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
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"
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
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.
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0-429-92124-7.
- ^ Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 1996) p. 65.
- ^ Roudinesco, p. 282
- .
- ^ Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism", On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 352
- ^ Freud, "Fetishism", pp. 352–3
- ^ Jacques Lacan, "Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris, Navarin 1983
- ^ Freud, "the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence", SE III
- ^ Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis", SE XVII
- ^ Lacan, Écrits, "Reply to Jean Hyppolite's commentary on Freud's Negation
- ^ Lacan, The Seminar. Book III. The Psychoses, 1955-56, trans. Russell Grigg, New York, Norton, 1993
- ^ Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 200
- ^ Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London 1997) pp. 113 and 122
- ^ Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (PFL 11) pp. 202–4
- ^ Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection New York Norton, 1977
- D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (Penguin 1973) pp. 115–6
- ^ Hill, p. 122
- ^ Lacan, Seminar III, ibid
- ^ a b Lacan, Écrits, ibid
- ^ 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
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