Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

If what characterizes the psychotic’s psychic life is his unmediated relation with

the Real-of-language—the letter or, to put it with one of Lacan’s definitions of psy-

chosis in Seminar III, “the signifier in its dimension as a pure signifier”^23 —then

we are also obliged to specify graphs 4. 1 and 4. 2 above. They should in fact also

take into account the distinction between the individual dimension of the Sym-

bolic (that of speech) and the universal dimension of the Symbolic (that of lan-

guage), the way in which the former structurally depends on the latter.

Graph 4. 3 indicates how, in psychosis, there is no Name-of-the-Father to de-

limit the field of the subject’s speech. In other words, the foreclosure of the pri-

mordial signifier makes the barrier between speech and language collapse.^24

Hence, the universal dimension of the Symbolic into which the psychotic is not

able to actively introduce himself is to be regarded as that which “inhabits” and

“possesses” him^25 in the guise of the Real-of-language. On the other hand, in

nonpsychotic subjects, signifying chains are ordered in speech by the Name-of-

the-Father. This is what I schematize in graph 4. 4. The Name-of-the-Father en-

circles individual speech, and thus allows the active entrance of the subject into

the universal dimension of the Symbolic. There still remain signifying chains—

“portions” of the universal Symbolic—that are not directly symbolized by the in-

dividual Symbolic of the subject but couldnevertheless potentially be symbolized

by him. It is in this context that one should take up the transindividual notion of

the unconscious as that which is “outside,” and hence allows all letters to “arrive

the subject of the real (other)

S

Real-of-language

pure Real

N.O.F.

Sy as speech

Graph 4. 3