On Psychosis

What gets lost is the basic paradox of the symbolic which at the same time involves the expulsion of the Real from the symbolic and the rejection of s signifier; that is, in the case of the symbolic Other, external and internal limitation coincide, the symbolic order can only emerge as delimited from the Real if it is also delimited from itself, missing/excluding a central part of itself, non-identical with itself. There is thus no Ausstossung without a Verwerfung - the price the symbolic has to pay in order to delimit itself from the Real is the truncation of its own being. That is what Lacan is aiming at with his formula that there is no big Other, no Other of the Other - and, as late Lacan recognized very well, this implies that, at a certain most basic level, we are all psychotics. However, one should be more precise here: the signifier which is foreclosed is not simply missing, lacking, but it is a signifier which stand in for the barred A, for the lack of signifier, for the incompleteness-inconsistency of the symbolic field. What this means is that the problem of the psychotic is not that he dwells in a truncated symbolic order (Other), but, on the contrary, that he dwells in a 'complete' Other, an Other which lacks the inscription of its lack.

There is thus no need to posit two phases - first symbolization, the rise of the primary battery of signifiers, through the expulsion of the Real, then the exclusion of the signifier. The two processes are one and the same, and psychosis comes afterwards, in a second stage, when - or if - the signifier which stands for the very incompleteness-inconsistency of the Other, which registers this incompleteness, is foreclosed.

In what precise sense, then, does that which is foreclosed from the symbolic return in the Real? Let us take the verbal hallucinations: their context is massively symbolic, and they are, at the level of their ordinary meaning, fully understood by the (psychotic) subject; so, again, in what sense do they belong to the Real" Two interconnected features make them real: isolation and certitude. They are foreclosed in the precise sense that they don't 'exist' for the subject: they ex-sist, persevere and impose themselves outside the symbolic texture. They are isolated from their symbolic context which is, by definition, the context of trust and suppositiion, the context in which every presence arises against the background of its possible absence, and every certitude is accompanied by a possible doubt - in other words, the context of certitude ultimately has to rely on a basic wager to trust the symbolic order. In religion proper, one does not know G_d; one takes the risk of trusting Him, believing in Him. A psychotic, on the contrary, procedes like the Slovene punk group Laibach, who, in aninterview in the US about their relationto G_d, answered with the reference to the "In G_d we trust' printed on every dollar bill: "Like you Americans, we believe that G_d exists, but unlike you, we do not trust Him.' Or as Balmes put it succinctly, it is not that psychotics believe IN the voices they hear, they simply BELIEVE THEM. This is why psychotics have absolute certitude about the voices they hear: they do not trust them, of course - they take them for evil voices, voices which want to hurt them - but they simply know that these voices are real, and it is this very absolute certitude that makes the voices real....

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...That is to say being and lack-of-being coincide, they are two sides of the same coin - the clearance of the horizon within which things fully 'are', or exist, only emerges on condition that something is excluded ('sacrificed') from it, that something in it is 'missing at its own place'. More precisely, what characterizes a symbolic universe is a minimal gap between the elements and the places they occupy: the two dimensions do not directly coincide, as is the case in the flat positivity of the Real, which is why, in the differential order of signifiers, absence as such can count as a positive feature (as Sherlock Holmes put it in the immortal line from 'The Silver Blaze', what was curious about the curious dog in the night-time was that the dog did nothing, that it did not bark when one would have expected it to do so). And Lacan's basic 'ontological' hypothesis is that, if this minimal gap between elements and their places is to occur, something - some element - has to be radically (constitutively) excluded; Lacan's name for this object which is always (by definition, structurally) missing at its own place, which coincides with its own lack, is, of course, the objet petit a as the object cause of desire or surplus-enjoyment, a paradoxical object which gives body to the very lack-of-being. The objet petit a is that which should be excluded from the framework of reality, that whose exclusion constitutes and sustains the frame of reality. What happens in psychosis is precisely the inclusion of this object into the framework of reality: it appears within reality as the hallucinated object (the voice or gaze which haunts a paranoiac, etc.), with the logical consequence that this inclusion leads to the loss of reality, that the subject's 'sense of reality' disintigrates.

Throughout his work, Lacan varies Heidegger's motif of language as the house of being: language in not man's creation and instrument, it is man who 'dwells' in language - 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject.' Lacan's 'paranoid' twist, his additional Freudian turn of the screw, comes with his characterization of this house as a torture-house. In light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language. Man does not dwell in a mere 'prison-house of language' (the title of Fredric Jameson's early book on structuralism), he dwells in a torture-house of language: the entire range of psychopathologies deployed by Freud, from conversion-symptoms inscribed into the body up to total psychotic breakdowns, are the scars of this permanent torture, so many signs of an original and irremediable gap between the subject and language, so many signs that man can never be at home in his own home...

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Ticklish Subject"