Lacan's Introduction of Foreclosure
It was however a third Freudian term, "Verwerfung", that came to the fore when Lacan took up the cudgels against Laforgue again three decades later, in his third seminar on the psychoses, and 'used the French word forclusion (fore-closure) to translated the German term Verwerfung, previously rendered in French as rejet (repudiation)'. When he first made public his use of the term (in 1959), he announced it very cautiously: 'Let us extract from several of Freud's texts a term that is sufficiently articulated in them to...designate in them a function of the unconscious that is distinct from the repressed. Let us take as demonstrated the essence of my seminar on the psychoses, namely, that this term refers to...psychosis: this term is Verwerfung (foreclosure)'.
Ignoring over Pinchon's role in foreclosure's introduction, as part of his 'victory over Laforgue he attributed to Freud the discovery of a process (foreclosure) and the invention of a concept (Verwerfung) that Freud had not originated at all'; and he tied foreclosure firmly into 'our theory of the signifier' which he also attributed to Freud (though admitting at least that 'Freud says this all the more in that he does not know that he is saying it fifty years before the linguists'). Here as elsewhere, his critics would suggest, 'Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him' - so that "foreclosure" in Lacan's sense is one of the 'many times...he used to attribute to Freud innovations that were really his own'.
Read more about this topic: Foreclosure (psychoanalysis)
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