Foreclosure (psychoanalysis) - Lacan's Interpretations of Psychosis

Lacan's Interpretations of Psychosis

The problematic Lacan sought to address with the twin tools of foreclosure and the signifier was that of the difference between psychosis and neurosis, as manifested in and indicated by language usage. It was common analytic ground that 'when psychotics speak they always have some meanings that are too fixed, and some that are far too loose...they have a different relation to language, and a different way of speaking from neurotics'. Freud, following Bleuler and Jung had pointed to 'a number of changes in speech...in schizophrenics...words are subjected to the same process as that which makes the dream'. Lacan used foreclosure to explain why.

For Lacan, 'Foreclosure is a primordial defense because it does not act on a signifier that is already inscribed within the chain of signifiers, but rather, it rejects the inscription itself....This operation of repudiation especially affects highly meaningful signifiers such as the Name-of-the-Father, the guarantor of castration. Lacan viewed the foreclosure of this signifier as the characteristic mechanism of psychosis'.

Lacan considered the father - later Lacanians might use the terms "fatherer", "motherer" - to play a vital role in breaking the initial mother/child duality and introducing the child to the wider world of culture, language, institutions and social reality - the Symbolic world - the fatherer being 'the human being who stands for the law and order that the mother plants in the life of the child...widens the child's view of the world'. The result in normal development is 'proper separation from the motherer, as marked out by the Names-of-the-father' - by, one might say, the internalised father. Thus Lacan postulates the existence of a paternal function (the "Name of the Father" or "primordial signifier") which allows the realm of the Symbolic to be bound to the realms of the Imaginary and the Real. This function prevents the developing child from being engulfed by its mother and allows him/her to emerge as a separate entity in his/her own right. It is a symbol of parental authority (a general symbol that represents the power of father of the Oedipus complex) that brings the child into the realm of the Symbolic by forcing him/her to act and to verbalise as an adult. As a result, the three realms are integrated in a way that is conducive to the creation of meaning and successful communication by means of what Lacan calls a Borromean knot.

In some cases, the paternal function is foreclosed from the Symbolic order. When this happens, the realm of the Symbolic is insufficiently bound to the realm of the Imaginary and failures in meaning may occur (the Borromean knot becomes undone and the three realms completely disconnected), with 'a disorder caused at the most personal juncture between the subject and his sense of being alive'. Psychosis is experienced after some environmental trigger in the form of a signifier which the individual cannot assimilate means that 'the Name-of-the-Father, verworfen, foreclosed... called into symbolic opposition to the subject'. The fabric of the individual's reality is ripped apart and no meaningful Symbolic sense can be made of experience. 'Absence of transcendence of the Oedipus places the subject under the regime of foreclosure or non-distinction between the symbolic and the real'; and psychotic delusions or hallucinations are the consequent result of the individual's striving to account for what he/she experiences.