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With the 1955/56 seminar The Psychoses we come to the third year of Lacan's twenty-seven years of seminars given in Paris between 1953 and 1980 (year of his death). Lacan's teaching was an oral one based on these weekly seminars which some of his students transcribed over the years. Before his death, Lacan allowed his son-inlaw, Jacques-Alain Miller, to edit and publish some of the seminars, and left him the depository of his posthumous work. The third volume on psychosis came out one year after Lacan's death. So far only eight seminars have been published in France and only four in England.
Lacan was at his best with the spoken word, with its freshness, detours, flows and failings. He believed in the flying word, the one which cannot be frozen or stuck in an indelible writing - even though he published the Ecrits (Writings) in 1966, his most indecipherable text. Whereas writing fixes meaning, the spoken word lets meaning flow freely - free association. (For Freud the power of speech is the ‘talking cure’.) Lacan puts forward the hypothesis of the fundamental nature of words (signifiers) for the human mind: what is specific to human beings is the fact that they speak, and ‘Psychoanalysis is the science of language inhabited by the subject’. The question then arises: is the psychotic, like the neurotic, an inhabitant of language? Lacan comes to the conclusion that the psychotic does not inhabit, but is inhabited by, language; the phenomenon of auditory hallucinations bears witness to the fact that the psychotic is literally possessed by it. Through his reading of Schreber's written ‘memoirs’ Lacan unravels the thread by means of which Freud follows this case of paranoia: the threat of language, Schreber's tormenting voices which take over his existence: his psychosis speaks. Freud did not have Schreber on his couch but his Ariadne's thread for the reconstruction of Schreber's delusional system was to follow the thread of his written words. Schreber hears his own speec