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The Psychoses 1955-1956 (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 3 / III)

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Lacan's seminars are superior to his articles because he clearly is addressing an audience, and needs to make himself understood, but he has already anticipated all of his students questions, as if he could read their minds: "I know what you're thinking." The argument of the third seminar is easy to summarize: the psychotic, because foreclosed from the father, faces a hole in the imaginary that is filled by the symbolic (or is it the other way around?), hence the hallucinations and voices. The psychotic always imagines that somewhere the big Other resides, in this world, like the man who broke into the US capital because there was a time machine inside that was trying to control his mind. The psychotic is in fact unable to distinguish the small from the big other. Lacan is always thought to be a little mad himself, something of a fraud, "il gagne beaucoup d'argent," and even Heidegger gave up reading Ecrits because he couldn't make sense of it, and he does make something of a display of his learning (not so much in this seminar). That said, there is something to Lacan, and eventually he will get his due, and outside the narrow circle of his devotees.

This is an essential book for understanding Lacan's overall theoretical framework. Despite the esoteric sounding title, it is not just for specialists and doesn't just treat the subject of psychosis. Lacan reviews and repeats here with greater clarity the theories he developed in his first two seminars.

The work of Jacques Lacan is infamous for the often obtuseness of its language and presentation. It is often said that the reader must work hard at Lacan to reach a glimmer of understanding. The work of Dr Russell Grigg as translator to this edition certainly gives the reader a head start. Dr Grigg address the work of Lacan from a new perspective of the 21st century, nolonger happy for the work to remain arcane and cloistered from the reading public, but he throws open the windows of further understanding for those willing to look and read closer the work of this French master. An excellent work.

not just psychosis, but also delusion and paranoia. lacan's starting point is freud's case study of daniel paul schreber, and the text freud used, schreber's memoirs of my nervous illness, a book written by judge schreber 'during the last months of his confinement....an extremely trustworthy and extraordinarily composed' book, lacan said. also 'you will appreciate the courteous tone, the clarity and order.'

lacan himself was courteous, which lends emphathy to the subjects with whom he works, whether his subjects be deceased or fictional characters within some text.

lacan spoke of continuous conversation, of the internal monologue as continuous with the external dialogue, and why it is that analysts, and maybe readers, who for whatever reason read psychoanalytical textts, can say that the unconscious is also the discourse of the Other. 'if we admit the existence of the unconscious as freud elaborates it, we have to suppose that this sentence, this symbolic construction, covers all human lived experience like a web, that it's always there, more or less latent, and that it's one of the necessary elements of human adaptation. the fact that this may happen without one's knowledge might have been described as outlandish for a long time, but for us, this isn't so...'

lacan also includes within the topic of consciousness the act of reading, a form of internal monologue. and for a great many pages of this book i was aware of the ghost of kant and his phenomenon.

of course, there's much more. what i write here doesn't pretend to approach a sketch toward listening and understanding, which is what lacan wanted to teach here.