dimension of these phenomena is pointed out.
So, if the concept of
the ordinary psychoses has come to delimit the map of what was until then a terra incognita of our clinic, this is
also because it shows that the orography of its terrain is present in every one
of the continents previously defined by classical cartography, the cartography
distributed according to the categories of psychosis, neurosis, and perversion.
Put differently, the map here creates the territory before representing it,
even to the point of becoming confused with it. Which is also to say that,
before it has a function of the representation of reality, language – including
that of the clinic – is knotted in the very operation of the construction and
perception of this reality. This is something as strange as it is familiar to
someone formed in the most classical Lacanian orientation: perception eclipses
structure precisely where this structure reveals the way in which this
perception is constructed.
We are now going to consider the nature of the terrain
that we know today with the term “ordinary psychoses”. Imagine a kind of Google Earth of the clinic in which we
can visualise the terrain and the geographical locations with their names and
borders. We find here clearly established, following our classical clinic, the
two great territories of the neuroses and the psychoses, with their borders and
sub-borders, with hysteria and obsession on one side and paranoia and
schizophrenia on the other. We can also locate melancholy and the perversions,
although at times they blur a little bit more at some of their borders in order
to reveal their condition of traits that can be shared by different countries.
Melancholic traits exist, in effect, in various places of the delimited
continents, just like traits of perversion, to take up again the theme of an
International Encounter of the Freudian Field from decades ago.
If we now write
“ordinary psychoses” in this imaginary search engine of the clinical Google Earth, in order to see how the
successive zooms lead us to a precise location, then surprise, surprise!, the
list of places that appear in the search window becomes longer and longer,
until it presumably becomes infinite. To such a degree that it would seem that
the “ordinary psychoses” can be today in any part of the map, without it being
possible to either reduce their description to a trait or constitute them as a
self-enclosed continent. If we click on any one of these names, it leads us
however to already known places. And if we continue to verify the list, perhaps
we can then conclude that ordinary psychosis is in reality Google Earth itself as a whole, the very system of representation
with which we try to locate the places of our classical clinic. It is a clinic
made up of discreet traits, which count because of the difference that exists
between each one of them, in the style of the structural system of language (la langue) that we know since Saussure’s
linguistics. But the traits are so discreet here – allow me the equivocalness
of this word – so subtle, that they disappear from the general view and only
appear in the singularity of each case, and each time in a distinct manner. It
is difficult to construct a general map and a precise search engine with these
conditions of representation, without, as we said, the place in question that
we are looking for finally becoming the very system of representation within
which we operate.
We should immediately say that this paradox does not
seem at all strange to the readers of Jacques Lacan. It is present from a very
early point in his teaching. He himself read his entry into psychoanalysis, which
carries the title of his famous 1932 thesis, On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality, by
saying a few years later that personality is
paranoia, and that it is for this reason that there are not in fact relations
between the one and the other. There is nothing more normal than personality,
nothing less discreet too, if we take the term “discreet” with the
equivocalness that we have pointed out.
But does the category of “ordinary psychoses”, which
seemed to us so effective in its use, not then evaporate now precisely because
of the extension and effectiveness of this use? Is the same not happening to us
as what Lacan drew attention to in the 50’s when he studied the use of
interpretation in the analytic medium starting from the observations of Edward
Glover? I remind you of his indication concerning this in his Écrit on “The Direction of the Treatment
and the Principles of Its Power”. Edward Glover, Lacan writes, lacking the term
of the signifier in order to operate in analytic experience, “finds
interpretation everywhere, being unable to stop it anywhere, even in the
banality of a medical prescription.”[2]
Our confusion of languages would doubtlessly
constitute such a going astray, a confusion that would add itself to the
current clinical Babel, a clinic that itself seems to disappear in the world of
increasingly disordered nosographies, further fed today by the crisis of the
DSM system. It is well known that the crisis of this system, in its new
versions, has extended in such a way the descriptions of the pathological in
everyday life that there is no longer a single corner of human existence that
is not diagnosed as a possible “disorder”. Up to the point that someone has
said that, if one doesn’t find oneself described in one of the pages of the
manual, this is because one really must have a serious “disorder”.
We are dealing in reality with an error of perspective
homologous to the one we described with the Google
Earth model. With the introduction of the category of the “ordinary psychoses”
into the clinic we find ourselves – as Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out in the
very moment in which he introduced the term – “divided between two points of
view that are contrasting, but that do not exclude one another”.[3]
From the first perspective, which we can order using Lacan’s first teaching,
there is a discontinuity between neurosis and psychosis, there are more or less
precise borders, there are discrete and differential elements, tributaries of
the logic with which the Names-of-the-Father function, and of the logic of the
signifier which operates in a discretional way, by means of the relative
differences between the elements. When there is a border on the map, there are
discretional differences between the territories, there is also a possible reciprocity
between them in order to define what one is and is not in relation to the
other. From the second perspective, which we can order using Lacan’s last
teaching, it is rather the continuity between territories that is highlighted,
what makes them contiguous, as two modes of response to the same real, as two
modes of jouissance confronted with the same difficulty of being. We are no
longer concerned in this second perspective with the establishment of borders, but
instead with the verification of knottings and unknottings between continuous
threads.
In this way, we can say that there is no proper
clinical description of the ordinary psychoses according to the classical model,
which orders their categories starting from a series of traits present in the
interior of a more or less well-delimited set. It would be impossible then to
include such a category in the logic of the DSM or the usual diagnostic
manuals, where the traits are enumerated that must be present for each clinical
category. From the descriptive point of view, the ordinary psychoses could be
better defined by a trait that we find to be lacking, never the same one in any
case, by that which we feel to be lacking in relation to the classical
psychoses, but also by that which we find to be lacking in relation to the
classical neuroses. We find ourselves obliged to define them, then, more than
ever, case by case, and always according to the context in which we find this
lack.
If you allow me to put it like this, the category of
“ordinary psychoses” then includes the categories that don’t include themselves:
it looks like a hysteria but it isn’t a hysteria, it doesn’t include the traits
that we know of hysteria, it looks like an obsession but it doesn’t include the
traits of obsession, it looks like a paranoia but it doesn’t include the traits
of paranoia… This transforms the ordinary psychoses into a kind of Russell’s
paradox, the well-known paradox of the set that includes the sets that don’t
include themselves. There are various ways of illustrating Russell’s paradox,
one is that of the catalogue that includes all the catalogues that don’t
include themselves, without being able to finally conclude with the question of
whether the first catalogue includes itself or not.
In this way,
the category of the ordinary psychoses explodes the diagnostic system of the
structural clinic. Something similar occurs with them as occurred in the first
Freudian clinic with the introduction of the “actual neuroses”, the neuroses
that Freud distinguished from the classical psychoneuroses, and that are
defined by the lack of an infantile history and the lack of a symbolic
overdetermination of symptoms. Every neurosis was an actual neurosis until
these two structural elements were found that didn’t stop not writing themselves…
up until the contingent encounter that decanted their signification.
Let us say that the only mode of verifying this fact,
the only mode of putting to the test this real that doesn’t stop not writing
itself in every case, is the very structure of the analytic experience, the
structure that is thrown into the light of day in the phenomenon of the
transference.
Put differently and to conclude: the ordinary
psychoses are only clinically ordered when their phenomena are precipitated,
ordered, in the logic of the transference. It is only there that the ordinary
psychoses are revealed as ordered under transference.
1 comentari:
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