Reading Psychosis

by Claudio Rosso 

  Psychosis is one of the three main diagnostic categories in Lacanian psychoanalysis together with Neurosis and Perversion. This is a systematization and extension of Freud’s work. I will summarize Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas about the etiology of psychosis and then focus on the delusional mechanism in paranoia.

Then, I will analyze the outreach of Jean Allouch’s theorization about the nature of delusional interpretation and his concept of “transliteration”.

Freud

  Freud defined the mechanism of psychosis for the first time in 1894 In “The Neuro-psychoses of Defence”.  He describes the defence modalities used by the ego to deal with an incompatible representation. 

The first of theses defence mechanism consists in the substitution of the incompatible representation by another which can be tolerated. This kind of process can be observed in obsessional neurosis.

In the second, the incompatible representation is object of hysteric conversion.  Freud (1894, p58) describes the third as a rejection (verwerfung) of this representation together with its affect.  The ego behaves as if the representation had never occurred at all, there’s no access to that representation:

“There is, however, a much more energetic and successful kind of defence. Here, the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea had never occurred to the ego at all. But from the moment at which this has been successfully done the subject is in a psychosis, which can only be classified as ‘hallucinatory confusion”

Freud states that the ego separates itself from the representation, but this representation is always associated with a fragment of reality hence in this rejection of the representation there’s also a separation from a part of reality.

  Freud constructed his theorizations progressively comparing Psychosis with Neurosis.

In the Schreber Case (1911) he presents the distinctive mechanism involved in psychosis: projection. In neurosis what has been repressed returns from the inside whereas in psychosis what has been rejected returns in the real, comes back from without. He bases his argument on a text written by a psychotic subject: “Memoirs of Nerve patient” published in 1903 by  Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber.

Freud had just explored the field of infantile libido and was about to elaborate his conception of narcissism (1914).  In the Schreber Case he describes psychosis as a form of   loss of reality and a regression of the libido to the ego and the construction of a delusion as an attempt at recovery. In this particular case the content of the delusion can be summarized as follows: Schreber had been asked to save the world but that would only be possible after his transformation into a woman.

According to Freud in psychosis there is a homosexual drive which is unbearable; therefore the object formally loved turns into a tormenting and persecutory figure. 

Lacan’s perspective

Following Freud’s work Lacan takes the perspective of narcissism and the verwerfung (as foreclosure) to base his theory of the failure of the paternal metaphor as the base of every psychotic process. In other words: the foreclosure of the signifier of the Name-of- the-father.

  Lacan refers to the “paternal metaphor” and calls “name-of-the-father” to the paternal symbolic function.  This function consists in the substitution of the original signifier of the mother’s desire by the signifier of the name-of-the-father.  In the intersubjective relationship between the mother and the child, the latter realizes that the mother wishes something else, not just himself, but if there is no representation of an authority which can intervene in this mother child dyad we are in the field of psychosis.

Narcissism is the central imaginary relationship between human beings: one loves himself in the other. This erotic identification also involves an aggressive tension. This is what Lacan conceptualized in the Mirror Stage (1953-54).  The child identifies with his own image. This image is his ego [moi], as long as there is a third party to recognize that.

On the one hand this allows the child to differentiate his own image from the other. This prevents the erotic or aggressive fight which may appear if the only possible choice is “him or myself”.  The third party is needed to regulate this fundamental instability of the imaginary balance with the other.  This symbolic “third party” is what Lacan calls The-name-of-the-father.  (Chemara, 1995, p354) 

  To understand this mechanism we have to refer to the entrance of the human subject to a symbolic world (a world of language) that pre exists the subject.

Lacan (1972-73) explains that “unconscious not only is everything repressed, that is, misrecognized by the subject after having been verbalized, but that behind the process of verbalization there must be admitted a primordial Bejahung, an admission in the sense of the symbolic.”

At a very early stage what the subject can refuse access to his symbolic is the thread of castration.

The delusion

 As said before Freud sees the delusion as a “reconstruction” caused by the loss of reality. It is an attempt at recovery, describing it as a symptom, a mechanism present in psychosis and neurosis.

For Lacan the delusion is self elaboration that compensates the effects of the foreclosure of the signifier of the name of the father.  The “delusional metaphor” allows the subject to deal with the consequences of this deficit in the symbolic.

Lacan focus on a very specific mechanism of the delusion: interpretation. This is the irreducible elementary phenomenon in paranoia.

