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Abstract
Jacques Lacan was one of the most controversial analysts of our time. He lectured and practiced in Paris from 1936 to 1980. Lacan’s radical return to Freud in the 1950s involved a return to the importance of the unconscious, as opposed to the emphasis on the ego; he stated that the unconscious is structured like a language. Lacan’s own interest in psychosis as a practising psychiatrist predates his psychoanalytic interest. In his third seminar on The Psychoses (1956), Lacan approached psychoses with reference to the subject of speech and language, dialectics of communication and Hegelian recognition.
This paper explores how Lacan’s idea of the ‘ego as an imaginary identification’, ‘the foreclosure of the name of the father in psychosis’ with it’s adjacent ‘push to the woman’ are applied in a psychoanalytic treatment of a case of psychosis. In his last seminar ‘The Sinthome’ (1973) Lacan developed a new theory by referring to Joyce’s art and it’s function to aim at a fourth knot. The presentation of this clinical vignette will further illustrate how Lacan draws a distinction between ‘the Symbolic’, ‘the Imaginary’ and ‘the Real’ and how the patient’s own creative productions are functioning to repair the structural fault of the knotting of these three registers.
Notes
The title refers to St Wilgefortis, also known as Uncumber in England, the daughter of a pagan king. When her father wanted her to marry the King of Sicily, despite her vow of virginity, she prayed to God for help in resisting the marriage, whereupon she grew a beard and moustache. Her father was so furious he had her crucified in order to unite her with Jesus. A sculpture of her nailed to the cross, dated around 1730, is at display in the Loreto Convent in Prague.