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Lacan on Psychosis: From Theory to Praxis, a volume edited by Jon Mills and David L. Downing, presents an excellent series of essays by experienced Lacanian analysts on psychotic phenomena. That being said, I found this book review more challenging to write than any of the dozens I have written. Since Lacan created a psychology unique to himself, albeit on the theme “A Return to Freud,” my difficulty involved the impossibility of refuting (or accepting) many of the statements made by the authors, especially in the first two chapters, and communicating my assessment of them to what I presume is a mostly non-Lacanian audience. In this regard, the Lacan apothegm “Language is meant to be misunderstood” rings all too true.
Jon Mills in his introduction and first chapter (“Lacan on Paranoiac Knowledge”) does a fine job of describing why Lacan has been rejected by mainstream schools of psychoanalysis and summarizing Lacan's three registers, or orders, of human existence—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—to provide the non-Lacanian reader a summary of the foundations of Lacan's enterprise. Mills's brilliant first chapter elaborates Lacan's statement that “all knowledge is tinged with paranoia” and offers a dense, multifaceted discussion of this topic from a Lacanian perspective, a performance that will often leave the non-Lacanian analyst feeling lost. A student of Lacan for only the past ten years, I found Mills's discussion of paranoia to be like a pool of water that I enjoyed diving into and swimming around in; it presented fascinating and clinically useful ideas, most of them foreign to anything I have come across. But just as Lacan recommended “oracular” interpretations, I felt as if many of Mills's assertions are themselves oracular, requiring the reader to accept them solely on faith. For example, I could neither agree nor disagree with this one: “Unconscious fantasy systems largely serve a defensive function in the pre-oedipal child, fueling illusory misrecog