The psychotic subject insists that “There is meaning”, what meaning he doesn’t know, but it comes to the foreground, it asserts itself, and for him it’s perfectly understandable. In the delusion there is an understandable kernel which is inaccessible and stagnant with respect to any dialectic. (Lacan, 1955-56)

Freud, S. (1894). The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899):

A localized signifier

  According to Lacan (cited in Allouch, 1984 p186) Freud  gives the Schreber text a Champolion – like deciphering.  He deciphers it in the same way hieroglyphics are deciphered.   Freud identifies “the birds of sheberian sky” with maids and from there “manages to stand all the signs of this language right side up again”   This language called “fundamental language” by Schreber.

Freud identifies this signifier as “localized” in a certain way. It is “written” and this writing allows reading all the possible statements. It enables us to read in a certain way, to reconstruct the text but also the language that it is made of.

This “deciphering” was necessary as its meaning is not accessible to immediate reading. This text “appeared·” to be similar to the usual writings. There is a logical structure and may be “coherent”, but Freud saw there was a difference.

Lacan warns us about not to try to understand in psychosis. “the difficulty of addressing the problem of paranoia arises precisely because it is situated on the place of understanding” (1955)The meaning is not immediately accessible, we need to “read” in a certain way. 

We are here within the realm of the interaction of signifiers. As a result of a missing signifier (The-name-of-the-father) signification is affected, but Freud identifies in this text that some signifiers function as a starting point to the construction of the delusion. The result is a text that may appear as coherent.

  Jean Allouch (1984, p186) states that here “to read” is equivalent to “to decipher” and to consider the text as a cipher.

He sees the psychotic delusional interpretation as based on another reading. A reading (by the psychotic subject) of signifiers written in a particular way.  He describes this mechanism as a “transliteration”.

Transliteration and the delusional mechanism

Transliteration is defined as a representation of the characters of some alphabetic script (the "source script") by the characters of some other script (the "target script") (Arabtex, 2004).  Allouch compares this process with the “rébus”.

Chemara (1998) defines the rebus as a group of drawings, figures and words that represent (directly or  by their sounds) the words and phrases to be expressed.

A pictogram (like a hieroglyphic) does not refer to the thing they represent. It refers to something completely different but with an equivalent phonetic sound.

The phoneme that participates in a representation is enough to produce at least another one. The phoneme that corresponds to a real image anticipates other images.  “the homophonic articulation of a representation causes its loss but, at the same time, the appearance of many others” (Chemara, 1998, p105)

In this context the signifier value of the image doesn’t relate to its signification.

Freud observed this process in the dream-work: Things that appeared disconnected or apparently incoherent in the dream can be read taking into account the “rebus”: “…if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical.” (Freud, 1900)

Allouch (p187) gives a lot of examples but takes one as paradigmatic.

Let us consider the delusional interpretation mentioned several times by Guiraud taken from the observation of someone called M.: “Once again, when he saw ta nurse with a collar made of celluloid (celluloïd), arrived to the conclusion that the draughts game he was using had been sent from Germany by Lou Lou, his boss’ daughter.  (…) celluloid represents “c’ést Loulou Lloyd” (It is Lou Lou Lloyd) (Lloyd is the ship company that delivered the package)”

When this patient saw this “collar made of celluloid” an image of “celluloid” was presented, Allouch defines it as a “pictogram” of the celluloid.

In this delusional interpretation the celluloid pictogram is taken as something that writes a signifier in language. This signifier doesn’t refer to the object that the celluloid would be in itself but something that writes the signifier “c’est Loulou Lloyd” based on the homophony. 

According to Allouch the homophony involves an alphabetic  writing, therefore the celluloid pictogram writes in M’s interpretation, what can be written in a different way: “c’est Loulou Lloyd” This mechanism relates  two ways of writing: figurative and alphabetic.

  He concludes that this “writing of another writing” is a transliteration, and that shows that the interpretation called “delusional” is a matter of writing. 

In other words, this is a way of reading that doesn’t relate to comprehension but localizes a signifier separated from his value in the code.

Homophony.

  The role of homophony in unconscious processes was observed by Freud in many opportunities: In the Interpretation of Dreams  Freud (1900, p59) analyzes the role of homophony in the linking of dream images:  “Maury himself gives two excellent instances of dreams of his own in which dream-images were linked together merely through a similarity in the sound of words.”

Also when describing the choice of methods to attain the purposes of the dream-work: “we shall not be surprised to hear that it effected this replacement because of the magnificent piece of condensation that was made possible by the identity of sound of the English ‘from’ and the German adjective ‘fromm’ [‘pious’]” (Freud, 1900, p519).

And in the Schreber case: “This surprising sexualization of the state of heavenly bliss suggests the possibility that Schreber’s concept of the state of bliss is derived from a condensation of the two principal meanings of the German word ‘selig’ - namely, ‘dead’ and ‘sensually happy’.”(Freud, 1911, p162)

  The Longman dictionary of contemporary English defines homophone as “a word that sounds the same as another but is different in spelling, meaning, and origin ”:

“write” and “right” are examples of words that are homophones of each other in the English language.

