Translation (from Colette Soler's "Psychosis: The Unconscious Open to the Sky") - Autism and Paranoia (original) (raw)

FROM DE CLÉRAMBAULT’S THEORY OF MENTAL AUTOMATISM TO LACAN’S THEORY OF THE PSYCHOTIC STRUCTURE

In 1966, in a paper on those who have influenced his work, Jacques Lacan suggested that his concept of ‘paranoid knowledge’ and his structural approach to psychoanalysis were closely linked to the work of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault. This article examines both of these points. Starting with an introduction to de Clérambault, focusing on his concept ‘mental automatism,’ the link between ‘mental automatism’ and ‘paranoid knowledge’ is discussed. Loyalty to Henri Claude and conflicts around theoretical and clinical issues seem to lie at the basis of Lacan’s initial neglect of his conceptual indebtedness to de Clérambault. Second, the author discusses the presumed connection between mental automatism and Lacan’s structural psychoanalytic theory, which Lacan did not elaborate. It is argued that from a structural perspective, mental automatism comes down to a rupture in the continuity of the signifying chain, which provokes the disappearance of the subject. Furthermore, Lacan’s theory implies the hypothesis that manifestations of mental automatism are determined by a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, where questions related to existence cannot be addressed in a stable way. Lacanian theory thus retained de Clérambault’s notion of a rupture in mental life that lies at the basis of psychosis, but replaced his biological framework with the dimension of the subject as produced through speech.

Schizophrenia, schemata and semiotics

www.fPaS.at, 2020

In this lecture I will make an attempt to explicate the extent that Melanie Klein has opened the semiotization of psychoanalysis, which "sign structure" imagos or schemata have (namely a "stagnant" or "stagnating" one) and nevertheless how these take a role for or in mature sign systems (in the sense of Charles Sanders Peirce). Here an interesting tendency becomes apparent: While so-called "character disorders" are characterized by the fact that schemata become somewhat of a "bracket" that "encompasses" mature characters, schemata in schizophrenia and delusional disorders "infiltrate" into the (mature) signs and occupy index or icon positions. The mentioned "branches", "diagrams" etc. refer to the German version of this lecture, which is available under https://app.thebrain.com/brains/e6e0d2e3-8333-40fc-89bd-e1b1ff6e9bbb/thoughts/d1ddc329-34ee-40d9-aa21-d880ebbf08d4/notes Since these references are not relevant for an overall understanding of the lecture, a translation and transformation of those parts to which reference was made is not realized yet. German-speaking readers should nevertheless have the opportunity to follow these references. Klein's "semiotization" of psychoanalysis 1 Melanie Klein's reflections on human beings and the development of thinking and experience begins with the-newly born-child and the mother's breast. The latter is of such relevance because these essential moments, such as food intake and the "(sucking) encounter" are linked to the breast. 2 The little person's first relationship to the world unfolds accordingly around the breast-and will be a "projective-identifying" one. The breast is not only a source of food: precisely because it is, it can also, in its absence, become a source of hunger and thus of "the bad". It thus becomes a place from which the baby gets something, but to which it can also "outsource" its own negative emotion-of a kind of "attribution" in which the own emotion is projectively identified with its trigger. 3 This reference and the relationship that goes with it, according to Klein, is deposited in the person as an "imago", i.e. as a kind of "emotional image", which is activated later in life, for example, when someone reminds one of the mother: a projective-identifying reference with all its qualities is then established to this person. 4 It is interesting that Klein has thus theoretically applied the essential components of a semiotics or sign theory: The imago is a sign with which someone-repeating his own, childlike-emotional interpretation practice-interprets and refers to an object with a certain (projective-identifying) reference. 5 Thus a "rudimentary semiotics" is designed around which Klein's and Bion's psychoanalysis develops further and further, but also gradually moves further away from the discussion about the unconscious.