Foreclosure (psychoanalysis)

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In psychoanalysis, foreclosure (also known as "foreclusion"; French: forclusion)[1] is a specific psychical cause for psychosis,[2] according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

History

According to Élisabeth Roudinesco, the term was originally introduced into psychology 'in 1928, when Édouard Pichon published, in Pierre Janet's review, his article on "The Psychological Significance of Negation in French": "...[and] borrowed the legal term forclusif to indicate facts that the speaker no longer sees as part of reality'.[3]

According to Christophe Laudou, the term was introduced by Damourette and Pichon.[4]

Freud vs Laforgue

The publication took part against the background of the Twenties dispute between Freud and

Verleugnung" ["disavowal"]'.[6]

Lacan's introduction of foreclosure

In 1938 Lacan relates the origin of psychosis to an exclusion of the father from the family structure thereby reducing this structure to a mother-child relationship.[7] Later on, when working on the distinctions between the real, imaginary and symbolic father, he specifies that it is the absence of the symbolic father which is linked to psychosis.

Lacan uses the Freudian term, Verwerfung,[1] which the "Standard Edition" translates as "repudiation",[1] as a specific defence mechanism different from repression, "Verdrängung", in which "the ego rejects the incompatible idea together with its affect and behaves as if the idea has never occurred to the ego at all."[8] In 1954 basing himself on a reading of the "Wolf Man"[9] Lacan identifies Verwerfung as the specific mechanism of psychosis where an element is rejected outside the symbolic order as if it has never existed.[10] In 1956 in his Seminar on Psychoses he translates Verwerfung as forclusion, that is foreclosure.[11] "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)".[12]

Lacan and psychosis

The problem 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."[13] 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'.[14] Lacan used foreclosure to explain why.

When Lacan first uses the Freudian concept of Verwerfung (repudiation) in his search for a specific mechanism for psychosis, it is not clear what is repudiated (castration, speech). In 1957 in his article "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis"

Name-of-the-Father
(a fundamental signifier) that is the object of foreclosure. In this way Lacan combines two of his main themes on the causality of psychosis: the absence of the father and the concept of Verwerfung. This ideas remains central to Lacan's thinking on psychosis throughout the rest of his work.

Lacan considered the father 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

Borromean knot
.

When the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed for a particular subject, it leaves a hole in the Symbolic order which can never be filled. The subject can then be said to have a psychotic structure, even if he shows none of the classical signs of psychosis. When the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father re-appears in the Real, the subject is unable to assimilate it and the result of this collision between the subject and the inassimilable signifier of the Name-of-the-father is the entry into psychosis proper characterized by the onset of hallucinations and/or delusions.

hallucinations
are the consequent result of the individual's striving to account for what he/she experiences.

References

  1. ^ .
  2. ^ Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 1996) p. 65.
  3. ^ Roudinesco, p. 282
  4. .
  5. ^ Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism", On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 352
  6. ^ Freud, "Fetishism", pp. 352–3
  7. ^ Jacques Lacan, "Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris, Navarin 1983
  8. ^ Freud, "the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence", SE III
  9. ^ Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis", SE XVII
  10. ^ Lacan, Écrits, "Reply to Jean Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's Negation
  11. ^ Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56, trans. Russell Grigg, New York, Norton, 1993
  12. ^ Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 200
  13. ^ Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London 1997) pp. 113 and 122
  14. ^ Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) pp. 202–4
  15. ^ Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection New York Norton, 1977
  16. D. W. Winnicott
    , The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Penguin 1973) pp. 115–6
  17. ^ Hill, p. 122
  18. ^ Lacan, Seminar III, ibid
  19. ^ a b Lacan, Écrits, ibid
  20. ^ Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (1979) p. 246

Further reading

  • Lacan, Jacques (1993). The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56, translated by Russell Grigg, New York Norton.
  • Fink, Bruce (1997). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Theory and Technique. HUP. London
  • Evans, Dylan (1996). Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London Routledge.

External links