The difference in spelling resides precisely in the fact that in most languages alphabetic writing doesn’t represent the sounds of the spoken word.

The most accurate representation of the spoken word can be found in phonetic symbols. The study of these symbols occurs when a second language is learnt and they establish a written register different to that of the alphabetical writing.  This register is usually ignored by the native speakers of a language.

 “In most languages the written text does not correspond to its pronunciation so that in order to describe correct pronunciation some kind of symbolic presentation is needed”(Sammy, 2004). This symbolic presentation can help us to understand  the nature of homophony. This “letters” are traces to represent the realm of the voice, to differentiate units. But there’s always something that cannot be symbolized “phonetic representation is not perfect as the speech signal is always continuous and phonetic notation always discrete. Different emotions and speaker characteristics are also impossible to describe with phonemes.” (Sammy, 2004)

  As we saw in the example of the celluloid, the homophony is not exact.  This is because it never is. Allouch differentiates assonance that is an imaginary phenomenon when we consider the writing as a transcription of the speech signal and homophony, a symbolic operation when transliteration acquires voice. 

Lacan .(1972-73) says that this is an admirable way to incarnate the signifier, but the signifier can not be limited to this phonematic support. and defines the letter as the localized structure of the signifier and  explains that meaning is not what we hear, but what we read in the signifiers we hear. 

Schreber

  We can find an example of the role of the homophony in psychosis following Schreber’s experience with the “miracle birds”.  There is a conflict with the miracle birds, they appear as dangerous and homophony seems to be the weapon to stop their persecution.

Schreber (cited by Allouch, 1984, p 202) explains that the “miracle birds” can’t understand the meaning of the words they speak  “but they’re by nature susceptible to similarity of sounds, though the similarity need not necessarily be a complete one.  Thus it is immaterial to them whether one says:

“Santiago” or “Karthago”

“Chinesenthum” or Jesum-Christum”

“Abendrot” or “Atemnot”

“Ariman” or “Ackermann”

“Briefbeschwerer” o “Herr Prufer schwort”, etc”

The the key of this process is not to be found in the translation of this words but in the signifier order, that is the fonematic coordination, independent of the meaning of the words. That, makes them equivalent to “proper names” Lacan (cited in Allouch, 1984, p203)  “What’s important is not assonance, is the correspondence term to term (término a término) of distinctive elements very close to each other”

Lacan here localizes an equivalence of written elements.

Allouch again situates this as a transliteration and argues that Schreber’s homophonic response to the miracle birds causes the return of their humanity, revealing that they have localized the discreet elements of their own speech: literal elements as the letter is defined as the signifier discretion. 

If we didn’t have alphabetic presentation homophones would only be defined by their difference in meaning, in other words, it would be the same signifier and different signifieds.  But Lacan explains that  the trap is to believe that signifieds are objects, things. Meaning always refer to meaning, and that to another meaning, the system of language never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality it’s the whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of language. (Lacan, 1972-73)

Writing and reading.   A conclusion.

As we’ve seen  the  delusional interpretation phenomenon and the  construction of the delusion itself can be characterized by the intervention of reading and writing mechanisms and the primacy of “literality”.  Therefore we must distinguish the different directions in which this processes are involved.

 First we identified a “reading” process made by Freud and taken up again by Lacan regarding the Schreber text.  This reading/deciphering of the text as a cipher is not done by means of the traditional paths of signification but analyzing the elements (signifiers) that constitute the delusion and identifying the particular rules involved in the psychotic mechanism.

In Freud and Lacan the idea of the delusion as a “construction” with its own laws highlights its coherent structure and the possibility of finding the key to its signification.

  We can think of another “reading” following Allouch’s theorizations about the “transliteration”.

Freud used to describe the pathological processes as an exaggeration of what is found in normality.  Following this methodology we can think that in the psychotic mechanism the subject is compelled to find the certainty of signification in the literality of what comes up as signifier in the language.  But this mechanism is not entirely different from the normal reading process of what is heard in the signifier. The main difference resides precisely in the possibility of misunderstandings and doubt that characterizes neurosis.

Freud himself observed this mechanism in the dream process, even though the theorizations in linguistic theory were not advanced enough to allow its systematization. In my opinion the category of “transliteration” is extremely useful to understand not only the processes involved in psychosis but also the literality of the unconscious: This literal unconscious characterized by specific rules of functioning which evidence precisely that the unconscious is structured as a language.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English SE. London: Longman Group, 1990.

Online dictionary.  [online] Available from: 

 http://leb.net/arabtex/files/glossary.htm [Accessed April 2004]