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The title of today's conference, Psychosis and Psychoanalysis, draws our attention to this most serious of questions for a psychoanalyst, namely the question of whether his or her tools are appropriate to treat psychosis. Or, to put it in another way, whether psychosis is indeed within the reach of psychoanalytic technique. This was the central theme of Dorothée's clinical presentation, and I am in agreement with her position when she tells us that ‘If anything, psychosis is at the very core of the psychoanalytic project’.
As I understand it, this question depends on another one, which, to evoke the title of one of Lacan's core texts on psychosis (Lacan, 2006b), is a question ‘prior to any possible treatment of psychosis’. To put it simply, Lacan invites us to think just that: What is Psychosis? How do we understand psychosis?
In her clinical presentation, Dorothée brought the example of those psychotic subjects who, experiencing as it seems a sense of bodily fragmentation, attempt to keep things together by wrapping themselves ‘in multiple layers of clothes’, attempting to survive, as it were, ‘an unamendable state of being “in bits and pieces”’. These patients seem to feel very unsafe in their bodily experience. They appear as if trying to keep themselves together, using their clothes.
I was reminded, in this connection, of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, and especially of chapter 11 of his Memoirs, entitled ‘Bodily integrity damaged by miracles’ (Schreber, 2000, pp. 141-51) - a chapter dedicated to questions of anxiety because of bodily fragmentation and to his hallucinatory interpretations of these experiences.1