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Schreber's Memoirs Of My Mental Illness

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Lacan draw on Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness and Freud’s in-depth exploration of the same book for formulating his theory about psychosis. Being distinct from neurosis and perversion, psychosis is brought about by the foreclosure of the master signifier, the Name-of-the-Father. Such a signifier is closely related to language. And it is the malfunction of language as such that leads to psychosis. Fink states “In psychosis, the paternal metaphor fails to function and the structure of language…is not assimilated.”36 The paternal metaphor must make meaning and signification possible, the lack of which affects all Symbolic order and pushes the subject toward psychosis. The psychotic subject never enters the Symbolic order proper. All the intersubjective relations with the Other and others are shaking. According to Lacan, “the psychotic is the martyr of the unconscious.”37 The unconscious is structured like language and the psychotic subject suffers from the law and order of the language and unconscious. The psychotic’s unconscious in not tamed and ordered. Lacan adds “psychosis consists of a …show more content…

Being an attempt at recovery, delusional system provides the psychotic subject with making and establishing new relations with other things and other people. Lacan contends “It is the lack of the Name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the hole that it opens up in the signified, sets off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a delusional metaphor.”46 Delusional metaphor is one probable reaction to foreclosure. It is an attempt to fix the hole in the Symbolic order. Lacan states “a hole, a fault, a point of rupture, in the structure of the external world finds itself patched over by psychotic fantasy.”47 The psychotic fantasy refers to the delusional metaphor and

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