Lacan, Psychosis, and Phenomenological Psychopathology

Abstract

The aim of this article is to assess the Lacanian account of psychosis from the standpoint of phenomenological psychopathology–especially perspectives from Minkowski, Binswanger, and Blankenburg; recent self-disorder models; and Sass’s Madness and Modernism (1992/2017). The article begins by summarizing Lacan’s classical account of psychosis as deriving from “foreclosure” of the symbolic realm or “name-of-the-father”–a view put forward in the 1950s in Seminar III: The Psychoses and a key essay. Next is considered this classical account’s failure to account for what might be called the alienated, agentic, and accurate (or insightful) aspects of schizophrenic experience. These three aspects are central to the above-mentioned phenomenological accounts; they are also consistent with the views Lacan put forward in the 1970s. In this sense, much that is intimated in Lacan’s enigmatic later seminars may be worked out in greater detail within the early as well as the contemporary phenomenological tradition, in ways that deserve to be incorporated within the Lacanian schools. The explanatory adequacy of two different accounts–one emphasizing “foreclosure,” the other “hyperreflexivity”–are then compared by applying them to characteristic anomalies of the lived-body and the experience of language. The article concludes by mentioning several features of the general Lacanian perspective that could enrich the phenomenological approach.