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Twentieth-century linguistics, catalyzed by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, made a radical departure from the nineteenth-century focus on philology, or the history and lineage of Indo-European languages, by focusing on descriptions of living languages at a single moment in time as arbitrary communication systems. The methodology derived from de Saussure's linguistics led to structuralism as an approach to diverse social science and humanities disciplines, giving rise, for example, to Levi-Strauss' anthropology or Roland Barthes' literary analyses. In the field of psychoanalysis a French neo-Freudian, Jacques Lacan, was the first to extensively reread Freud through de Saussure's linguistic legacy and structuralist methods. Although long at odds with the psychoanalytic establishment in France and internationally, his theories impacted strongly on French psychoanalytic thought and practice of the 1950s through the 1970s and were championed by militant students, feminists, and literature specialists as well as by his own psychoanalytic following.
While his immediate impact in France has waned with his death in 1981, Lacan's theories are gaining a new audience in North America, particularly in the humanities and social science faculties, and to a lesser extent in psychiatric circles where he is perhaps best known, and best rejected, for the short hour—as short as 5 minutes—at full price to the patient. While linguistic models are not the only conceptualization of psychosis, nor is Lacan's model the only linguistic one, as much of what we learn of a patient's psychotic process is told to us by the patient via his own voice or voices he receives, it makes intuitive sense that better understanding of the communication act may help in the definition and the nuance of the disturbed speech of psychosis.
Lacan has left three major texts on psychosis, all of which were produced relatively early in his career. The first, On Paranoia and Its Relationship to Personality (Lacan, 19